There are many, I think. Like what other people have mentioned, sometimes the new standard is just better on all metrics.

Another common example is when someone creates something as a passion project, rather than expecting it to get used widely. It’s especially frustrating for me when I see people denigrate projects like those, criticizing it for a lack of practicality…

I was surprised to find that there are a ton of symbols that have sought to become the standard notation of sarcasm in text. I think we should really adopt one of those that are far more elegant than the “/s.” /s Looks ugly as fuck.

Whenever the new standard hits the almost impossible golden triangle of “cheap, reliable, and fast”.

It’s gotta be cheaper than the alternatives, better and more reliable than the alternatives, and faster/easier to adopt than the alternatives.

Early computers for example had various ways to chug math, such as mechanical setups, relays, vacuum tube’s, etc.

When Bell invented their MOSFET transistor and figured out how to scale production, all those previous methods became obsolete for computers because transistors were now cheaper, more reliable, and faster to adopt than their predecessors.

Tbf though transistors are more of a hardware thing. A better example of a standard would be RIP being superceded by BGP on the internet.

UEFI boot mode

!iso8601@lemmy.sdf.org

Small net protocols like Gemini, gopher, spartan, IPFS because they don’t compete with the web instead they coexist as separate things.

There are a lot and in most cases you’ll notice when dealing with Americans, who are refusing to do stuff like the rest of the world. The meter and kilogram took over from hundreds of different measurement standards. Most of the world is using the same calendar and writes dates in the same way. Most countries are driving on the same side. Traffic signs are kind of the same worldwide. You can buy screws with the same standard everywhere.

what if instead of coming up with new standards to the pile you combine existing ones, based on what works and is reasonable to do?

Not exactly this, but it reminds me of my first job. I used to work in finance, and I was given the task of automating cash flow reports that were sent out to hundreds of clients.

The problem was that they were made manually in Excel, and most of them were unique. So every couple years they’d get a bunch of smart people in a conference room, and tell them to figure out how to automate the cash flows. The first step was always to create a standard cash flow template, and convince everyone to adopt it.

Some users would adopt the new template, but most of them would say that the client didn’t like it, so they’d stop using it and the project would fall apart.

By the time I got there, there were still hundreds of unique cash flows, but then there were a few dozen that shared the same handful of templates, like a graveyard of failed attempts to automate this process.

I just made the output customizable. The reports looked the same as what the client was used to, but it saved hundreds of man hours for the users. A lot of people got laid off.

Networking standards started picking winners during the PC revolution of the 80’s and 90’s. Ethernet, with the first standards announced in 1983, ended up beating out pretty much other LAN standard at the physical layer (physical plugs, voltages and other ways of indicating signals) and the data link layer (the structure of a MAC address or an Ethernet frame). And this series of standards been improved many times over, with meta standards about how to deal with so many generations of standards through autonegotiation and backwards compatibility.

We generally expect Ethernet to just work, at the highest speeds the hardware is capable of supporting.

emacs is everything

When the standard is a big interoperability push that leverages MORE functionality as a bribe to be implemented.

This is how USB (plug & play!), Bluetooth (wireless headset!), HDMI (high def, single cable!) , and USB-C (both sides are good!) all beat the entrenched pseudo standards.

The way I see it, it’s not so much an issue of making something that’s better than the other standards. It’s really about getting your standard into actual use and hitting critical mass which makes all the other standards irrelevant.

Email, as far as im aware there isn’t some alternative email standard (messaging services, whatsapp, signal, sms, etc do not count imo as I believe they serve a different purpose than email)

DNS, while there are alternative root servers, they still fundamentally rely on the dns protocol.

TCP/IP, when the internet was first starting, this was not the only standard in use, but now it is (to my knowledge).

I thought about this for longer than I should’ve for a comment on a random post, but this is all I could think of lol.

edit: grammar

Chess, there’s so many wonderful ways to play.