I think that it’s interesting to look back at calls that were wrong to try to help improve future ones.
Maybe it was a tech company that you thought wouldn’t make it and did well or vice versa. Maybe a technology you thought had promise and didn’t pan out. Maybe a project that you thought would become the future but didn’t or one that you thought was going to be the next big thing and went under.
Four from me:
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My first experience with the World Wide Web was on an rather unstable version of
lynxon a terminal. I was pretty unimpressed. Compared to gopher clients of the time, it was harder to read, the VAX/VMS build I was using crashed frequently, and was harder to navigate around. I wasn’t convinced that it was going to go anywhere. The Web has obviously done rather well since then. -
In the late 1990s, Apple was in a pretty dire state, and a number of people, including myself, didn’t think that they likely had much of a future. Apple turned things around and became the largest company in the world by market capitalization for some time, and remains quite healthy.
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When I first ran into it, I was skeptical that Wikipedia would manage to stave off spam and parties with an agenda sufficiently to remain useful as it became larger. I think that it’s safe to say that Wikipedia has been a great success.
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After YouTube throttled per-stream download speeds, rendering
youtube-dlmuch less useful, theyt-dlpproject came to the fore, which worked around this with parallel downloads. I thought that it was very likely that YouTube wouldn’t tolerate this — it seems to me to have all the drawbacks ofyoutube-dlfrom their standpoint, plus maybe more, and shouldn’t be too hard to detect. But at least so far, they haven’t throttled or blocked it.
Anyone else have some of their own that they’d like to share?
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You were pretty correct about Apple, it got saved by Microsoft who kept it alive to skirt monopoly laws.
I wrote a term paper once about how twitter would enable citizen journalism and lead to a more informed public and a healthier, more direct democracy. I got an A.
I was a pretty huge fan of Zune and I still miss it.
I thought blu-ray would supplant DVD-RW for storing and transferring data, including for buying software. Much like DVD replaced CD, which replaced diskettes. Turns out both were replaced by cloud and streaming, with a short interlude for USB sticks.
Al still have their niches, but buying software and storing data is pretty much all online now.
In the late 90s I saw a piece demonstrating an optical 3d storage system that had a capacity about an order of magnitude greater than the at the time brand new HD DVD and Bluray discs. I assumed this clearly superior format that already had a working demo would obviously kill other optical media. Turns out nobody could figure out how to manufacture one at a price anybody was willing to spend.
Physical buttons on phones would win out over gimmicky touch screens
When Steam first appeared (and was required to play Half-Life 2 IIRC), I thought that was a ridiculous idea to have a middle man to play a game. Well, what do I know, everyone loves Steam now (yet hates on other launchers).
There are dozens of us who still aren’t convinced.
Around 2000, graphene was a very hot material. I was pretty excited by it and thought carbon-based high-Farad capacitors would essentially replace lead acid and lithium ion batteries in most consumer electronics within a decade, maybe two.
Having been on a few Segway tours I was surprised when they stopped making them. Easy to learn, fun to ride. Eventually they will age out and be gone. I wouldn’t buy one for myself to have at home, but for whizzing around sightseeing when on holiday they’re great.
Minidiscs would endure and crypto would fail…I still believe both will bw true in the end…
I like minidiscs, even if I’m too young to remember any popularity of them, I remember discs for Sony PSP which are similar in idea, an optical medium with protection like of diskettes.
And optical discs are not such a common good to think a protection case is too expensive or something. They get scratches.
But there’s another moment - optical discs also degrade with time faster than one would think when they were common. Mostly. Some are good.
About cryptocurrencies … I don’t believe that actually. That is, I believe many of them are scams. Or, one can say, very weird fundraising schemes for their creators. But there are uses, as one can easily feel when being in a sanctioned country.
Well, if vinyl could come back, I suppose MiniDiscs can too.
I thought cameras on phones were a gimmick. To be fair, they were pretty low quality back then but I still use it to remind myself not to be too overconfident because boy was I wrong.
Oh they definitely felt like a gimmick at First
My parents made us a Betamax household well into the mid 90s; always relegated to the small shitty section of the video rental store.
In the 2000s I wanted to avoid another format pushed by Sony, so I went with HD-DVD over Bluray… sigh. I even got the Xbox 360 external HD-DVD drive.
My uncle got an Xbox 360 specifically because Smallville was coming out on hddvd instead of Bluray. He could never find that hd dvd drive until the format war was over, and I ended up with the 360.
It’s crazy to think this now (since I’m so heavily into free software) but I actively chose a Windows Phone for my first smartphone, and thought it would take over the market from iOS and Android.
To be fair, it did have some cool features: it let you aggregate all the different ways of contacting people into one interface (the dream of many a tech person since the beginning of time!), it had a connection with facebook so you could see status updates/photos from your friends (in the contacts app of all places!), and I thought the live tiles and design language were really cool.
Despite even my hatred of Microsoft, I still have fond memories of that phone.
Tiles and the metro interface in general were a really good idea. Kind of a shame everything’s consolidated around iPhone’s icon system instead. I remember being impressed with my mom’s, but it was such a flash in the pan and had so little 3rd party app support I never ended up getting one.
You could do something similar with widgets I suppose.
I still believe my windows phone had the best UI of any smartphone I’ve used
Well, on the flip side, my first smartphone was a Palm Prē, and I even installed the custom kernel to overclock it.
Still have it in a box somewhere too. That was such a great phone.
Now webOS is used by LG to spy on their smart TV customers.
In the mid-nineties I passionately believed that the internet would democratize information and usher in a wonderful new era of well-informed critical thinking and general enlightenment. Basically the opposite has happened.
It kinda did that for a few wonderful years.
It wasn’t just you, this was the general sentiment in the west. Cory Doctorow (now of “enshittification” fame) wrote “The Net Delusion” about it
Same, except mid-00s.
Yeah I never thought how it would be the hot bed of spreading misinformation…
Man I think all of us mistakenly thought this. The early internet had such promise.
I think the Internet still has lots of promise. We just did a capitalism on it. If we can get the cancer out it’ll be an amazing thing again.
But I do think some of that early promise was overestimated, because mostly smart people were on it then. We thought it was the medium, but it was just techies or people with hobbies or interest that made it that special place, now that your average Joe is there it’s mostly shit, but go somewhere with a little barrier to entry (like Lemmy) and it is pretty cool again.
I often think about an Arthur C. Clarke book—I think Songs of Distant Earth?—that has a colony of humans that solves all the big debate questions facing their society anonymously through the internet, which has completely solved the problem of judging ideas based on who said them.
Bless the optimists.
considers
I’ve been in a couple conversation threads about this topic before on here. I’m more optimistic.
I think that the Internet has definitely democratized information in many ways. I mean, if you have an Internet connection, you have access to a huge amount of information. Your voice has an enormous potential reach. A lot of stuff where one would have had to buy expensive reference works or spend a lot of time digging information up are now readily available to anyone with Internet access.
I think that the big issue wasn’t that people became less critical, but that one stopped having experts filter what one saw. In, say, 1996, most of what I read had passed through the hands of some sort of professional or professionals specialized in writing. For newspapers or magazines, maybe it was a journalist and their editor. For books, an author and their editor and maybe a typesetter.
Like, in 1996, I mostly didn’t get to actually see the writing of Average Joe. In 2026, I do, and Average Joe plays a larger role in directly setting the conversation. That is democratization. Average Joe of 2026 didn’t, maybe, become a better journalist than the professional journalist of 1996. But…I think that it’s very plausible that he’s a better journalist than Average Joe of 1996.
Would it have been reasonable to expect Average Joe of 2026 to, in addition to all the other things he does, also be better at journalism than a journalist of 1996? That seems like a high bar to set.
And we’re also living in a very immature environment as our current media goes. I am not sold that this is the end game.
There’s a quote from Future Shock — written in 1970, but I think that we can steal the general idea for today:
It has been observed, for example, that if the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately sixty-two years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes. Of these 800, fully 650 were spent in caves.
Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another—as writing made it possible to do. Only during the last six lifetimes did masses of men ever see a printed word. Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precision. Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor. And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th, lifetime.
That’s just to drive home how extremely rapidly the environment in which we all live has shifted compared to how it had in the past. In that quote, Alvin Toffler was talking about how incredibly quickly things had changed in that it had only been six lifetimes since the public as a whole had seen printed text, how much things had changed. But in 2026, we live in a world where it has only been a quarter of a lifetime, less for most, since much of the global population of humanity has been intimately linked by near-instant, inexpensive, mass communication.
I think that it would be awfully unexpected and surprising if we would have immediately figured out conventions and social structures and technical solutions to every deficiency for such a new environment. Social media is a very new thing in the human experience at this scale. I think that it is very probable that humanity will — partly by trial-and-error, getting some scrapes and bruises along the way — develop practices to smooth over rough spots and address problems.
Consider, say, the early motorcar, which had no seatbelts, windscreen, roof, suspension, was driven on a road infrastructure designed for horse-drawn carts to travel maybe ten miles an hour, didn’t have a muffler, didn’t have an electric starter, lacked electric headlights and other lighting, an instrument panel, and all that. It probably had a lot of very glaring problems as a form of transportation to people who saw it. An awful lot of those problems have been solved over time. I think that it would be very surprising if electronic mass communication available to everyone doesn’t do something similar.
I think that the Internet has definitely democratized information in many ways.
unfortunately the internet democratized the creation of information, which is one part of the the problem. Now everyone and their creepy uncle can say whatever they want and post it everywhere. Good info is drowned out by a firehose of misinformation.
The other part of the problem is access to information is definitely not democratized; it’s controlled by billionaires, state troll mills, and bots. People are not equipped to deal with that. This is what you get with libertarian ideals, might makes right.
came here to see this
Yeah. Didn’t we all. Although I’ve met several smart young people that self educated themselves in to a impressive degree.
Then again I’ve met dozen times more dumb-dumbs that have made their idiocy much much worse and are spreading it around.
Polarizing as always. Sorry to say, on average for the worse.
I thought people would learn how to use computers.
It seemed as if most of the millennial generation in wealthy countries did learn to some degree and I expected it to be even more true for younger generations. Those more sophisticated users would enable more sophisticated and flexible applications. Technology would empower individuals while weakening corporations and governments.
Instead, the most reliable recipe for popularizing tech is to dumb it down. Millennials represent a peak of digital literacy (in wealthy countries) and those younger tend to have weaker technical skills.
Yes. This is also similar to Strugatsky brothers’ fiction where people of the future seem like a society of scientific workers.
“What’s a computer?”
I also fell for the Nintendo 3DS hype! I was 12 years old at the time, and I really believed the glassless 3D would be a killer feature and the next big thing in gaming, and I spent six months leading up to the launch date washing cars and doing odd jobs to scrape enough money together to buy it on day one.
I did still love the device and kept it for a long time, but the 3D was a gimmick and got switched off fast. I was sad to have spent all that time and effort saving money, only for the price to plummet soon after launch, but it taught me a good lesson :)
I thought that the 3d was pretty cool on the 3DS! Now I can’t find my New3DS XL, now that they’re apparently quite jailbreakable…
