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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That texting would be so popular. Coming from pagers to actual cell phones and being able to hear people talk anywhere was amazing. Going back to text messages seemed counterintuitive.
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.
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.
it was like that for a few. now AI will definitely make people braindead, how many years of brainrot can the mind endure?
came here to see this
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.
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.
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 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.
Same, except mid-00s.
Yeah I never thought how it would be the hot bed of spreading misinformation…
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.
Around 2009 I predicted that very soon, Linux smartphones you can plug into a docking station to use as a desktop PC would become the standard consumer computing device.
It’s so obvious, I wish they had caught on! I remember there was a failed Ubuntu phone Kickstarter for exactly this…
Sapphire screen…
The nearest thing we have is the Steam Deck dock.
I remember playing with a Motorola Atrix in a store. It seemed like a really cool idea.
I still mourn the loss of the timeline where the Atrix was successful. Our phones are every bit powerful enough for 95% of the computing most of us do, so why can’t we just drop them in a slot and have them be a laptop?
Samsung, Huawei, Microsoft, and LG tried similar ideas and none got much traction.
I’m not sure it’s actually a good idea even now that phones have enough CPU and RAM for an adequate desktop experience. It’s certainly not a good idea running Android as we know it, where apps are data silos and have UIs that don’t cleanly transition from the palmtop experience to the desktop experience.
Still hoping…
My Steam Deck is basically that.
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.
When the 3DS came out I was sure it would be a stepping stone to 3D TVs that didn’t require glasses.
3D TVs basically died out by now.
I know nobody else cares, but I really like the 3D on it and the eye-tracking technology! My nephew just got one for Christmas and he loves it too…
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.
I thought Apple/most smartphones would never move to USB-C, or away from proprietary chargers. Pleasantly surprised - thank you EU.
I thought wireless controllers were going to be a fad, or at least garbage in their reliability/connection strength.
I thought VR was finally going to take off as the next major gaming experience when the Vive came out. Unfortunately it remains niche.
I thought Linux was going to be unusable for gaming/mainstream use cases for much longer, but Valve has made huge strides on that with Proton, and OSS devs making things like Heroic for other stores has been awesome. Also shoutout to KDE for, well, everything. Krita, KDE connect, Plasma. LibreOffice has also come a very long way.
I also thought we’d never get another steam controller. Also pleasantly surprised.
I think another major factor for Linux gaming beyond Valve was a large shift by game developers to using widely-used game engines. A lot of the platform portability work happened at that level, so was spread across many games. Writing games that could run on both personal computers and personal-computer-like consoles with less porting work became a goal. And today, some games also have releases on mobile platforms.
When I started using Linux in the late 1990s, the situation was wildly different on that front.
It was more that graphics hardware got a lot more flexible. Less fixed functionality meant that DXVK (DirectX 8-11 to Vulkan translation layer) was a lot more viable as you were able to emulate old behaviour on the GPU through Vulkan.
Graphics APIs are a lot more „thinner“ these days as well. Creating a Vulkan renderer from scratch is like „first one must enumerate the universe“. But it means that DX12<->Vulkan translation is relatively straightforward, and all the crazy stuff is done in shaders which can be recompiled for different APIs.
“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!
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
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.
Speaking of carbon, did scientists give up on lengthening carbon nanotubes at some point? They were supposed to be a miracle material as well.
Probably still a thing. You can’t really put more surface in a box. Will just take a bit longer, foundational research and all.
It’s still hanging
“Bitcoin will never take”. I mined a few at the very beginning when it was easy, out of curiosity, and didn’t bother backing up because it was useless anyway. Ahem.
I mined a bit too. Got almost 2 bitcoin in 2 weeks. Figured it was a pyramid scheme, went back to running folding@home. Forgot my wallet passphrase.
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
I hate microsoft but really liked windows phone and cortana. Something about tiles made a lot of sense and the keyboard was clean af.
I am very sure they were the first to have url bar above the keyboard in their browser WHICH WAS VERY HELPFUL BECAUSE YOUR FINGERS ARE ALREADY AT THE BOTTOM HALF OF THE PHONE LIKE OMFG.
like there was so many little things they did that just worked and worked well. rip windows phone, i will tell my grandkids about you.
Firefox for Android still defaults to this. I don’t understand.
