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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I thought VR would be more widespread by now.
And it’s probably because of the two next things I thought as well.
I thought it would be cheaper and easier to do by now. More like a Google Glass kind of thing. But we’re still playing 4 figures for dedicated massive headsets to strap to our heads. No wonder it didn’t take off.
And I mean dedicated like the HTC Vive. Not the Quest.
This was my thought as well. I really thought it would be better by now. Fingers crossed for the steam frame!
I never thought tablet computers would become popular among the mainstream public.
When the iPad first came out, it was functionally worse than even the cheap netbooks, and I didn’t see much purpose in the larger screen with phones getting bigger and bigger every year. Wireless display was also already available, so I envisioned people would just cast content to a TV if they really wanted a bigger screen. Even reading articles etc seemed to be already covered by eReaders, which were already available for half a decade by the time the iPad released.
Little did I know how brain rotted people would become.
Tbh I personally still don’t see the utility in most tablets, except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.
Yeah, I think tablets are cool, but if they were full-fledged Windows/Linux computers with mobile app compatibility, they’d be absolutely incredible.
You can do that today with a Linux tablet and Waydroid. It’s more like running the Android apps in a VM than something really well integrated with the Linux environment, but perfect is the enemy of good.
except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.
The one niche that they’re probably the biggest is the “I just need a public facing web browser in this spot”
Its really hard to beat a locked down iPad for that usecase, both from a financial perspective (~$250 hardware cost for a lowest-tier iPad was the price I was seeing when ordering and provisioning them for this usecase) and from a management perspective (join it to the MDM and by nature of being an iPad, even if they get out of the browser window its really hard to cause trouble, basically 0 malware risk and iOS has far less obtrusive updates than Windows) plus from a support perspective you can simply walk users through rebooting them and swap the hardware if it needs more than a reboot
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.
came here to see this
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
The profit motive killed this dream. Capitalism seems to wither anything it touches.
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, 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 the problem. Now everyone and their creepy uncle can say whatever they want and post it everywhere. People are not equipped to deal with that, especially with for-profit social media algorithms involved too.
It did that, but we had an overly rosy view of what “democratize” meant. We thought that citizen journalists would leaven the bulky corporate media of the time. And they did. But there was also a torrent of bullshit. We have no excuse for not seeing this. The Greeks and Romans spent a great deal of thought on what would happen if the rabble were given a voice. We dismissed their ideas as gatekeeping oligarchy, but it turns out that populism is moatly a dirty word.
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.
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.
Man I think all of us mistakenly thought this. The early internet had such promise.
it was like that for a few. now AI will definitely make people braindead, how many years of brainrot can the mind endure?
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 really think social media algorithms+profit motives are a big part of what did it. Suddenly there’s both the desire and the means to manipulate users into whatever pattern the business wants. Engagement-based algorithms pushed incendiary content creating a feedback loop of more and more extreme and hateful views being normalized, but also engagement-based algorithms plus monetization encouraged new forms of farmed content like brainrot and AI boomer slop which has zero (or realistically net-negative) value to society as a whole.
I’m really hoping the analogue/physical media trend continues because that might actually be what breaks the cycle. Normies may have simply had it with social media platforms owning them…I write on social media at midnight instead of going to bed on time…
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
It kinda did that for a few wonderful years.
Physical buttons on phones would win out over gimmicky touch screens
I remember thinking similarly. Specifically “well duh you’ll just be hitting buttons with your face on calls with those dang touchscreen phones” except it turned out I spend way less time on phonecalls than circa 2006 me could have ever imagined, and also the proximity sensor blanking the screen and blocking input works really good (and even did back in the early 2010s when I got my first smartphone)
“Nintendo should admit defeat and focus on making games for other platforms and mobile devices.” - Me, after the Wii U and a little before the Switch launched.
I thought the switch was gonna end up with the same depressing library as the 3DS, if that’s any consolation.
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D
- Fire Emblem: Awakening
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
- Shovel Knight
- Super Mario 3D Land
- Pushmo
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D
I guess we can’t be friends. ☹️
I have the 2DSXL, and have played about half of those. I was just sad it was primarily limited to mostly online (Pushmo’s servers are dead) and first-party titles. I was a GBA/DS kid so expected wider variety beyond that.
It’s a fantastic little device for modding though!
“No parent is going to buy a Wii because of the stupid name” -me, 2005
“Revolution” was a better name.
Wii
me, 2005
Unless you are a Nintendo insider or a time traveler, the name of Wii was announced on April 2006. Gamasutra reported it.
Oh no, they were off a year for something that happened 20 years ago!
Pessimistically I thought for sure autonomous war drones would have become way more prolific by now.
I also felt pretty sure that some kind of massive CRISPR/Cas9 catastrophe was bound to occur by now.
I thought for sure autonomous war drones would have become way more prolific by now
It just took until recently for a war to break out with the right conditions for drone warfare to actually make sense. I posted this photo in another comment:
This is the city of Lyman following a battle. Those are fiber optic strands, used for long distance wired (therefore can’t be jammed by radio signal) control of the drones by their operators. Every one of those strands had a drone at the end of it.
Ukraine has also made significant headway damaging major military assets via drone, sinking a significant portion of Russia’s navy as well as basically making tanks obsolete in ground offensives. Flame throwing drones, drones that launch other drones to attack drones, etc. The cyberpunk future is here!
Drones are the industry in the last 6 months. It’s just beginning.
I sold all of my Apple stock because they wanted to make a phone and I thought that would end poorly, so I should take my profits while I could.
The iPod did well. Your point?
The iPod did well.
“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”
Even after seeing it, I was sure the iphone would fail. I thought, “Why would anyone use a crappy computer on a tiny screen instead of a laptop or desktop?”
In the late nineties, I thought the availability of online knowledge would make universities obsolete.
I mean you’re not wrong, for some people in some cases. But it’s not so easy to teach yourself how to learn, nor why to learn it.
The Wii. Previous gen console specs. Silly gimmick controller. Best selling peripheral was a step.
Most popular shit in the history of everything.
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 never had one but IMO Zune was one of the few Microsoft hw wins. And their mice.
And the Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro joystick. Came out in 1998 and people still build USB adapters today to make it work in modern racing games and flight simulators.
Using light sensors was wild back then, the successor didn’t use them anymore because they cheaped out.
Now that you mention it I have one of those too. Somewhere.
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.
I thought the advent of 4k TVs would push people over to BluRay because with the codecs available a decade ago you needed a good 40mbit+ for a single 4k stream. Turns out I picked the wrong component of streaming to be the thing that would push people back to physical media.
Also all of that broadband investment that was talked about a decade+ ago actually turned into broadband improvements, so now even my in-laws who live on 8 acres in the sticks outside of a tiny town of 400 or so residents have gigabit FTTH service
It doesn’t matter how good is internet connection nowadays, the source in the server is still encoded losing some quality.
Tried to watch Batman Begins in HBO Max, despite being offered as 4K UHD, the loss of information was noticeable on my OLED tv, specially the blacks (as you know, there is almost no black colour in Batman /s).
A friend of mine lend me his Nolan’s Batman trilogy on BR 4K UHD and it was like night and day.
Since the lbs I’m buying physical for movies that I like the most and want to watch them in the highest quality possible.
I thought drones were just going to be a fad, but they’ve become huge, especially in terms of government and corporate surveillance. I should have realized the way it was going when America started using them militarily. American military inventions almost always end up becoming popular consumer products/applications.
They’ve not even started for most of the domestic and consumer uses. They’re only just scratching the surface of commercial and military application.
In 30 years people will have subscriptions to a drone service that will take x# of packages for them within their city/geography per month/year with weight tiers. Etc. errands and single use car trips and commercial trips in the last mile will drastically decrease.
The skies will never be as they are again. The generation growing up right now will be the last to have been able to look up at the vast expanse without some buzzing. Whirring distraction.
Of all things, the war in Ukraine will probably be the thing that sets the stage for what our drone-filled future might look like. Not something I would’ve predicted 5 years ago!
This is the city of Lyman following a battle. Those are fiber optic strands, used for long distance wired (therefore can’t be jammed by radio signal) control of the drones by their operators. Every one of those strands had a drone at the end of it.
This is what present day warfare looks like now, its all flying buzzing drones attacking people and other drones. And what happens after the peace treaties are signed? A ton of that engineering and tooling for making this tech will get refocused into consumer and commercial products.
Autonomous tractors are already commercial products, reducing the number of people needed to complete a task on a farm. Many new non-autonomous tractors these days already have whats effectively cruise control on steroids, where the tractor will follow a predetermined path with the driver just sitting in the cab to monitor and take over if anything happens. And of course at home the robot vacuum cleaners are available from many brands. I’ve even seen one of those floor mopping machines adapted to run autonomously at my local Menards (which shocked me as I live in a pretty small town with about as low of a cost of living as it gets really) and while visiting family in LA I saw a robot waiter which both (optionally) took orders and would serve as a mobile food/plate tray. I saw a security robot making the rounds at a convention center in Florida while on a business trip. A Coworker told me about a robot working at a hotel he stayed at in San Francisco which would transport ordered/requested items to guests’ rooms. And there’s those dog sized food delivery robots in many cities. The more I think about it, wheeled and legged robots are probably what we will see a lot more of, since many already do exist in real commercial applications, and the legal, logistical and ethical barriers to their integration into our lives is much lower than flying robots.
while visiting family in LA I saw a robot waiter which both (optionally) took orders and would serve as a mobile food/plate tray.
Yeah, I’ve run into these. That being said, I’d call them currently a novelty…but I also remember when using touchscreen kiosks for ordering instead of cashiers was a rarity.
I never thought game subscription would take of. The entire concept is stupid to me. Pay per month to *acces selected games but not own them? Take into accoumt 90% of people will play at most 25% of the catalogue. Let’s do some math if PS Plus Essentials, where you get 2-4 random titles per month is taken, which costs 9€ per month which if you play down to 25% of the catalogue goes up to 36€ per month (that is you basicly pay 36€ to play that single game which was chosen at random and you still don’t own). For that ammount of money I can buy a REAL game I OWN or 5 good games on Steam Sale or GOG.
Still I guess if it sounds good people will smoke it.
To be clear these statistics are purly “Trust me bro” but I doubt someone will play Core Keeper, Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed and NFS: Unbound all in one month enough that it makes sense, and if you can more power to you, but I know those are not most people. Most people play Minecraft or Elder Scrolls or COD or GT etc.
Still feel free to express yours opinion.
I’m generally against the rise of subscriptions in every service on the Internet, but I did actually benefit from game pass for a couple years. Access to the library meant I could try a lot of games I otherwise probably would not have played. I was only out the time I spent downloading and playing them if I didn’t like them- no need to deal with returns or resale, which is especially difficult/restrictive for digital purchases.
I can’t find what the original price for game pass was, but I’ll do the break-even math for the current price: It looks like the highest tier game pass subscription today is ~$30/mo. Multiply by 12 months, that’s $360/yr. With games typically costing $60-70, $360/yr divided by $60 is 6 games/yr.
One would need to play > 6 new games each year to save money with xbox game pass. I think that number is pretty achievable for the average gamer, but I’d be curious to see some statistics about average game consumption.
I think what drives it is probably the general prices of games on consoles. The prices just don’t really drop from the launch price of $60+ (plus indies are far less prevalent) so the math starts mathing up pretty quickly, especially if you’re one to sell your console when you stop using it
For sure. I feel like holding the launch price forever has been more of a recent development (some time in the last several years, ignoring nintendo) and it seems to be happening on pc too. At least on pc, we usually get a couple decent sales every year and lots of indie content.
“This bitcoin thing is too niche and low value to be worth figuring out”
I remember making a note to look into it several times, and thinking I should buy one (exactly one) when it was about $600. If I had, I imagine I would have sold at 10x rather than holding until 100x or its peak at 200x.
I actually did think it or a successor would become important as a consumer payment method. I was wrong there.
I had a two (or maybe a bit less) bitcoins on my wallet back in the day. I sold them for ~20€.
Not me but my dad. He was friends with a guy who was loosely related to someone relatively high up at Google when they first went public. His friend offered him 500 shares at 50¢ a pop. His life right now would have been wildly different.
If my math is right this would be worth about 9.8 million today if the shares were issued in 2004 ish.
Did you take share dilution into account? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_dilution
Why would I? Ruins the story ;)
