The Internet is Made of Geniuses and Idiots

It has been said that the internet is comprised of 100 million geniuses and 300 million idiots. (This is a great quote I was told a coworker of mine said. Context not important.)

Whatever you think of the internet, it is made up of millions of people’s output. Some of these minds are sane, some are not, and the levels of intelligence vary. But that’s ok! Because the whole “thing” is quite interesting because of it.

I remember quite well when I was a teenager and had gotten access to some internet chat rooms via Telnet. Then, I made it to college and used the Lynx browser to browse the very limited amount of information on the baby internet.

Around 1995 or 1996, I was making rudimentary web pages and had a fairly good idea of what sites were out there. Then the whole thing exploded, just like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Well, not quite the same as that – but just as messy.)

Now, I like to (from time to time) type in random words (in search engines) and see what I get. Sometimes I find very cool stuff. Like today I typed in “plep” and found this site. On this site are a gazillion links to weird, interesting and cool stuff.

Sometimes I use StumbleUpon to find random cool stuff. Sometimes I browse Reddit.

But all of this would be unimaginable ten years ago. The sheer volume of information out there is too much for one person to ever be able to absorb. And how’d we get such a cool environment?

By the efforts of a bunch of geniuses and idiots. Not bad work!

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