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Alyson Shontell writes at Business Insider that Peter Thiel, a longtime friend and mentor of Mark Zuckerberg, recently gave a talk that imagined what a Zuckerberg-less world would look like and it's pretty grim. According to Thiel, the web would be a not-very-safe, not-very-fun, totally anonymous place and it wouldn't be baked into our social lives at all. "You can imagine an alternate history in which people don't become comfortable using [the Internet] to meet their friends and family," said Thiel. "It could have remained a wild and dangerous place — maybe an exciting place to escape for a while, but maybe not part of your daily social life. Facebook has led a long and subtle but deeply important trend away from mob behavior, away from the kind of nastiness that hides behind masks and rules in shadow."
Thiel added that without Zuckerberg, information would be at the center of the Internet, not people. "If you could go back to the first years of the new millennium in Silicon Valley, you would hear a lot more about 'information' than about people. 'Organizing the world's information' was the idea of the age," Thiel told the audience. "While the implicit goal of computer science had been to build a machine that can do everything a human can do, Facebook has made software that only makes sense as a tool for humans. Its success in doing so has helped to gradually orient software developers away from the mania for replacing people." Thiel made his speech while Zuckerberg received the first-ever Axel Springer Award for being an outstanding entrepreneur (Google translation) in Berlin. Thiel and Zuckerberg have known each other for a long time and Thiel was an angel investor in Facebook who invested $500,000 in Facebook in 2004 and cashed out in 2012 for $1 billion.
(Score: 5, Informative) by isostatic on Monday February 29 2016, @01:46PM
I can name usenet. And we used our own names too.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Monday February 29 2016, @04:24PM
However that was not enforced by Usenet, but by social pressure (and possibly for some individual servers by the local newsmaster, but then only for those posting through that server). In other words, you were not excluded for not using your real name, you just had to accept that every now and then other users might tell you that you should use your real name (and some might actually refuse to read your posts because of it).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 29 2016, @05:43PM
(and some might actually refuse to read your posts because of it).
This sounds oddly familiar!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday February 29 2016, @06:00PM
Well, the means of communication change. The humans don't.
However in Usenet, no posting was hidden by default. Only if you actively put users into kill files/score files, that would hide them from you (and only from you).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday March 02 2016, @12:56PM
There were some moderated groups, but they were the exception. It's rather sad the way that usenet fell to web forums with moderators. Spam was a problem of course, but no more than posts being deleted and users blocked in today's replacements.