我们的互联网环境何以如此糟糕

糟糕在哪？

• 一切服务以APP为主。网页体验很糟糕，甚至必须下载APP。
• 数据垄断，无法检索。比如微信公众号等的数据不能被正常的搜索引擎检索。
• 屏蔽外链，或是阻滞用户跳转外联。这会导致作者引用困难。
• 时间线为王。会使创作者倾向于生产半衰期很短的作品，即发布一段时间后就没有价值/不被看到。

为什么糟糕？

• 最主要的原因，我们的Leapfrogging，即没有经历完整的电脑时代就进入了手机时代。
• 这样的环境不被有效的规则约束
• 极度敏感的Censorship……

从我的体验来说，简中世界一言难尽。

简中并不缺好的创作者，但是创作环境太恶劣了：

• 外链封闭，难以引用。这也让二手信息与未经核实的信息泛滥。
• 数据归属被侵占，比如微信公众号甚至不允许作者本人下载自己的图片
• APP弱化了文章结构复杂性的问题，比如大多公众号文章都没有文内标题，这会导致长文阅读体验很糟糕

而对于读者来说，要获取这些好的简中信息困难重重。获取外语的信息在质量（大概率）更好的情况下，还能更低成本无干扰地获取（通过rss，如我的Lyfomate可以弱化时间轴获取半衰期长的信息）。

哎。之后我也许会尝试用英语写blog。

查看原文：

The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

Much has been said about China leapfrogging ahead of the West in mobile payments and other mobile-first technologies. However, the downside to skipping the PC stage (and hence the open web) is often overlooked. Below, I highlight two unintended consequences of jumping directly to a mobile-first envi…

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yiqinfu.github.io

The Chinese Internet, however, is the polar opposite. Search engines are practically nonexistent, and people read primarily by scrolling through social media timelines rather than visiting web pages with URLs at the top.

One might blame the censorship apparatus for handicapping Chinese search engines, but I’d argue that the dearth of long half-life writing is mostly the consequence of China jumping directly to mobile and the mobile-first Internet companies (rationally) creating walled gardens around content.

But in a mobile-first environment, the gateway to information became the few “super-apps,” which naturally erected walls around their content because they didn’t need a search engine to direct traffic to their apps. The invention of timelines (especially the algorithmic ones) further reduced consumer demand for search, as passively scrolling took much less effort than actively typing or clicking.

Take WeChat as an example. It is home to the vast majority of China’s original writing, and yet:

1. It doesn’t allow any external links;
2. Its posts are not indexed by search engines such as Google or Baidu, and its own search engine is practically useless;
3. You can’t check the author’s other posts if open the page outside of the WeChat app. In other words, each WeChat article is an orphan, not linked to anything else on the Internet, not even the author’s previous work.

The system’s disincentives for knowledge creation cannot be overstated: If your writing “disappears” after a day, why invest the time to write at all? Stated a different way: if you know your words are only read within the first few hours of publication, what kind of words are you incentivized to put down?

作者相关推文： 微信不允许外链与禁止自己内容被别人检索，这至少对两代人造成了伤害。

用户上网能力弱化的问题不是我们独有的，computer literacy率在下降：

从小接触手机的Z世代上大学后不会使用文件目录，让教授们担心要怎样调整课程。

But it may also be that in an age where every conceivable user interface includes a search function, young people have never needed folders or directories for the tasks they do. The first internet search engines were used around 1990, but features like Windows Search and Spotlight on macOS are both products of the early 2000s. Most of 2017’s college freshmen were born in the very late ‘90s. They were in elementary school when the iPhone debuted; they’re around the same age as Google. While many of today’s professors grew up without search functions on their phones and computers, today’s students increasingly don’t remember a world without them.

A cynic could blame generational incompetence. An international 2018 study that measured eighth-graders’ “capacities to use information and computer technologies productively” proclaimed that just 2 percent of Gen Z had achieved the highest “digital native” tier of computer literacy. “Our students are in deep trouble,” one educator wrote.

作为Z世代的一分子，我也见证了编程课上，一群大学生嗷嗷待哺等老师帮忙，大家都不知道怎么改路径的computer illiteracy盛况。

说来惭愧我到现在还不会用命令行

现在的小孩子，从小学到初高中生，搜索东西第一反应是掏出视频APP（比如bilibili或抖音），甚至不是垃圾搜索引擎。

让人很担心啊啊啊啊啊啊……！