In elaborate terms: you have the ability to change any one of the protocols, specifications, designs or standards of the above at their proposal stage or before their mass adoption. You may choose to modify or reject an existing one or create one by yourself.
Some users and I would have common ideas in mind, however I would love to see some esoteric ideas as well.
Forums and YouTube remain the main forms of social media. No Facebook or anything of the like.
Here’s an esoteric one: Kill the internet (as we know it) before it begins.
Okay, hear me out. Internetworking existed before HTTP and websites, and once the system of routing was there it was inevitable it would be used for all the things it is today. Email came first, and what is the Fediverse but an automated, abstracted-from-the-user email system?
With no HTTP, somebody comes up with the idea of an application that formats your mailing lists into one navigable page, and then somebody else starts caching mailing list emails at the server until requested by a user (like an instance). SMTP directly transitions into ActivityPub, and there’s no need to build platforms overtop which can be monopolised. We might get to skip the Zuckerbergs and surveillance capitalism entirely.
I’d make the internet automatically fact check everything
How?
Like, it’s hard enough for a group of humans to credibly do, because of the whole “who minds the minders” issue. The internet infrastructure itself couldn’t even tell the town of Scunthorp from profanity very well, until recently with the advent of LLMs.
I’m not really that smart when it comes to protocols but I would go to Stanford University and guard the IT cabinet and tell Aaron Schwarz to stay the fuck out and go do something else.
European computer builders joining MSX and expanding it to 16 and 32 bits.
Hard to say, but we needed to leave a minimum level of a learning curve to using any computer, not a PHD required, but enough to bore the red hats. As soon as Apple’s toddlerfication of smashing BIG, bright, colorful, soft shapes made it so everyone in the world could gold the history of humanity’s knowledge in their pocket… They started confusing their pocket with their brains. Holding knowledge doesn’t mean HAVING knowledge.
The instant and infinite false confidence that magic slab gives hateful idiots was our downfall as a species.
Prevent MS from forcing their docs xml standard on us all.
Ban UDP. Illegalize the formation of UDP. I hate UDP. TCP is God’s transport layer protocol. Everything successful uses TCP. Minecraft, best selling game in the world? Guess what, TCP. UDP fans will really send their packet into the void praying for a response that will never arrive, for their packet was completely ignored by the receiver and will never see the light of day again until a stupid 60 second timeout. I Refuse to use udp. DNS? tcp only. HTTP/3 is disabled everywhere, as QUIC is an unholy bastard born from the wrath of UDP and the comparably great TCP. Even my VPN over wire guard (mullvad) uses the UDP over TCP bridge so that I am not required to come into physical contact with the hell that is UDP. I hate the stupid uncancellable timeouts that every software waits a full minute for, even though I know the request has failed. Everything that has failed uses UDP.
UDP has uses beyond internet and PCs. The embedded world makes extensive use of it.
God it’s all hopeless. It’s hopeless. I thought the “Reddit/Lemmy users can’t detect satire” was mostly a joke but it’s all too real
/s was invented for a reason.
We’re not dumb, it’s just that the internet is so full of incredibly crazy takes nobody can tell.
UDP is for video streams and other applications where a couple of dropped packets do not matter. Triple handshakes are kinda pointless for these types of data transfers.
Every packet is born equal. It is heresy how some people believe that some little packets, born with a certain task, are worth so little that we can just “drop” them. Imagine poor little Bobby packet #93736, on his school field trip, carrying a pixel of your stupid Microsoft teams meeting… but he gets lost in the crowd and left behind by the rest of the class.
Bobby Packet will never see his family again.
“Too much overhead”, they said. “It’s okay if we lose a few”. Billions of little packets are lost daily, forever, all because UDPcels believe in file packet supremacy, and that Bobby Packet “didn’t matter”.
TCP is proof of a loving God. In a TCP world, the teacher would do a head count… and figure out that Bobby Tables had gone missing. He would shout RETRANSMISSION! He would search ceaselessly just to find Bobby Packet again. And he will.
This one will be super controversial, but I’d say get rid of mobile internet. I think it was a huge turning point for society, and not in a good way.
It’s tough because it actually does a lot of really good, useful things. But it also has a ton of negative effects. We seemed to do ok before it, and cell phones would still function as phones for calls and texting.
Erase Facebook/most social media from the collective consciousness and go back to forums.
Regulatory: Ban advertising.
All of the worst elements of the internet are ad supported. There would be no downside.
You’d need to still have a whitelist, so putting the name of your store on the front of the store or telling a friend about a cool new thing you bought is allowed. But yes.
In a similar vein, letting websites render whatever they can imagine has proven ripe for abuse. Basic HTML is a kind of whitelist of it’s own.
I’ve said this for years, but not about technology. Just a complete worldwide ban.
Provide yellow pages type of thing you can look up businesses in, companies can “advertise” on their entry, with a separate resource to look up information and data about them.
Throw in word of mouth, and that’s it. Free market determines everything else. Also, no logos on any product. The products can’t become the advertisement either.
But if take this rule back to like the (19)00s, so we just head off radio and TV commercials before the get go.
Maybe this prevents capitalism from becoming what it is in the first place. The main thing is presenting objective facts alongside the ads, so people don’t just buy something because “it said it was the best”. (Maybe that could extend to preventing people from believing something because “it said it was true” as well >_>)
IDK how I’d do it, but I’d absolutely try to find a way to ensure Amiga wins out compared to windows worldwide.
Either that, or, if legal, making a very vague patent/trademark/whatever on things like tracking pixels/cookies and implementing them on a dummy site for a “totally not a patent/trademark/whatever hold” type site to at least ensure privacy is at least a little better for the average person not using chrome, edge, Firefox, etcetera.
Full documentation and second sourcing of all hardware.
This restores the right of ownership and destroys the current dystopian nightmare world of lost citizenship and democracy. It is closely tied to google winning the right to digital slavery and the buying and selling of your digital person to exploit and manipulate you.
In the context of changing the course of things early on, I’d make everyone post under their real name in any context. To be clear, I DO NOT support that today. The cat’s already out of the bag and pseudonymous communities are the norm now, I don’t think we can unscramble that egg.
But if somehow, from day one, you needed to attach your own name to everything posted online, I feel like we’d have ended up with a less toxic internet than we have in many places today.
I’d stop development of JavaScript.
Now VBScript would have likely become the default for Internet Explorer and would have likely won out.
It could have been Python 🤷♂️ Imagine of Mosaic and Netscape had gone by that road.
And Microsoft would be in control of the web
I wonder if Gates would still go along the personality trajectory he’s had if he was even more powerful.
Oh man, I had completely forgotten about VBScript.
