Sci-Hub of course

Smooth piracy of scientific articles.

It took a lot of work. Other people tried different ways but it has succeeded where others didn't and even cost some people their lives they thought is so important.

I think the modern internet is just TV anymore.

Early internet was innovation. It was almost as if you had to innovate merely to get on and use it.

Now it's a commercial resource, and the major effort will be extraction.

Dislosure: I'm also old. I almost spelled "internet" with a capital 'I'. Harumph.

I noticed in my feed the other day that Monero is introducing javascript client side wallets. And its just one of those ideas I can't get out of my head. I love the idea of every web site visitor as "digital bank". That instantly accrues some wuffie just by participating.

And it opens up a huge range of "economic games" for all parties. Not just auctions, exchanges, casinos, and e-sports betting networks. But voting, stake holding, debt issuance, derivative products, commodity peer net grid computing. As well as a drop dead simple system for the allocation of public funds.

It’s a fantastic idea, but it’s also dead on arrival without first hand integration into Chrome. Brave is doing something similar with bats, but even that is limited. I think browser based mining is a huge deal, but Google has somehow managed to convince everyone that is malware instead of a legitimate threat to their business model.

* The current self driving tech requires internet to function. It may not be where we want it, but it has progressed far.

* Same with Drone technology.

* I think voice recognition/digital assistant has evolved quite far the last 10 years.

* P2P tech is exciting again thanks to blockchain progress and various civil unrest.

Private tutoring platforms. Now that video calls are ubiquitous we can get a private tutor on short notice for a one to one class tailored to our needs and goals, choosing a teaching style in a pool of hundreds. It's especially big in language learning.

Seconding smartphone and the many apps that run on it, but not one in particular. Ten years ago few people had their head glued to a phone.

Now, on any public transport (where I live) it's unusual to look up and see someone not looking at their phone.

For many, a smartphone (or, the apps on it, and I don't think the app matters so much, simply the compulsion) is the first thing to check when waking up,; many app makers simply in the business of making an app compulsive.

For many, a valuable conversation or thinking process is interrupted by an ping and 'very important' message for the constantly connected. But that's the norm for this many.

For many more, the smartphone comes before, or completely substitutes, the need for a 'traditional' computer in providing internet connectivity for many different internet use-cases across the globe: from staying in touch to banking to running a business to becoming a celebrity.

'Innovative' is also an interesting choice of word. As an amateur follower of business jargon, 'innovation' wasn't used much in business speak (it certainly existed, but in a different sense than that I observe today). In the 90s and 00s 'creativity' was the buzz-word, hand-in-hand with 'out of the box'. 'Creativity' as a term seems to have fallen off a cliff in usage a little more than 10 years ago, with 'innovation' filling the gap. But unlike creativity, 'innovation' is used to reflect thinking that is very much 'inside the box (or push the edge, but don't get out)' way. Usage of this term is slightly different from the classical dictionary definition. 'Innovation' (today) as a term seems to refers to bringing an idea that already exists to fruition, or combining several pre-existing ideas with some sprinkles on the top, or an incremental process touted as 'the next big thing' when it's what existed before but improved a little/new angle taken - not 'creativity' from the 90s certainly, the term 'innovation' representing a lower risk appetite over the past decade, and a preference of small and frequent change over the traditional one-step 'creative disruption'. Note this is my observed adoption/morphing of the term in business language over the past few years.

Part of the problem is the 10 years. It takes ten years to innovate and prove it.

Starlink started in 2015 and probably will change how the internet works.

Lime started in 2017, this may work.

Ok, another suggestion: The Noise Protocol Framework.

https://github.com/noiseprotocol/noise_spec/commit/213237c43...

https://noiseprotocol.org/

Twitch launched in 2011 and nowadays it seems everything is a good idea for video streaming.

Biggest internet thing of the past decade is the smartphone and anything related.

I guess Pidgin or Hexchat don't exist, eh.

Invention != innovation. They're two different things. People in this thread are confusing the two rather painfully. The title of the thread refers to innovation.

Innovate: "make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products"

That's exactly what Slack did. Slack was innovative. It didn't invent chatting on the Internet.

Or, y'know, AIM.

Slack did neither invent graphical chat clients nor web chat. "running irssi inside of tmux" as the alternative is a massive red herring.

irccloud would do 90% of the same though

So why does Slack have so much traction?

They sure did something right, but it wasn't innovation.

Maybe right time, good marketing, good design, but I honestly have no Idea. I also don't understand why smaller software communities are now spread across gitter, discord and slack when a channel on freenode was perfect...

Only advantage over freenode I see: some archive/search (usually not good)