The Internet City

Sorry if this goes in an existing thread or another forum, but during a long chat room conversation the other day, I discussed what the internet would look like as a city with somebody. Some of the things were:

• Social media = parks, malls, etc
• Forums = residential
• Search engines = roads
• Browsers = transport
• 4chan = the bad neighborhood
• YouTube = a movie theater

Let's add to this!

Wikipedia: Museums, Library, schools, maybe?

Amazon, oher shopping sites: Stores.

Pandora, last.fm and others: Music cafes, Night/Disco clubs, concert halls.

Any major porn sites: brothels, strip clubs, you know the drill.

TV Tropes = Wretched Hive part of town?

No; Commercials I Hate would be the Wretched Hive part.

Cracked, TVT and other Browser Narcotics would be, hmm... some sort of maze?

A museum of oddities, perhaps?

A hippie commune. The virtual Freetown Christiania.

Websites that are connected to offline media are the part of the city that's gated off, because they're a completely different culture to the rest of the city. In fact, they're the part of the city that's advertised and known about by people outside of the City & Metropolitan Borough of Internetia.

I know I've seen somewhere a while ago a map someone made of the internet as if it were a world map. EDIT: here: http://xkcd.com/256/

edited 20th Apr '15 2:00:00 PM by Odd1

That's more of a world than a city. And it doesn't say anything about what actually goes on in each site

And that "world" is painfully obsolete in its borders.

Good point.

I guess The Silk Road would equate to some dodgy black market that you need a fake identity (Tor) to get to.

And the rest of .onion deepweb too

How did the name of something good (the original Silk Road) end up becoming the name of something bad (the deep web thingy)?

Because even back then the Silk Road had lots of goods which were explicitly disliked by various rulers - opium for example was traded along those routes, as were a few other things disliked by various rulers.

I'd imagine that Silkroad and its ilk, in light of recent events, to be more of a Raccoon City.

I'd imagine that FFN, AO3, etc wold be bookstores, as being a library is for wikis.

/discreetly bumps own thread

lol triple post by op

but seriously though, I need more ideas.

I guess small startups could be, like, a Flea Market or something? It's just like a mini mall!

Kickstarter would be busking maybe?

^ Kickstarter would be that one street corner where you have all the street performers out with their hats open collecting money to get a gig off the ground.