[HN Gopher] I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
Author : sanmak
Score : 427 points
Date : 2021-06-13 10:58 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sffworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sffworld.com)
| amelius wrote:
| With the right blacklist, the old internet is still there.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| It's considerably easier to maintain a whitelist of actual
| content, than attempt to maintain a blacklist of ever-expanding
| spam.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| OK Boomer.
|
| You might remember this one:
| https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/gratefuldead/shakedownstreet...
|
| "Maybe you had too much too fast. Maybe you had too much too
| fast. Or just over played your part.
|
| Nothin' shakin' on Shakedown Street. Used to be the heart of
| town. Don't tell me this town ain't got no heart. You just gotta
| poke around."
| causality0 wrote:
| Ah, back when you could safely ignore a racist tirade because it
| came from xXBone_Lord420Xx instead of John Smith from Accounting.
| roachpepe wrote:
| Ignorance is bliss, they say - it was still John, but you just
| didn't know it.
|
| Also, back then when it was allowed to have more imaginative
| names we were also able to have actually meaningful arguments
| online. Now you have to be in the line of "non-entity_#83591"
| without any opinions on anything to not offend anyone, and
| mostly voicing a different opinion results in a veritable
| s*tstorm that has no relevance to the topic that was discussed.
| SJWs and white-knighting simps... /sigh.
| keiferski wrote:
| _Million Short_ is a nice way to find some of these old websites.
| It lets you remove the first million search results from your
| query:
|
| https://millionshort.com
|
| The thing I _really_ miss about the old Internet are forums.
| Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and other social media sites lack a
| certain intimacy. Everyone is somewhat hostile by default and
| there is no incentive to contribute to the community. It 's very
| different and a lot less fulfilling than the Internet forums
| circa +-2000-2005.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Which is another way of saying part of the problem is the
| _search_ _engines_ we use to discover the web. IMO, another
| piece is that Wordpress and similar engines homogenized
| design-- it 's superior but always unsurprising.
| ipaddr wrote:
| That's the only problem. Google shows big player websites now
| because it has lost the ability to detect spam.
| [deleted]
| mattlondon wrote:
| To a certain extent, Wikipedia has replaced a lot of the old
| Geocities sites for a certain subject.
|
| The sort of nerdy/obsessive detail is still there, it's just
| kinda centralised on a fairly bland website. Your opinion on if
| this is an improvement or not depends on your affinity for
| animated GIFs I guess :)
|
| The Geocities style stuff still exists, it is just the discovery
| is harder now as you will find the Wikipedia page first and then
| probably stop reading.
|
| Things like webrings we're kinda cool for discoverability.
| luke2m wrote:
| I'm 14, and internet wise, I wish it was the 90s. I coded my
| website, blog occasionally, and get noticed once in a great
| while. I chat on open platforms, and like decentralization and
| freedom from corporations.
| d3ntb3ev1l wrote:
| What's the alternative?
| [deleted]
| abhiminator wrote:
| Below are some relevant articles I keep going back to that
| highlight the same phenomenon on the 'decay' of web as a platform
| (by decay I mean extreme commercialization, excessive bloat,
| endless tracking and whatnot) made by the linked forum post's
| author:
|
| * https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/
|
| * https://danluu.com/web-bloat/
|
| * https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/the-world-wide-web-is-d...
|
| Can't help but agree with most of their assertions.
|
| Also, I just noticed that the author of this forum post uses
| 'internet' in place of what I feel should be 'web/world wide web'
| (just some pedantry from me tbh).
| scelerat wrote:
| "Internet" here is appropriate too. Although he's reminiscing
| about mid '90s websites, most of that was still an extension of
| the amateur, interest-driven culture (and counter culture) that
| was prevalent across Usenet, gopher, and ftp sites prior to the
| web's domination and conflation with "Internet"
| papito wrote:
| Please sign my guestbook...
| 55555 wrote:
| There's still ~75,000 results on google for that string. At
| least a few thousand are still /guestbook/ pages.
| imiric wrote:
| I miss guestbooks. It was great to see comments from visitors
| thanking the webmaster; it made it feel like each site had a
| small community around it. Nowadays such a concept is hidden
| behind CAPTCHAs or happens on external forums, so feels much
| more disconnected.
|
| Also, hit counters were rad.
| jd3 wrote:
| > Also, hit counters were rad.
|
| https://stuff.mit.edu/doc/counter-howto.html still works! I
| still use it alongside an old php guestbook script on my
| personal homepage.
| marban wrote:
| F5
| RGamma wrote:
| Thank your for this great content. It has really improved my
| insight.
|
| Buy Viagra ONLINE NOW !! Best viagra sildenafil pills
| medication 100% safe reliable online shop.
|
| Edit: I guess this ironic post may be indistinguishable from
| actual spam
| DavidVoid wrote:
| If your link wasn't directed to a video that is LOUD AS HELL
| then your comment would've been fine. Why not redirect to the
| regular Rickroll video instead of fucking with people's ears?
| Kiro wrote:
| I remember the backlash against unique designs where everyone
| said they just wanted plain sites, with the information in focus.
| Now when big parts of internet basically have become standardized
| and sterile everyone wants these unique designs back.
| nabla9 wrote:
| When we said we wanted plain sites, we meant like this
| https://lite.cnn.com/en or https://news.ycombinator.com/
|
| We did not mean standardize to big picture smiling people,
| carousels to more pictures and with just one sentence.
| ratww wrote:
| It's not the same thing.
|
| What everyone misses are the personal, hobbyist, non-commercial
| websites. This was replaced by things like Facebook, Wikia,
| Pinterest, Twitter, Medium, which are both constrained and ad-
| ridden. A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr.
|
| The "every site looking the same" thing is fine, however, and
| still preferred for commercial sites, government, newspapers,
| startups, other utilities. In fact most of those could still
| look _more_ of the same, because visitors rarely care about the
| differentiation for marketing purposes. You could get away with
| removing all parallax effects from those sites and nobody would
| miss them. Same for advertisements: nobody cares for the forced
| variety of colourful banners in web advertisement.
| DavidVoid wrote:
| > A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr.
|
| It will be a sad sad day when/if Tumblr gets shut down. I
| really appreciate the fact that users can customize their own
| pages in many more ways than just changing their profile
| picture and header image, it gives it a lot more personality
| than you can get on Instagram/Tumblr/Facebook.
|
| It also has a timelessness that you don't really get on other
| sites, at least not to the same degree. Posts have
| timestamps, but on the dashboard they're only visible if you
| look for them. So most people don't notice if the post they
| just reblogged was originally posted yesterday -- or seven
| years ago. This also gets rid of much of the repost issues
| you see on Reddit and similar sites, since the original post
| can remain relevant for much longer.
| ratww wrote:
| Tumblr really got it right, IMO. - It has
| all the tools for newbies (WYSIWYG) - It has tools
| for advanced users (HTML editors) - It has a
| marketplace for templates for those in-between - It
| has the "good" social features (follow, republish)
| - It doesn't use too many dark patterns - It's not
| a walled garden that blocks or pollutes Google search
| results, like Facebook or Pinterest - It has no
| "algorithm" encouraging people to consume the same bullshit
| as in Twitter/FB/Youtube - It encourages people
| browsing specific blogs instead of doing pointless doom-
| scrolling
|
| Of course it also has a lot of problems, but I'd say
| they're mostly social and not related to how the platform
| is built. On the other hand the same issues happen on
| Twitter and Facebook, so...
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| The sad part is that those websites do _exist,_ but are nigh
| impossible to stumble upon except in association with a
| particular context.
|
| For example, small communities around specific interests, and
| personal sites of authors of specific works.
|
| We really just need a concentrated effort to catalogue and
| curate them under a single banner. These efforts also do
| exist, but haven't yet reached critical mass. Probably
| because policing content is a full-time job.
| ori_b wrote:
| It's not about the design, it's about the commercialization.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I agree wholeheartedly, it's the evaporation of genuineness.
| You know behind most stuff you see now, there's a
| monetization attempt eyeing at the corner, and since people
| think web is for mass scale of low hanging fruits .. that's
| what we get.
| ozim wrote:
| Thing is commercialization made it easier for people to
| express themselves and actually start using that resource.
|
| Commercialization made it form "only nerds sit in there" to
| "everyone is on the internet and it is cool", if there would
| be no commercialization, internet for masses would still be a
| silly toy.
|
| Just like going to the Mars - it is just a "hobby" for NASA,
| most of people on Earth are not giving a damn that they just
| landed another rover. There is no practical way to make money
| on space travel currently. Find a way to earn money on
| sending rockets to Mars or Moon, everyone is going to jump
| into it.
|
| Companies on its own without hype would not go to the
| internet or digitalize their processes. There is still loads
| of companies that are not digital. There are loads of stories
| of how companies started switching to digital last year
| because of recent events...
| ByteJockey wrote:
| > if there would be no commercialization, internet for
| masses would still be a silly toy.
|
| Sure, but part of the fun of the old internet was that it
| was a silly toy that people didn't take too seriously, at
| least most of the time, there were definitely still some
| flamewars stemming from people taking things way too
| seriously.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| Then maybe it's commercialization I dislike. I loved the
| silly toy internet. It was a place to get away from the
| real world. Now it's just a part of the real world.
|
| A lot of things turn lame once real names and money are
| involved. And that's the fate of most things once they get
| big enough. It makes sense, but it's still sad.
| ozim wrote:
| I don't think it is sad because it provides so much more
| value to the whole world.
|
| Keeping it as a toy for selected ones would be really
| selfish.
|
| There is still a lot of place for "not real world" in
| here.
| ori_b wrote:
| > _Thing is commercialization made it easier for people to
| express themselves and actually start using that resource._
|
| Yes, it certainly did make it easier for people to leave
| turds in the communal pool.
| borrowcheckfml wrote:
| I believe the main reason the internet has turned out this way is
| because of flawed economic incentives. It's a winner take all
| game ruled mostly by American corporations. The individual
| blogger, Usenet contributor, IRC moderator, or open source
| software creator never got a piece of the cake. As the internet
| became mainstream, the incentives to engage in these kind of
| activities vanished.
|
| I hate to be the guy to bring up crypto since it never ends well
| on HN, but I believe that if the internet had had a "payment
| layer" that rewards early users from the start it would've turned
| out very differently.
| erikbye wrote:
| While I agree, there is still great content to find online,
| content of the type he refers to, it is just damn hard to find.
| To discover it I use alternative search engines and custom built
| crawlers.
|
| There should be more portal sites, just links to quality content.
| Used to be many of those, too.
| ferros wrote:
| In 20 years somebody will write an article about missing this
| 'old' internet from 2021.
|
| I wonder what they will miss.
| einpoklum wrote:
| They might, but the piece will be less credible.
|
| Or - Fagoomazon might censor it.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Memes, Discord, the "old" Twitter, and either having ad
| supported sites (as opposed to everything being paid) or having
| premium sites (as opposed to everything being as supported.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| they will miss not having to use a browsing agent that logs
| everything you do to your identity/passport and sends it out
| to the government to keep you in check
| slver wrote:
| Memes won't go away. Nor will ads.
| vkk8 wrote:
| Memes will be killed by some entrepreneuring copyright
| troll at some point.
|
| In many jurisdictions, memes would either break the
| copyright laws or at least be in the grey zone. It's only a
| matter of time before someone exploits this. After one
| case, the platforms will ban them to avoid the risk of
| getting sued themselves. The same will probably happen for
| gaming videos.
| slver wrote:
| Really. All right, I'm looking forward to the author of
| dickbutt stepping up and claiming what's theirs.
| vkk8 wrote:
| The author of the dickbutt (if he/she can be found) might
| easily sell the rights to their creation to a copyright
| troll for one million dollars after which my scenario
| could take place.
| [deleted]
| slver wrote:
| You see, if they had the rights, we'd know who it is. You
| reserve your rights through registration. If we don't
| know, then there's no way to prove you have the rights.
| meowster wrote:
| Less-invasive advertisements.
| ajuc wrote:
| > I wonder what they will miss.
|
| Being able to log in without providing you national ID number.
| And being able to run a public-facing server without a permit.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| In India they already miss this.
| Sleepytime wrote:
| Unregulated encryption will be out in the next decade, it's
| too powerful for us plebes to have. Things will be safer when
| only the paragons of infosec like big corporations and banks
| get to use it freely.
| politelemon wrote:
| Web pages under 100MB
| ratww wrote:
| I like your optimism in thinking it will take full two
| decades for people to miss sub-100MB pages. :)
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I don't see that anyone could have predicted the change of the
| past 20 years so it's silly to think we can even guess at the
| next 20
| cutler wrote:
| AI-enhanced web pages. Sorry, SPAS.
| agumonkey wrote:
| you said pages
| [deleted]
| xwdv wrote:
| Anonymity.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| "I miss old ATX."
|
| "I miss old [X]."
|
| There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always missed.
| You can't go back without a time-machine.
| serf wrote:
| >There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always
| missed. You can't go back without a time-machine.
|
| the point of reminiscing is to steer the current time towards
| the good points of the past, while trying to navigate around
| the difficulties experienced previously.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I am pretty sure people were missing old ATX the day Heartworn
| Highways was released
| jcfrei wrote:
| I feel like a lot of those nostalgic posts are made by people
| who were simply happier when they were younger. And they
| conflate this general decline in happiness with a perceived
| decline in quality (of anything, be it the internet,
| television, music, etc). But in most cases it's just that
| things change and they no longer fit their desired qualities -
| they haven't become worse per se.
|
| For a lot of people who are young today the internet the way
| it's right now (with TikToks, Instagram, Twitter discussions,
| rants and memes) will be the one, true internet. And in 10-20
| years they will say it has changed and how they miss it. This
| is a cycle as old as time.
| npteljes wrote:
| That's absolutely the case. It's also them encountering the
| first X, and then the millionth X. And a bunch of other
| biases also come into play, like survivorship bias. The good
| old refrigerator that's chugging along just fine for the
| twentieth year. It's not like today's shitty refrigerators
| can ever last this long. What's unseen though is the huge
| pile of discarded refrigerators on the landfill.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| The fridge I grew-up with lasted 30 years.
|
| It does seem like an industry-wide conspiracy to make
| "durable" consumer goods last only as long as their
| warranties. And also, to make money on replacement parts
| and complete replacements. The "Just go buy another
| one"-mentality makes me cringe.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| It seems like consumers prefer fancy features than
| durability
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Ugh, not lowest TCO. D: And those mostly pointless
| features are so fleeting. Just do them in software and
| modular assemblies. Also, right-to-repair and design for
| maintainability.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| There doesn't need to be mutual exclusion. Views change with
| a person's life-stage priorities. And, it's easy to lionize
| the terrible when infant minds see only the best in
| everything.
|
| Things in certain places, like America, are getting
| demonstrably shittier over time: the USPS used to work, there
| weren't mass shootings nearly every day, parks had water
| fountains, people debated, corporations didn't takeover
| public spaces as much, real wages were higher, the US made
| things, there weren't as many prisoners, healthcare costs
| were lower, and there weren't millions of visibly-homeless
| people from an unjust economic system.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I guess I can see how a lot of the stuff on the internet now
| makes me really happy too. It's just that it came with the
| loss of a lot of other things.
| kh_hk wrote:
| Yes, but still, thats almost always the case on any new
| information conduit. Early adopters use it as a novel means of
| expressing what was not possible with the old means. After
| adoption, it becomes a commodity, and the pendulum swings again.
|
| I understand a platform cannot be compared to the internet, but I
| believe the comparison still holds true. Will early snapchat
| users remember and miss their early experiences 10 years from
| now?
|
| Positively (ideally) the internet is not a platform, and it can
| transport anything, not damping future and novel means of
| expression.
|
| EDIT: But, lets not forget (since I easily went for rational
| dismissal) Missing something is completely subjective feeling, a
| valid assertion, and nothing we discuss would have made the
| author not miss it.
|
| Let's reflect on how difficult it is to fight the endless
| resources poured on making us engage (and our natural tendency to
| accept commodities because they are either easy or addicting). I
| miss napster, I align conceptually with peer to peer interchange,
| but still, I use spotify. Movies, I still prefer playing directly
| from bittorrent (even when I know that sequential downloading is
| harming the swarm).
|
| Ultimately, I just want the network to be neutral and for
| protocols to never be banned. A neutral network needs not to be
| subsidized by corporations.
| ______- wrote:
| Some Tor hidden services, or `Onionland` as it's called are very
| similar to the early web. For some reason a lot of the pages look
| like Angelfire[0]. I can't figure out why though. Perhaps the
| technical challenge of setting up an .onion was so hard that the
| webmasters were glad just to have _something_ hosted and the bulk
| of their energy was spent on the hidden service and they didn 't
| spend 5 hours creating a Javascript single page app in their free
| time.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelfire
| ashleyn wrote:
| Many tor services eschew javascript because it's recommended
| not to have javascript enabled for services requiring
| anonymity/security (or, at least it was several years ago when
| I last checked). A lot of the sites will be very technically
| simple.
| barney54 wrote:
| This sentiment of missing an older internet is one reason like
| like Hacker News. Slash dot was great in the day. Digg was so
| great in the day. Then the early days of Reddit were great. I've
| been her for over ten years and Hacker News is still good.
|
| So thank you to the team that runs Hacker News and everyone who
| comments for making it a good place to come to.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| This orange website is truly a fascinating place. We reminisce
| about the old, less commercialized internet while rubbing
| shoulders with the people who made it the way it is today.
| vkk8 wrote:
| Indeed. I find it extremely ironic how people here - of all
| places - are sympathetic to this sort of stuff.
| ryandrake wrote:
| And we (software professionals) are the ones with the power
| to fix it! It seems obvious but the answer is to just stop
| working on products/companies that are making the Internet
| worse!
|
| "Ads are annoying and intrusive!" posts the HN commenter
| whose next Jira ticket at work is to integrate a new ad SDK
| into their product.
|
| I've quit jobs that I believed were making the world a
| worse place. Software Engineers supposedly are in demand
| and have the power to pick their projects and companies. Be
| part of the solution then, and not part of the problem.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| The problem is the bulk of the demand is at the places
| with all the money, and those places mostly make the ads,
| show the ads, or serve companies that make or serve the
| ads.
| neolog wrote:
| > And we (software professionals) are the ones with the
| power to fix it! It seems obvious but the answer is to
| just stop working on products/companies that are making
| the Internet worse!
|
| I'm not convinced. We don't work in defense contracting
| but that industry seems to be doing fine without us.
| vkk8 wrote:
| I'm not personally a software professional, but to me it
| seems that the problem is economical. Centralization and
| walled gardens happen because they are a way to couple
| the internet platforms to the economic system. I think
| that if done "nicely", much of the software and internet
| tech exist in market failure corner of the economy. It's
| not like there aren't many
| federalized/decentralized/community driven and open
| source projects in existence, it's just that no-one wants
| to fund and/or market them so that they often become non-
| viable in the long run.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Many of us here followed the same path. HN is good for now, but
| it has been changing. It's unlikely we'll still be here in a
| couple years.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Sadly, you are probably right. For better or worse, I keep
| thinking that invite only forum is the way go to maintain a
| decent level of 'interesting conversations'. HN still has
| them, but it is getting harder to filter through.
| na85 wrote:
| I think that that will work in the short term, but unless
| you're very proactive about recruiting new blood your
| userbase is just going to dwindle away.
| doogerdog wrote:
| It's true that HN has gotten more crowded with more
| noise, but it is still the best there is. I won't be
| going anywhere.
|
| I am constantly amazed at the thoughtful comments from
| people who are informed on a subject and take their time
| to layout a cogent argument. This makes it worthwhile to
| spend some time scanning more and more other stuff. I am
| getting to be quite a speed reader in this place.
|
| HN will be just fine as long as Dang (and the other guy)
| spend so much energy here.
| vkk8 wrote:
| I actually found HN quite late (a few years ago) and was
| pleasantly surprised how well the spirit of the old Reddit and
| Slashdot lives on here.
| oscargrouch wrote:
| Facebook was cool before it allowed to post images and the same
| goes for reddit. Once the multimedia content was allowed, the
| incentives changed, the crowd changed and things started to go
| downhill..
|
| Take a look at HN, no images or videos, so it tends to bring
| more of the literate crowd.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| What the hell happened to Slashdot? I was on it from 1997 until
| about 2010ish, and now it is pretty ugly.
|
| I think /. cratered due to poor moderation. It's just toxic.
| Digg is now like Axios for people who think link I do, so I
| check it daily. And reddit is, well, since the Digg/Reddit
| wars, its just become all-consuming and too noisy for me.
|
| I'm guessing HN has remained civil because paid mods--who
| strive to be objective--really do make a difference.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| On HN with its dang moderation that is often praised, I have
| noticed a tendency to ascribe Slashdot's fall to poor
| moderation. That wasn't actually how things happened, though.
|
| Slashdot's decline started in the years around 2004 because
| of a site redesign that was taken very badly by the
| community, and the sale of the site to new owners who began
| to make all kinds of annoying changes with a view to
| monetizing. A lot of longtime users bailed out. It was only
| due to this loss of the productive participants that the site
| seemed to be taken over by low-quality posting.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I remember the site UI change, but I was mostly grumbling
| because it looked even _more_ 1990 's post-redesign. I
| didn't realize that cause people to leave en masse. I'm
| surprised UI was more important than discussion, esp. when
| the UI change wasn't really that dramatic, IMHO.
| jcfields wrote:
| The UI changes weren't especially popular, but I don't
| think they were the cause of a mass exodus. I think it's
| more that Reddit was gaining in popularity. Slashdot
| posts had to go through their "editors," who were kind of
| laughingstocks who regularly let dumb mistakes through,
| reposted old articles, and regularly posted low-quality,
| flamebaity articles and thinly disguised advertisements.
| People put up with it since the articles were largely an
| excuse for a discussion topic. But then Reddit bypassed
| this and let people submit things directly. And the
| quality of Reddit posts and comments was a lot higher
| since it drew a more cerebral crowd in those early days,
| which made it more of a threat to Slashdot than the more
| mainstream Digg (which it also replaced ultimately).
| flyinghamster wrote:
| I'm kind of thinking that it was more about the new
| owners than about the site redesign.
|
| I still visit /., but it just isn't what it used to be.
| If anything, the trolls are even more vile than they were
| back then.
| npteljes wrote:
| I agree. I think HN in the perfect combination of the old
| internet, with the text-only posts, and the web 2.0 way of
| doing likes and threaded conversations. And, of course, the
| moderation keeping it all in check. I'm grateful that I can
| come here every day.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Includes the very worst part of echo chambering though.
|
| Don't like someone OR their comment? Just do your part with
| three other people and it'll be faded, once it's faded other
| people will join in hiding the bad man who said the bad thing
| - and gone!
|
| No more contrarian opinion, we protected other people!
| Everyone agrees now. How wonderful.
| hashkb wrote:
| They'll also go through your recent history and downvote
| any comments you've made that are still fresh enough.
| Downvote culture has some clear drawbacks that I have never
| seen validated, let alone addressed, by any community
| mod/admin. Dang responded to me once, but not with
| validation, and not to my follow up. It's the best I've
| ever been treated by a mod. I must be a bad person with
| evil opinions.
| andrepd wrote:
| How ironic.
|
| I agree, downvote-based discussions invariably lead to echo
| chambers / monocultures. See the dumpster fire that are
| reddit comments.
|
| At least on old-time forums there was no such bullshit
| (except post count :)).
| ryandrake wrote:
| You can't crowdsource quality. Comment voting systems
| only tell you what is popular, not what is high quality.
| So many sites make this mistake, including HN.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| You reminded me of a failed experiment I did a while back
| with music tags. I still purchase music monthly (Bandcamp
| when possible), and I always tag music. I have a bunch of
| multi-value tags including 'instruments' and 'moods'. It
| works really well with a huge collection. I can quickly
| find songs similar to the one I'm listening to, or
| generate playlists.
|
| Anyway, a few years ago I thought I could speed up the
| tagging process by pulling tags from Last FM and
| filtering out the shite by only including tags that
| matched an instrument name or mood. Luckily I backed up
| before running the script on my whole collection. The
| data was absolute garbage.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| It reminded me of when I went through and ripped my CD
| collection. I'd estimate that almost a third of the album
| data was complete trash, and there were a shockingly bad
| number of spelling errors. I couldn't help but wonder if
| someone was deliberately poisoning data.
| jcfields wrote:
| Slashdot tried to solve this problem by making mod points
| limited and requiring you to give a reason for moderating
| a comment. Then there was a metamoderation system where
| you decided if the moderation someone gave was fair or
| not. If someone consistently doesn't use the moderation
| system correctly (and the metamoderation system is
| successful in identifying this), they don't get mod
| points anymore.
|
| It didn't work perfectly (obviously the site is still
| highly opinionated in favor of certain things, like Linux
| and free software), but it also wasn't the smooth-brained
| hivemind that Reddit comments sections are. I can't think
| of another site that's even tried to come up with a
| better moderation system than simple up/down votes. At
| best, there are some behind-the-scenes algorithms that
| decide how exactly to prioritize comments based on the
| voting, but that's derived from popularity as well. An
| immeasurable side effect of this is that many heterodox
| comments simply aren't posted at all since people know
| they're going to be downvoted to oblivion anyway.
| [deleted]
| raffraffraff wrote:
| If you don't have the ability to vote, you can't
| influence the content in a positive way either. Some
| comments _are_ pointless, like some tool making the "and
| my axe" joke for the millionth time.
|
| Reddit lost its way when they started heavily moderating
| or banning entire subs that didn't fit with their woke
| US-centric world view, while rape porn was "fine". I
| closed my account a while back and stopped visiting the
| site, but unfortunately, there are so many organisations
| and FOSS projects that use it in an official capacity
| that it's unavoidable.
| vkk8 wrote:
| In more user-centric (as opposed to content-centric)
| forums this problem is solved by banning users who
| repeatedly make low quality posts. One crappy comment
| here and there is something anyone might make, but the
| same person posting pointless comments in every thread
| deserves a ban.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| The solution is simple: Use downvotes for rude and
| disrespectful comments. I am all for moderating a forum
| for pointless and useless comments. Most downvotes now-a-
| days are about disagreements. Using downvotes as a tool
| to push others into conformity is the shittiest part of
| HN.
| xf1cf wrote:
| HN is not anything like the old internet forums or BBSes.
|
| Content would get moderated but you could still read
| messages. Even the ones that went against the dogma.
|
| Not at HN, anti-dogma posts get downvoted into oblivion or
| flagged if they are bad enough. I recently posted a counter-
| opinion on burnout and was downvoted pretty badly. I didn't
| flame, and tried to articulate my point well.
|
| HN is composed of the exact microcosm of people who have
| ruined the internet. It's just an echo chamber where counter-
| points are nuked. No different than facebook, or anything
| else. At least /. made you think about using your modpoints
| to downvote. Now it's free - and for many very pathetic
| people downvoting is a source of dopamine. It's far easier to
| drive-by-downvote without having to even articulate a reply
| as to why. Comparing this to the old BBSes and forums, you at
| least got a moderator note (or a VERY disparaging note from a
| user) in your PMs about why you're being moderated. It is
| wildly frustrating to type something well thought out and be
| downvoted into oblivion because your stance isn't en-vogue.
| sneak wrote:
| Slashdot still exists, and the text internet is still a thing.
| It takes a deliberate effort to seek out smaller communities.
|
| I run one myself, because I want more of them to exist.
| vkk8 wrote:
| Slashdot indeed exists, but its comment section is complete
| garbage and the news are less and less about science and
| technology and more and more about politics and nerd tabloid
| style journalism ("You wouldn't believe what Linus Torvalds
| said on the Kernel developer mailing list!").
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| For me, HN suffers in the comparison to Slashdot, because HN is
| an example of the arguably overmoderated internet of today.
| Slashdot had a vibrant culture of troll posting. It wasn't just
| dumb one-line slurs or whatever, which no one would want to
| see. Rather, it was often longform text crafted to a downright
| literary quality, to the point where many Slashdot regulars
| would choose to browse their discussion threads at -1 to see
| those posts. Some of those troll posts ("BSD is dying", etc.)
| became part of the subculture, it helped create a real feeling
| of community around shared cultural references.
|
| Yes, on HN one can toggle "showdead", but that is rather hidden
| away in one's user preferences, so very few people do it.
| Anyone creating an original troll post might also get a chewing
| out from dang for trying. In my view, this makes HN more
| similar to Facebook or Reddit that have very heavy-handed
| moderation compared to Web 1.0.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| On the contrary, I feel that "troll culture" is (along with
| commercialization) one of the things that has ruined the net.
| It's basically a form of bullying, and over the years, as
| bullies do, they've steadily escalated in their trolling.
|
| Harmless pranks from the 4chan crowd morphed into harassment
| campaigns like Gamergate and Pizzagate, then to 1/6 [edit:
| the storming of the US Capitol].
|
| Anyone disingenuously complaining that their "freedom of
| speech" is under attack because they or their hero got booted
| off Facebook, Twitter, or some small forum, needs to learn to
| distinguish between private website operators and the
| government.
| neolog wrote:
| I'm sure I don't want to know, but what is 1/6?
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Storming the US capitol on January 6th
| handoflixue wrote:
| > Anyone disingenuously complaining that their "freedom of
| speech" is under attack
|
| "Freedom of speech" is a philosophical concept, not a legal
| principle. You seem to have it confused with the US-
| specific "First Amendment", which is the one that only
| applies to the government.
|
| I personally see a big problem with social media banning
| trans-people (Facebook), or declaring that the whole LGBT
| crowd is inappropriate (Livejournal, Tumblr). I think it's
| a problem when scientists sharing Covid-19 information get
| banned for being ahead of the official CDC/FDA guidance
| (Twitter)
|
| Maybe the solution isn't legal, but I still think it's bad
| that we have a massive media apparatus that can wipe out
| any voices it disagrees with, and which is fairly eager to
| use that against people like me.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Definitely agree, HN has been downvoting too much lately and
| it used to be the case that contrarian views were rarely
| downvoted, and it was reserved for rude comments or baseless
| allegations, personal attacks, etc. Today, HN sucks just like
| any other major discussion board. Conformism is real and
| downvotes are a tool used to silence and discredit real
| opinions and insights - although they might be uncomfortable
| and challenges your long held views - that's exactly the
| thing that I love about the old internet.
|
| HN is held hostage by people with a particular ideology and
| conformity, not just political, but across the board.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Fwiw I'm old enough to remember people deriding the internet
| for replacing more pure bbs' and newsgroups with flashy
| websites like /. and digg.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The internet killed bbses. Bbses were local (or not) more
| personal, easy to make longterm friends, meetups in malls
| died with the bbses.
|
| I miss bbses. I resisted the internet switch for as long as
| possible. I remember the last c64 release..wasn't it monsters
| of mayham.. the graphics were amazing and the gameplay fast.
| Sort of like a mario world.
|
| BBS could be elite where you needed references. It could be
| local family focuses with no swearing. There was a network of
| bbses who would share posts.. that was cool.
|
| The best thing about bbses. As a SysOp I could start chatting
| with any user. The person logging in actual used your
| computer so in real time you could watch what the user was
| doing. Websites lost that.
| bombcar wrote:
| Some BBSes evolved into forums but even those were
| different.
|
| We lost the "local" based internet groups and we only
| really have "subject" based groupings anymore.
| goalieca wrote:
| Yeah. Phpbb was a huge deal in the early 2000s. Then
| reddit came along with subreddits and Facebook groups
| took over. All stuff now happens under the curated
| moderation of the corporation that owns whatever
| hobby/interest.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Hn, unlike the rest, doesn't have a business model they
| strongly encourages them to make the site a dumb as nails
| tabloid
| cortexio wrote:
| Many people here mentioned it's notalgia. I dont think its the
| case. The internet was actually very different. It was WAAAAY
| more social than today. It revolved alot more around small
| communities. Even in gaming, we had dedicated servers in pretty
| much any game. Now, everything is automatic and you almost never
| meet the same people twice. It's just sad.
|
| We have reddit, but it's just a pool of people caring a tiny bit
| about everything instead of caring alot about 1 thing.
|
| The entire internet is over run by ads. It's all about
| bussinesses now, while back then, it was about communities and
| information.
|
| Im happy with the current internet, it's great. But we have lost
| alot of amazing things from the past. The old internet had things
| the new internet could only dream of.
|
| That's life.
| mdoms wrote:
| For me, it's Reddit which has killed the internet. It (along with
| Facebook Groups) has sucked the oxygen out of internet
| communities. It favours recency, but only at the thread level, so
| new comments in old threads will never be seen but new threads
| with the same conversation will always pop up.
|
| This causes one of two effects: old timers leave communities
| because it's just the same repetitive threads over and over, and
| communities become dominated by newbies; or, worse, old timers
| develop lexicons of inside jokes and memes, and the community
| becomes impenetrable to newcomers who might otherwise have a lot
| to offer.
| fabbari wrote:
| I miss text. It seems now that whenever I search for 'how to do
| X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial
| things.
|
| A 10 minutes video with the usual 'subscribe and hit the bell
| icon', a word from the sponsor, a long winded introduction and
| then "click on menu, then click on this item, then select the
| size".
| imiric wrote:
| Or even if there is a text article, it's obscured by cookie
| consent forms, ads, "subscribe to my newsletter" popups, padded
| intros and outros, and most likely scraped instructions from
| elsewhere. It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or
| specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get
| lucky with random search results.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > Or even if there is a text article, it's obscured by cookie
| consent forms, ads, "subscribe to my newsletter" popups,
| padded intros and outros, and most likely scraped
| instructions from elsewhere.
|
| The worst are the ones that obviously scrape content from
| StackOverflow and then reword it.
|
| > It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific
| forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky
| with random search results.
|
| This indeed, and DuckDuckGo automates it further with their
| bang shortcuts like !w for Wikipedia, or !reddit, !ebay, etc.
|
| But even though DuckDuckGo has mostly shaped up to be a good
| alternative to Google (I rarely use !g anymore), it's
| vulnerable to SEO tricks in its own right. Searching specific
| sites helps a lot, but it shouldn't have to be that way.
| emodendroket wrote:
| So you say, but a lot of times the videos are a Godsend. I will
| never go back to written recipes (at least for an unfamiliar
| dish), for instance -- why struggle to figure out how much a
| "dash" is supposed to be or get confused over how exactly to do
| something when I can just watch it performed?
| scambier wrote:
| I almost never watch videos, unless it's the necessary medium
| for the context (i.e. music teaching or movie analysis),
| because I _need_ text to learn.
|
| But.
|
| Two weeks ago there was a small video on Discord that crashed
| the client when you played it. Here's a 8m30s long video
| explaining how it works:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBNQ6tiNcI
|
| tl;dw: they used ffmpeg to stitch 2 videos with a different
| aspect ratio together, so it crashes chromium. That's the whole
| explanation, and this guy spends SIX MINUTES of blowing hot air
| before getting to the point. It's absolutely infuriating, I
| genuinely felt robbed of my time.
| RinTohsaka wrote:
| You should check out sponsor block
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
| rvense wrote:
| I learned recently that you can make tea from roasted
| buckwheat. I googled it, and found a seven minute video of a
| man making tea with his daughters. And I don't mean an artful
| exposition or something, just full-on Youtube "yo what's up
| welcome back to the channel so since last time we've been
| really loving BUCKWHEAT TEA here's how to make it don't
| forget to LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE" drivel around pouring water on
| buckwheat.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| A weird thing I learned while working on my own YouTube
| channel is that saying "Like and subscribe" actually does
| work. As in, you get more likes and subscribers by saying
| it compared to not saying it. It's like people need to be
| reminded that they can or should click those buttons.
|
| I could never bring myself to say it at the start of a
| YouTube video but I added it at the end and saw
| improvements in the analytics from videos that had the
| reminder versus not.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Do you get more people to do it by saying like and smash
| that subscribe button vs just saying like and subscribe?
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I never experimented with it that much. My only test was
| asking people to like and subscribe versus not.
|
| My intuition would be that you should use the phrasing
| that is authentic to your channel and voice. Most of my
| content was reading quotes from government reports,
| academic research, and news reports and then explaining
| what I thought about it in a calm monotone. (My vocal
| inspiration was Sam Harris). At the end of my videos I
| said "If you enjoyed this video please let me know by
| clicking the 'Like' button. If you'd like to see more
| content in a similar style, please subscribe." Which I
| felt represented the tone and pace of my videos.
|
| On the other hand, if your channel is faster paced, more
| energetic, focused on being funny etc, then you probably
| should come up with a wacky or creative way to say "like
| and subscribe." I don't think anyone is going to
| subscribe just for how clever your saying is, but it will
| be more consistent with the tone of the channel. I think
| the main benefit of saying "Like and subscribe" is just
| to remind people to do that. Some people will be watching
| your video and enjoying it but just need an extra push to
| think "Oh yeah, I should subscribe, I do like these
| videos."
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Always play at 1.5x and skip the first third. That's the
| secret. You can skim videos just like skimming text. It's a
| learned skill.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > they used ffmpeg to stitch 2 videos with a different aspect
| ratio together, so it crashes chromium.
|
| Do you have link to _that_ video? It sounds more (read: at
| all) interesting than the one you linked.
| sircastor wrote:
| I wonder if after the current Tik-Tok/YouTube Shorts/other
| version of video settles down we'll start to see videos that
| don't need to be long utilize this format and that will get
| pushed into search results.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Why are you not skipping the bullshit? I feed most of my
| youtube addiction through mpv and have configured several key
| combinations which allow me to quickly bisect the video.
| These videos are always full of comments like "why did I have
| to spend 20 minutes on this", while they never take more than
| 15 to 20 seconds from me.
|
| By the way, with a proper youtube-dl config in place you
| don't even have to open the browser: $ mpv
| 'never gonna give you up'
|
| It the best way to watch youtube by any measure that I can
| think of right now.
| crtasm wrote:
| I recently learned pressing the number keys on youtube.com
| jumps to 0/10/20/...% of the runtime.
| joshspankit wrote:
| You're missing something important: You have built the
| intuition necessary to pick up on pacing cues so that _you_
| can skip ahead and quickly get a sense of where they put
| the info.
|
| Not everyone understands those cues, and of the ones that
| understand them not everyone can process them as quickly.
| fuckwarmweather wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the key combinations thing? Is it just
| for jumping around in the video or is there more to it than
| that?
| doogerdog wrote:
| I also prefer text to videos, but there are many times
| when you need to churn through six lousy vids to get the
| one thing you need.
|
| I use Movist Pro (Mac-only) for videos that work with
| youtube-dl. Once you set it up it's like magic. I can set
| keys for any speed or jump size I desire.
|
| I have gotten pretty good at watching fast and jumping
| around to see if this vid is worth a look, or will cover
| the information I need. When I'm away from my computer
| and have to wade through vids on another machine it's
| like torture.
|
| By the way, the modern internet is way better than the
| 1995- 2005 version. Everything you could want is there,
| you just have to learn how to get past the fluff and BS.
| I have fond memories of 1997 internet because for the
| first time I could access so much information from home,
| but I would never go back.
| flir wrote:
| I don't know if it's what OP meant, but I'm imaging
| starting at the 50% mark, then jumping forward or back
| 25%, then jumping forward or back 12.5% etc, until you've
| zeroed in on the nugget of content in the sea of noise.
|
| Might make a good browser plugin. Binary search, but for
| video. Tweaking the exact ratios might be an interesting
| problem. I'm thinking (no evidence!) that 30% for a
| forward jump and 15% for a backward jump might work
| better. Large jumps forward until you hit something
| interesting, then small jumps back to find the start.
| scambier wrote:
| An old memory just popped up > The Wadsworth Constant is
| the idea (and 2011 meme) that one can safely skip past
| the first 30 percent of any YouTube video without missing
| any important content. https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-
| culture/the-wadsworth-const...
|
| The funniest part of that meme is that YouTube
| implemented a (now obviously removed) "wadsworth" query
| parameter that skipped the first 30% of a video.
| scambier wrote:
| > Why are you not skipping the bullshit
|
| Honestly? Because I was expecting to hear something
| interesting at any moment. When I saw the length, I
| expected to see a technical explanation, a step-by-step
| how-to, a live example with the ffmpeg CLI. Anything
| remotely interesting.
|
| What I absolutely did not expect was a 6 minutes long
| "introduction" out of a 8:30 minutes video. All of that to
| finally say "it's 2 videos stitched together, like and
| subscribe"
| cesarb wrote:
| > out of a 8:30 minutes video
|
| A friend of mine who has an youtube channel once
| explained to me that he had to add more content to one of
| his videos which otherwise would end up being too short,
| since there's a minimum length before youtube can
| monetize the video. IIRC, the minimum length was
| something like 8 minutes.
| bsder wrote:
| And here we have yet another example of the GooTube
| monopoly making the internet shittier.
| joshspankit wrote:
| Is there enough of a market for extremely short YouTube
| videos so that people could make a living just making
| "It's 2 videos stitched together"?
|
| Honestly, my heart wants it to be true.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Pretty soon the industry will be reduced to bunches of
| three preteen content creators in a trenchcoat.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Yeah, TikTok.
| joshspankit wrote:
| Hahaha, I knew this comment was coming. Fun fact: TikTok
| is experimenting with longer videos. I think they're up
| to 3min already.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Eventually all these things converge on an identical
| feature set, I guess.
| sonar_un wrote:
| Short videos get killed by the YouTube algorithm since
| it's difficult to show ads.
| manquer wrote:
| They do youtube shorts for 1 minute videos
| joshspankit wrote:
| Right! Exactly!
|
| That's why I'm curious if it's possible for creators to
| make 1-2 sentence videos _that are profitable enough for
| the platform those videos are on_ that they can pay the
| creators well.
| akamal90 wrote:
| what are those proper youtube-dl config?
| JoeAcchino wrote:
| Linking that video you're playing their game, adding
| pointless rambling is a way to increase video length for more
| ads.
| joshspankit wrote:
| Some days I think about making a service that cuts to the
| chase.
|
| For example: Put in the URL for that vid (or share-sheet it to
| the app), and it instantly returns "Click on menu > Item, then
| select size"
| joshspankit wrote:
| And sometimes when I'm really grumpy I think about just going
| around and manually doing it by adding comments.
| egypturnash wrote:
| That's where the money is. I fuckin' hate it.
| ftkftk wrote:
| I agree with this to some degree, I generally digest things
| better in text. At the same time video can be many times better
| at teaching skills. Mushroom foraging for example; I have read
| many books on the subject, but youtube has exponentially
| improved my skills to a level that just wasn't feasible to
| reach with books. Home improvement is another example. If you
| own an older home and come across the DIY jobs that the boomer
| generation pulled off - you start thanking FSM for how to
| videos...
| cik wrote:
| As someone who cannot process video, agreed this is genuinely
| insulting. To me, the majority of knowledge distillation is
| quickly becoming like cheap snacking - you get a bit, it leaves
| you wanting, but is ultimately bad for you.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I don't understand. Has someone made it so you don't have
| access to books anymore? The videos are additive.
| Jolter wrote:
| For some reason, search engines are now promoting video
| results over text results, at least for "how to" type
| searches.
| sneak wrote:
| There are tools to download the automatic captions of youtube
| videos as text. I do this with a lot of videos.
| driscoll42 wrote:
| That's useful, but ultimately you can't search captions in
| Google/DuckDuckGo if you're trying to find out if the video
| even has the info you're looking for.
|
| Plus it sucks trying to copy code to reuse
| mcherm wrote:
| Sounds useful.
|
| Which such tools do you recommend?
| novok wrote:
| That comes from changing economics. Youtube pays, blogs with
| ads do not
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Or text that is preceded by pages of phony life-stories.
| code_duck wrote:
| My issue is that I don't find it convenient to watch a video at
| all. For answering simple questions, there are many drawbacks
| to the format compared to text. I can usually extract necessary
| information from text in seconds. I might have to turn on a
| video and wait several minutes to hear the relevant information
| or spend minutes searching through it. Info in videos is not
| searchable by keywords or easily copy/pastable, and I may be in
| an environment where I don't want to turn the sound up.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| To be fair, the reference documentation for 90s GUI programs
| was also excessively tedious in how it documented every single
| element and never quite explained how to actually do what you
| wanted. As prose, it was rather lacking.
|
| Videos containing the same information still somehow manage to
| be worse, though, no argument about that.
| queuebert wrote:
| Unix man pages are the pinnacle of documentation, and you'll
| never convince me otherwise.
| api wrote:
| Even more annoying: it's now considered necessary to have a
| bunch of videos about any major new product or project. Video
| production is either very expensive, very time consuming, or
| both, so it's a new "tax" that you have to pay to look serious.
| sneak wrote:
| Watching the videos at 2-2.5x helps a lot. YT supports 2x
| natively and there is an extension that lets you go even
| faster.
| sen wrote:
| Spam that right arrow on your keyboard to skip through and find
| the relevant part. I refuse to listen to all the filler drivel
| that's designed purely to pad it out behind 10min for the
| increased algorithm love. Then we're supposed to sit through
| sponsor ads when we already pay for YouTube premium. I'm all
| for patreon and supporting creators but it's gotten ridiculous.
| Multiple "sponsor" sections in a single video and endless meta
| crap irrelevant to the actual video. Don't forget to like this
| comment, subscribe, hit that bell, join our amazing discord
| community, follow is on Twitter for updates, comment below for
| a chance to win our giveaway... etc.
| bombcar wrote:
| Sometimes a quick glance at the comments will have someone
| timestamping the useful parts.
|
| And - hey! If the only solution was in a video snap off a
| quick blog post! You can even link the video and maybe it'll
| help someone in the future.
|
| Modern web has become less and less "write" and more "read"
| and that contributes to the downfall imo.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| That is really annoying with software.
|
| Videos were super useful for fixing my toilet.
| bjornjajayaja wrote:
| Honestly I think the downfall began with lack of no-script
| support. JavaScript is a great addition to add interactivity,
| but it is an obvious win for commercial interests.
|
| It would be nice if instead of websites being forced to display
| cookie banners, what if they were forced to support plain
| HTML/CSS only mode? Not only would it increase privacy and
| prevent things like Canvas fingerprinting (oh wait, that's what
| commercial interests use), it would also put content first.
|
| JavaScript began as a way to add dynamism to HTML which CSS now
| can handle by itself.
|
| What we need is a web framework that provides good fallback
| modes.
|
| My challenge to folks: try to use HTML/CSS only to create
| interesting and dynamic websites which focus on content-first.
| And give that content good printer-friendly support :)
|
| And for monetization, sell a product on there of some kind.
| Provide something useful. Don't hide behind a barrage of ads.
| There's always another way!
| axiolite wrote:
| > whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video
| results for sometimes very trivial things
|
| You can usually pull the transcript/subtitles, without watching
| the video.
| jrootabega wrote:
| It's 8 minutes now.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Say "thank you Google" for this one. This is how they decided
| to monetize the internet.
| dehrmann wrote:
| It's also opportunistic fact marketers.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| "They" is a bit unfair here.
|
| The sequence seems to have been something like: (1)
| Advertisers: "We'll pay you $2 for a video ad, $1 for an
| image ad, and $0.20 for a text ad." (2) Google: "We should
| find a way to create more video ad space."
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > "They" is [ _]a bit[_ ] unfair here.
|
| Was going to disagree that it's unfair, but I suppose it
| arguably _is_ exactly one bit (or ~0.3 orders of magnitude)
| unfair, since the parties at fault are Google and
| advertisers jointly, and the parent mentions one out of the
| two. Not sure how to rigorize that measurement, though.
| kwyjobojoe wrote:
| Google changed YouTube monitisation so that videos had to
| be over a certain length to make money. Short to the point
| videos mean that the creator gets zip, so padding with
| unnecessary crap is the way to big bucks.
|
| So it's totally, 100% Google's fault that there is a
| majority of pointlessly long videos on YouTube
| trey-jones wrote:
| Worse still, a lot of those videos are simply a content-creator
| (as opposed to an expert in the subject matter) teaching you
| how to do something that they learned how to do from another
| video (possibly by an expert).
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Trying to learn how to do household stuff on YouTube is full
| of comically bad or dangerous advice with millions of views.
| Thankfully this Old House has uploaded their back catalog and
| the comment sections of videos usually has rational insight
| from people claiming to be tradesmen.
| grishka wrote:
| Regarding the word from the sponsor, I can't recommend the
| SponsorBlock extension enough.
| hzay wrote:
| We all miss the old internet. But what is to be done about it
| honestly?
| leadingthenet wrote:
| What made the early internet great was a combination of a
| somewhat high bar of entry, with the right type of people
| climbing it. I'm not entirely sure how to recreate that.
| decasteve wrote:
| Paraphrased from Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, in which he referred
| to books but I think he captures the sentiment universally:
|
| It's not the old internet you miss, it's some of the things that
| were in the old internet. The same things could be in the
| internet today. It's not the old internet you're looking for.
| Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old
| motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and
| look for it in yourself.
|
| The old internet was only one type of receptacle where we stored
| a lot of things we were afraid we might forget...The magic is
| only in what the internet says, how it stitched the patches of
| the universe together into one garment for us.
|
| The old internet showed pores in the face of life. The
| comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless,
| expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying
| to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black
| loam.
| prepend wrote:
| Sadly, it's the people.
|
| The old internet had a filtering function where, because it was
| harder to use, people had to have some interest or skill to use
| it. So as a result, I think the proportion of people "online" had
| similar interest so more content was relevant and made by similar
| people.
|
| Now everyone is online with more diverse interests and
| capabilities.
| grishka wrote:
| Not quite. Companies decided to monetize the internet, and
| because they want to earn all the money in the world, they want
| as many people as possible to use the internet. So they dumb it
| down to make it "easier to use".
| CyanBird wrote:
| > Not quite
|
| You are just describing the same thing as OP said
|
| And it is not even a matter of direct monetization, but
| growth _into_ monetization
|
| So yeah, OP is correct
| vkk8 wrote:
| I think that most of the filtering happened because different
| communities operated on different platforms rather than a
| single huge one like Reddit or Facebook.
|
| A small, old time discussion forum for a specific interest in
| my (rather small) language had only perhaps a hundred active
| participants and another few hundred casual posters. In that
| sort of environment it is actually possible for the actives to
| get to know each other and have occasional live meetings, which
| builds a much better community. The threshold of participation
| is a lot higher since a new participant would first have to
| find the forum and then go through the registration process,
| both of which filter out people who were not actually that
| interested in the topic.
|
| In Reddit or Facebook, any "community" (the word in quotations
| because I don't think they actually are very communal) for even
| a mildly popular topic gets filled with thousands and thousands
| of posts from thousands or millions of casual participants. The
| quality of the posts get very low, it becomes impossible for
| anyone to read all of them and personalities of the
| participants don't matter at all.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| Yep, this is something I noticed as well. Reddit calls its
| subreddits communities, but most communities are not about
| the people but about the content. As you can only have
| nuanced conversation when you repeatedly run into the same
| people, the only subreddits able to withstand conversation
| are niche or heavily moderated like AskHistorians.
|
| What this means is that if you want good conversation on
| Keyboards, it better be about mechanical. Good conversation
| on coffee or want a new pair of headphones? Better be into
| audiophile equipment. There's no room for generalists who
| just want good enough. Overnight WallStreetBets went from an
| interesting community of people willing to gamble far more
| than I to a pile of garbage.
|
| I'm beginning to think that Dunbar's number and the
| associated tribal splits are something that we should factor
| into our community building, and not try to work around
| through metrics and algorithms.
|
| So HN does this aspect correct, by grouping by interest of a
| certain type of person, but even on HN as more people show up
| and post the same problems will become evident.
| eloisant wrote:
| I think it's a good point. Also everything being in the same
| place, easy to link or retweet means the small weirdo
| community will invariably see outside people coming to make
| fun of them or explain them that they're bad people who
| deserve to burn on hell.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I agree. It hasn't just ruined the internet, though. The
| internet has ruined them. Back in the day we didn't have any
| illusions about what the internet was. When you connected to a
| website you were literally just reading information from some
| random dude's computer. Nowadays there are older people who
| think the internet is finally lifting a veil on everything
| because anyone can say anything and mainstream media censors
| everything (ie. conspiracy theorists), and younger people who
| don't know anything except the internet and don't realise that
| there is so much stuff still out there that isn't online.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| "diverse capabilities" is quite the euphemism.
| hvasilev wrote:
| This. It also happens with everything, not just the old
| internet. It is the fun aspect of being one of the few first to
| reach a certain resource.
| ms123 wrote:
| Come say hi at the Midnight (https://midnight.pub) if you miss
| the old internet. :) I built it for those reasons.
| bitwize wrote:
| Flashing back hard to alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, where a bunch of
| William Gibson wannabes would write for each other as an
| audience, set within a "virtual bar" known as the Chatsubo.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Oooh this reminds me of hoe.nu or anada or
| http://textfiles.com/ ! Thanks!
| zanethomas wrote:
| Sadly the current state of the internet was predictable.
| zanethomas wrote:
| gotta wonder why that got a -1 not only was it predictable i am
| not the only one who predicted it
| evgen wrote:
| Strange, as this author misses the internet that they remember
| from the mid-90s and I miss the internet from the days before
| people like the author even knew what it was.
| cdrini wrote:
| I never got to use the internet before the mid-90s; what do you
| miss about it?
| evgen wrote:
| I miss a high bar for entry that meant most of the people
| online were at a relatively small collection of universities,
| tech companies, or government and public service agencies. It
| was elitist for sure, but sometimes that is not a bad thing
| and the level of conversation was something we will never see
| again.
|
| I miss being able to read everything interesting on Usenet
| over a long lunch sitting in front of a vt220.
|
| It was slow, but you didn't mind because it was all text
| based. The protocols were open and barely compressed so it
| was easy to explore and play around with things. A few hours
| in a wiring closet with a punch-down tool, a crimper, and
| spools of cable could be used to create magic.
|
| There was no money to be made so no one took it too
| seriously. There were vast spaces to explore; we didn't know
| as much as we do now about what is and is not possible (and
| what can or cannot be solved with technical solutions to what
| turn out to be meatspace problems) so every crazy idea held a
| kernel of possibility.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > All these wikis have the same layout and are just dull, devoid
| of emotion.
|
| Probably he's talking about Wikia (or, by their new name,
| Fandom), which indeed is pretty much always the same layout as
| Wikipedia plus a literal shitload of ads.
|
| What killed off the other sites? Mostly the fact that whenever
| emotions run high (and the more invested people are in a fandom,
| the worse it gets), you _will_ have a bunch of scriptkiddies or
| actual capable hackers that will DDoS or hack your site off the
| Internet. I don 't know many people who are willing to deal with
| this shit for a hobby project, so it is only logical that most of
| the creators have either left the fandom entirely or migrated
| their content off to some centralized platform.
|
| Additionally, people on the consuming side were tired of content
| vanishing into nothingness when its creators died, lost interest
| or were unable to pay the hosting bills... which led them to seek
| out centralized platforms, as (as ugly and ad-ridden they may be)
| at least promised some form of reliability.
| ozim wrote:
| That is combination of great points.
|
| Most of those niche stuff sits in Facebook groups, I bet there
| are quite a lot of naturist/whatver groups there (probably not
| posting photos but organizing events or discussing stuff), you
| have to follow right people on fb/tt/yt.
|
| The creativity is there, for me author of that post misses
| forest for the trees. Web pages are just secondary artifacts. I
| don't want my favorite band members sitting in the evening
| messing with HTML I want them to make music.
|
| Counter culture is about people and what they want to express,
| sometimes it might be important "how", but for a lot of hobbies
| "how" is not that much important as long as it is clear and
| easy to do.
|
| This is why I don't miss "old internet", people are crafty and
| interesting anyway.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Counter culture is about people and what they want to
| express, sometimes it might be important "how", but for a lot
| of hobbies "how" is not that much important as long as it is
| clear and easy to do.
|
| The danger is that a _lot_ of counter-culture movements aren
| 't exactly welcomed by the major providers. Anything
| involving sex or sexuality - no matter if nudists, swingers,
| poly-amory, LGBT, fetish beyond 50SOG-style or sex work - has
| massive risk of getting booted off the internet, as a result
| of legal requirements (FOSTA/SESTA, child protection laws),
| credit card regulations or Evangelical fundamentalist
| pressure.
|
| Anything involving drugs faces similar risks (I'm actually
| surprised Erowid hasn't been shut down), as is anything going
| too far anti-capitalist (see e.g. Pirate Bay, SciHub, but
| also Occupy Wall Street or u/DeepF.ckingValue being dragged
| in front of Congress after the $GME shenanigans).
| ozim wrote:
| Is it a danger?
|
| What is the upside of having nudist/sex-workers/poly amory
| group having millions of followers?
|
| For all of those activities it is best to keep it in small
| trusted groups of people. If you are really dedicated to
| that stuff you will find your way. Then is it really a
| counter culture if it can have millions of followers?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Relying on centralized entities is a danger for the
| movements themselves, as the nsfw community found out
| when Tumblr banned all of that virtually overnight. Or
| when PornHub banned everything not commercial (I do
| understand that this was due to revenge porn, which PH
| had ignored _for years_ , but doesn't change the side
| effects!)
| dang wrote:
| Missing it other times too:
|
| _I Miss the Old Internet_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402518 - Oct 2019 (306
| comments)
|
| _Tell HN: I miss the old internet_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552 - June 2018 (221
| comments)
| carapace wrote:
| The metaphor I came up with (and am proud enough of to flog here)
| is, "The Internet was Burning Man, now it's Bangkok."
| api wrote:
| Has anyone tried Gemini?
|
| https://gemini.circumlunar.space
|
| I looked around a few days ago and I find it really neat. Its
| minimalism makes it unsuitable for all the trash that has ruined
| the modern web _as a simple information store_. It uses the
| principle of least capability to create an environment where mere
| information takes center stage. Not even supporting images means
| memes can 't even take hold, let alone real-time adtech.
|
| The only flaw is that it's still a client/server protocol, which
| means closed silos and more passive forms of adtech could still
| invade.
|
| (The modern web is however an acceptable thin client for single
| page apps that interact with services. I look at HTML5+CSS+JS as
| the new VT100, a terminal protocol for talking to remote
| machines.)
|
| The other part of the modern Internet that reminds me of the old
| Internet is small independent podcasts. I listen to a number of
| these, and the high information content and lack of bullshit is
| reminiscent of the web before Facebook and adtech. There's also
| an implicit principle of least capability in podcasts. It's
| possible to insert ads, sure, but it's also possible to skip them
| and it's hard to make it impossible to do that. The medium is
| non-interactive and almost non-scriptable. There is an effort
| right now to walled garden podcasts, and I urge everyone who
| cares to resist it by using podcast apps and aggregators that are
| not pushing this.
| ______- wrote:
| https://alex.flounder.online/gemlog/2021-01-08-useless.gmi
| cm2187 wrote:
| It's like nostalgia for old TV shows. You have found memories but
| then when you watch them again they were really crap. I also
| remember images rendering line by line, expensive phone bills,
| crashy browsers, popup storms, going through 15 pages of
| altavista results before finding something useful, etc
| npteljes wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're downvoted, whatever there was, it was
| also abused or shit. Spam everywhere, banners as annoying as
| ever, the nice insights in forums buried between low-effort
| one-liners and the trendy extra spacious forum signatures, and
| you couldn't do much against the flashing banners because
| adblocking was hit or miss.
|
| It's not like I don't empathize. But one needs to realize that
| this is a specific thing, it's a human experience, shared
| across time and culture.
|
| Oh yeah and the popups and the pop-unders can rot in hell. I
| can't believe how long it took for developers to control the
| situation.
| [deleted]
| zubspace wrote:
| I just watched Inside [1], where Bo Burnham creates a wonderful,
| funny, sad and thought-provoking "Special" about our internet
| culture. Highly recommended.
|
| This is one of my favourite songs now: [2]
|
| It's a bit crazy when I think about how different our generations
| grow up and it makes me a bit sad that our children will have a
| completely different understanding of what the internet is. For
| me it was a place of wonder, freedom and self-expression. It's
| different today, but even I have problems explaining how it
| changed. But it definitely lost some if it's playfulness on the
| way.
|
| [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14544192/
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/k1BneeJTDcU
| isaiahg wrote:
| Maybe things felt better because the internet originally
| reflected a subset of our population. Before the advent of
| cheap smartphones and 24/7 connections with a cellular plan,
| being part of the early internet usually meant you had a well
| paid job and were educated.
|
| The internet of today hasn't changed much and is still a
| reflection of it's population. And if we don't like what we see
| it's because it highlights the worst parts of society as well
| as the best.
|
| I've been doing a lot of thinking on how the internet has
| changed humanity since it's inception and watching our gradual
| change into a more connected and collectivist mentality. I
| think right now we're all being confronted with the imperfect
| creatures we are and ultimately I think it's a good thing for
| how we'll progress from here.
| ketanhwr wrote:
| +1 for "Welcome to the Internet". I was thinking exactly of
| that song when I read the post!
| ethbr0 wrote:
| If I had to distill four decades of "mass Internet"
| transformation into one phrase:
|
| Independent creator culture (1980-2000), converted into mass
| consumer culture (2000-2010), and then back into taxed creator
| culture within walled ecosystems (2010-2020).
| skummetmaelk wrote:
| The book "The Master Switch" explains how radio, film and
| cable TV went through the exact same phases. It's worth a
| read if you find this transformation interesting.
| sprkwd wrote:
| What happens next?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Predicting the future is a more lucrative talent than
| summarizing the past, and I'm not that rich. :)
| keiferski wrote:
| If we ever get around to having a Basic Income, it may help
| this somewhat. Creators may feel less pushed to monetize
| the things they make.
| wwweston wrote:
| This. Capitalism is pretty good at making a lot of what
| can be monetized at industrial scales, but without some
| form of complementing security, it also places distorting
| incentives to search _every_ activity for ROI
| possibilities in one form or another.
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| That timeline you described doesn't align with the events of
| eternal September:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Mass effect lags individual instance, and ranges are
| general.
|
| F.ex. YouTube started in 2005, but from my memory the first
| years were primarily sharing copyrighted commercial
| material, before they cracked down on that and leaned into
| monetizing and taxing organic content
| delecti wrote:
| I think all of that independent creator culture is still out
| there, there's just also the mass consumer culture and walled
| ecosystems on top. It's a relatively insignificant proportion
| of things now, but big networks seem to be what most people
| are looking for.
| vkk8 wrote:
| Not all. While commercialization of the creator culture
| undoubtedly has some benefits, it also kills some of its
| original "soul".
|
| Someone making funny videos on the internet on their free
| time without any kind of expectation to make money out of
| it unavoidably produces different results than the same
| person making semi-professional videos on Youtube and
| making living out of it. If the latter is an option, why
| the hell would the said person do the former? But since the
| latter option exists, it drives all of the creations to
| more professional, less quirky direction. It's the same
| effect that causes all the Hollywood films to have pretty
| much the same story arc and all the big budget games to
| feel like copies of each other.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| That's an effect, sure. But I think it's more corrosive
| on the _platform_ side.
|
| If I start a business that makes hosting and sharing
| videos easier, should I sell it to hobbyists who don't
| have money, or semi/pros who have lots of money? And how
| does that affect my feature pipeline and product
| evolution?
|
| The end result being... hobbyists have minimal,
| difficult, and (relatively) expensive platforms to enable
| their work, and semi/pros have well featured and cheap
| (or free) platforms. And that perpetuates the bifurcation
| and destruction of pure hobbyists.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > I think all of that independent creator culture is still
| out there
|
| It absolutely is. You don't even have to go completely old-
| school and DIY youtube. There is always a way you can surf
| the current internet weather conditions to achieve some
| hybrid stance.
|
| For instance, maybe you put some videos on YouTube, but
| also have deeper posts for each of those on some personal
| blog that you host on a server in your garage.
|
| With this approach, you can drive traffic from both
| directions - People who were browsing your blog and want to
| watch some embedded YT demo, and YouTubers _desperate_ for
| hard, written technical documentation on how to do
| something will have link in the description below.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > it definitely lost some if it's playfulness on the way
|
| Kids seem to be having fun on TikTok. The obvious issue is I
| wouldn't call it a place of freedom.
| cousin_it wrote:
| In retrospect, the old internet had plenty of derisiveness,
| toward targets like religion or copyright. Many of the loudest
| voices switched to today's morality movement without skipping a
| beat.
| ipaddr wrote:
| That's because the social justice movement is a religion. No
| one calls it this but the tell tail sign is you can't debate
| this issues with facts.
|
| Climate change has produced their own religious zealots.
| emodendroket wrote:
| It's not true that "no one" calls it that. That's, in fact,
| one of the most shopworn arguments against it and one I
| come across nearly every day.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I've never heard the term in the media. I guess a lot of
| people are reaching the same conclusion.
| xwolfi wrote:
| But to be fair, while it was a cheap wild west pioneer
| experience for us, it's also because we were drawn to this in
| the first place. Once it become cheap and accessible enough for
| most people, it turned into the utilitarian network it is
| today.
|
| I mean, there was frankly no other way forward. Our kids will
| either be drawn to the next frontier, or wont be bothered like
| MOST KIDS when we grew up :D
| firekvz wrote:
| It's just nostalgia
|
| You could say that you 'miss the old _____' and apply it to
| almost everything in life and you will feel nostalgia for it,
| even to the point of looking for a way to get back to it and once
| you are trying it, you become meh and get back to the new thing,
| as you realize that it changed for good
|
| This happens repetitively to me and my friends with
| tech/videogames, we are randomly chatting about how good it was
| some game (i.e) and we decide to try it again, some 20 minutes
| into it we are already pretending we are having fun when in
| reality we are bored/hating it
|
| We might miss litle things, but it's quite hard to actually give
| a good reason to get back to something 'old' besides just
| nostalgia
| Lapsa wrote:
| +1 for zombo com. you can do anything on zombo com!
| kh_hk wrote:
| counterculture is ephemeral
| fnord77 wrote:
| the old internet still exists here and there.
| marban wrote:
| Blame the gatekeepers and the users who made them, not the Web.
|
| Only using FB or TW for content discovery is just the equivalent
| of starting a browsing session via Yahoo's catalogue -- It's just
| that the ratio of lazy people using the Web has outgrown those
| who still take the effort of finding the nuggets. At the same
| time, it has become too easy to publish fluffy spur of the moment
| content and people craving for upvotes over meaningful
| discussion. I'm not against giving anyone a voice or leaving it
| only to the tech-savvy, but I can't say that zero-effort
| publishing has contributed to the perceived quality and original
| idea of the Web.
|
| Do I miss the old Web? Yes, but only as much as I miss analogue
| photography. It's nice to get into that reminiscent mood while
| flicking through old screenshots made up of spacer gifs, but as I
| watch the world go by on four screens at a time while ordering
| groceries on the fifth and paying with my fingerprint, it's kinda
| nice to see how far we've come.
| goto11 wrote:
| Nostalgia never changes. In 20 years todays kids we will be
| lamenting how everything was better, more fresh, more fun and
| more innocent back in the 2020's.
| Sleepytime wrote:
| Based on the direction the web is going, it might continue to
| be true. Easily 90% of the bandwidth a typical webpage uses is
| trackers, battery/CPU drains, and assorted worthless fluff when
| some text and a few pictures would suffice just fine in the
| majority of cases.
| thom wrote:
| I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were
| 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various
| things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as
| far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in
| chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my
| future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about
| any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it.
|
| I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have
| 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical
| because _I_ was a blank slate. Every new friendship was
| thrilling, every new skill opened up infinite horizons, every
| nook and cranny felt like somewhere I could belong. But life
| moves on. I'm more than half-way through my career, perhaps not
| the one I was expecting. I didn't marry the girl I met on IRC. I
| don't have strong opinions about Radiohead anymore. I find
| people, however delightful and kooky they are, quite tiring
| having got to know 10,000 of them at this point.
|
| I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and
| find their place in it with all the joy I used to. And I'm pretty
| sure older generations frowning upon it all is part of the rush
| anyway.
| foobarian wrote:
| The thing that's even easier to forget is that back then, a
| much smaller fraction of people were online and thus we had a
| very special self-selected group. Going on the Internet
| basically guaranteed you'd find someone interesting. Then the
| commercialization happened (Al Gore remember?), AOL hordes came
| in, trolls came in, jocks figured out how to use it, and it
| went down the toilet from there.
| jghn wrote:
| It's always September somewhere on the Internet ...
| alerighi wrote:
| To me the main change that internet got is this: the old
| internet was like a parallel universe, you picked up a random
| username, and no matter who you were in real life, you could
| socialize and share interest with other people without any
| prejudice.
|
| This is especially important for introverts like me, that if
| they have to put their real name on something, for example a
| comment on Facebook, they think about it 100 times, while being
| anonymous they are more inclined to share things with
| strangers. You don't have to worry about what people thinks
| about you, or about prejudice that people have based on your
| age, your social life, your job, because nobody knows who you
| really are. The only thing that matters is your contribute to
| the discussion. I still remember discussions that I made with
| people that I only recognize by a username, and they were so
| interesting, much more interesting than everything you can find
| on Facebook.
|
| In the old days you were told to never share your real name on
| the internet, to always pick up usernames, nowadays companies
| forces you to register with your real identity, Facebook can
| even ask you to provide a photo of your ID, and YouTube won't
| let you watch content for over 18 if you don't identity
| yourself. There are even countries that would like to force
| internet companies to ask for the identity of the people!
|
| In the old days internet was a place where an introvert that
| didn't know how to relate with other people in real life could
| have escaped to share it's interests with other people freely
| and without any anxiety. Nowadays it's no longer like this,
| unfortunately. Forums are desert, nobody still uses IRC, and
| everything is a Facebook group or something like that on a
| social media platform where I don't want to sign up. Even
| websites in the old days had comment sections, nowadays you
| want to comment? Do it on Facebook. There are only a few
| exception of course (one of this is this website, that I like a
| lot for exactly this reason).
|
| The only website that still maintains the old web philosophy,
| and the only social media that I use, is Reddit, that still
| doesn't require you to register with your real identity. But I
| fear that it will not last for long...
|
| Also in the old internet there was a spirit of collaboration
| and community that I never saw in the modern web. You were a
| newbie in something, for example using Linux? Sign up to a
| forum, or ask on IRC, and people would have helped you, helped
| solving the problem, for free, only for the gratification on
| doing so. And most of the time even the person helping you to
| solve the problem learned something new in the process! It was
| fun for everyone. Nowadays even on the few forum that remained,
| go and ask a newbie question, and they will tell you "just
| search on Google", make fun of your ignorance, or something
| like that.
| novok wrote:
| Old internet had a bit RTFM and show your work to solve this
| before asking questions culture too. And were pretty
| curmudgeony back in the 90s on irc. Tbh its reasonable to ask
| people to bother to search for a minute before askinf
| questions, and if you tell people i tried searching with this
| before asking, they're a lot more friendly.
|
| That sense of community is there with discord, you gotta use
| that.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| To paraphrase what an old boss said "they just happened to make
| the best music when I was the most emotionally vulnerable".
| Black101 wrote:
| This younger generation would be happy with an Internet that
| would constantly stream video content that they have ANY
| control over (AKA TV) ... that doesn't mean that it is
| better... WTF am I reading...
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I don't think I've seen a more succinct display of this as in
| The Daily Show, when Jon Stewart was lambasting Sean Hannity.
|
| "You know why America was so great to you when you were 12?
| BECAUSE YOU WERE 12!"
| erikbye wrote:
| Yeah.. this younger generation you speak of will at some point
| lament about Discord or Snap with the same nostalgia. Maybe.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Won't be long. Discord is in talks to be sold. I can see it
| becoming as scummy and invasive as LinkedIn or Facebook
| depending who buys it
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-talks-buy-
| discord-m...
| Apocryphon wrote:
| They already do so for Vine.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uxJd7aoFM4
| derefr wrote:
| > I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and
| find their place in it with all the joy I used to.
|
| Yup. "Today's IRC" -- the place for kids to idle around and
| make friends -- isn't Discord; it's Minecraft. (Not that weird;
| Minecraft is a low-stakes graphical MUD, and MUDs have always
| served double-purpose as chatrooms.)
|
| And "today's GeoCities pages" -- shrines for an individual's
| personality, beliefs, and curated tastes -- are now sprawling
| multimedia affairs split between a Twitch/YouTube streaming
| channel for community-engaged events; an Instagram/Snapchat for
| live stories/high-engagement lifelogging; a Discord/subreddit
| for async community engagement; and a Wordpress/Tumblr site
| with a comissioned custom theme to hold evergreen reference
| stuff, longform supplemental materials for videos, etc. (And
| maybe a Squarespace/Shopify/Redbubble store, too, if there's
| anything to sell; or a Bandcamp/Patreon, if the published
| online material is itself the thing to be sold.)
|
| (Tangent: the number of different pieces of "heavy
| infrastructure" Internet plumbing required to make the modern
| approach to a "shrine of personality" work, should be a hint as
| to why people don't just make plain websites any more. They
| want to _interact_ more with their audiences /fans/communities,
| and with higher fidelity, than a plain website / comments
| section / forum can offer; even more than a heavily-built-up
| Sandstorm.io instance could offer.)
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| This crystallized for me during a discussion about which
| websites people missed, when someone said "I would say
| Purevolume but there's nothing that it did that SoundCloud or
| Bandcamp don't do just as well". I realized that it's not the
| _websites_ I'm nostalgic about -- it's the people, the culture
| and my younger self.
| timmytokyo wrote:
| Nostalgia is not really about the places and things you're
| reminiscing about; it's more about remembering the positive
| way you felt when you experienced those places and things in
| the past. We miss those feelings and want to recapture them
| in some way, but we can't. That's why nostalgia is painful in
| a strange, indescribable way.
| cloverich wrote:
| Firstly I strongly agree with everything you said and also just
| wanted to say this was a very eloquent description that i hope
| i remember a year from now.
|
| I wanted to suggest a kind of alternative for discussion. I
| think there was something magical about the early web in that
| it offered a new way of interacting with the world that did not
| previously exist. It was difficult or impossible to find people
| that shared my interests (etc) before it, and usually that
| meant to just kept a large part of myself internal. I agree we
| have also changed, and there's nostalgia involved, and that the
| internet does exist still the way we remember and even ion more
| ways we don't appreciate but our kids will.
|
| However i think there is also a bit of frustration that that
| initial burst of excitement did not continue to develop. When i
| read on HN and realize just how many people there are like me,
| or that there's people that are also way too into disc golf,
| acoustic guitar, or any other semi niche activity i wonder why
| it is so hard to make more regular connections and interactions
| with them. Posting semi anonymously to HN with people i may
| never speak with again is a HUGE improvement over life before
| it, but it's still a very limited experience. With facebook and
| reddit we have imho suboptimal platforms that have captured
| much of this magic and perhaps stunned their growth. I don't
| mean to be pessimistic and the current internet is absolutely
| improved on uncountable ways from the one we remember. I
| suspect a bit of the frustration is some people's inner belief
| that we could have something even better and somehow we are
| stuck.
| jl6 wrote:
| You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic
| universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that
| we were winning...
|
| And that, I think, was the handle-- that sense of inevitable
| victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or
| military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply
| prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or
| theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of
| a high and beautiful wave...
|
| So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep
| hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of
| eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--that place where
| the wave finally broke and rolled back.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas by Hunter S Thompson, for
| anyone not familiar with the quote
| JasonFruit wrote:
| > When i read on HN and realize just how many people there
| are like me, or that there's people that are also way too
| into disc golf, acoustic guitar, or any other semi niche
| activity i wonder why it is so hard to make more regular
| connections and interactions with them.
|
| That hit me in the truth. I feel like that a lot: if I know
| these people exist, and care deeply about the things I care
| about, why am I not building lasting friendships with them?
|
| And then I realize that it's not a flaw in the medium but in
| myself. I lack the confidence and determination to go form
| those connections. I could write to any of those people and
| say, hey, I'm coming through Cincinnati, and would love to
| see your project/talk with you over coffee about your
| research/drink beer and yell about liberty. But I don't, and
| that isn't the internet's fault.
| ip26 wrote:
| I've found shared interest has actually been a very bad
| predictor of whether I'll enjoy spending more than five
| minutes around somebody IRL.
|
| _isn 't the internet's fault_
|
| An argument could be made on a tinder-ization of
| intellectual discussion. That is, it's so easy to move on
| to the next stimulating discussion online that you are less
| willing to invest in chancy RL interaction.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| That is probably true. Maybe "lasting friendships" was
| not exactly what I meant, anyway; maybe "sustained
| interactions" would be more like it. I think about the
| way people in the past, like the Wright brothers with
| Octave Chanute, Jefferson and Madison, Johannes Brahms
| and Clara Schumann, corresponded over decades, bouncing
| ideas off each other and honing their arguments,
| encouraging each other and keeping each other grounded in
| reality, and I don't know if that happens to the same
| extent today, even though it would be far easier and
| faster. Maybe I'm generalizing from outstanding examples
| in the past, and it never happened on a broad scale, but
| I'm inclined to think it did, and we're the weaker for
| not carrying it on.
| jghn wrote:
| > why am I not building lasting friendships with them?
|
| I remember arguing with a high school teacher that 50 years
| in the future countries as we knew them would no longer
| exist. People would cluster online based on shared
| interests and goals.
|
| That was 30 years ago. I'm gonna go out on a limb and
| suggest it ain't happening the way I thought it would.
| barrkel wrote:
| Maybe not, but the people are still clustering, and
| reality has a crack: different groups of people have
| disjoint mutually inconsistent but internally consistent
| narratives about events in the world, generated and
| sustained by their online clustering.
| adventured wrote:
| > why am I not building lasting friendships with them?
|
| I find the biggest problem is the lack of time to dedicate
| to it. Specifically, in my order of priorities it comes in
| behind a lot of other more important things that I don't
| have enough time for as it is.
|
| I've noticed this has become a far more important equation
| with age, how I allocate time. When I was ~16-24 years old
| I burned up enormous amounts of time doing stupid shit.
| Time seemed inexpensive, plentiful, unlimited. And of
| course typically when you're young you have fewer
| responsibilities anyway. Now I'm far more certain about
| what matters and what doesn't in terms of ordering how I
| burn up what remains of my lifetime. As you get older you
| learn all of this, you learn what matters for yourself, and
| properly you allocate time accordingly.
|
| Sometimes I think I'm getting grumpier as I get older, but
| it's not actually that at all. I dislike doing things I
| don't want to do more as I've gotten older, because I've
| acquired a far greater understanding of the value of time.
| How fast it seems to zip by, how scarce it is, how little
| of it we get relatively speaking. Stupid things that rob me
| of time, are a far greater annoyance with that
| understanding, that appreciation. When you're young, you
| can think you understand the value of your time; when
| you're older, you feel it in your bones, you walk around
| wearing the expense of time across decades.
|
| Watching time vanish when you're 18, you don't think much
| about it. Time is infinite as far as you're concerned.
| Watching time vanish when you're 40 gets a lot more
| concerning. You become very aware of how quickly a decade
| seems to slip by. Blink, a decade goes by, you're 50;
| blink, blink, you're dead.
|
| Your body also starts to deteriorate in accelerating
| fashion after anywhere from your mid 30s to your mid 40s,
| depending. You begin to notice that at 40 as well. Your
| memory isn't as sharp as it was at 20. You don't recover
| from damage as quickly. The physical aspect just reminds
| you that much more of the clock and how you're allocating
| your time. You can hear the little rusting springs in your
| telomeres as they keep getting shorter.
|
| Chat rooms don't matter so much when you're 40 and you've
| spent a collective year or two of your earlier life hanging
| out in chat rooms (webchat broadcasting system, IRC et
| al.), bullshitting with people. You've got N years
| remaining to do things that really, really matter to you,
| and then you're going to die. And you're going to be dead
| forever. More chat rooms, to chat about things that you've
| chatted about 497 times in the past? No. Fuck no. On to the
| next, something more valuable, something more interesting,
| a new experience perhaps.
|
| I too mentally miss the good 'ol days of being 18 and
| hanging out on IRC chatting about things that seemed super
| fascinating to me at the time. It's one part fantasy, one
| part longing to be young again, to feel young again (it's
| the reversal of the experience dulling concept of
| repetition, that people long for; every time you do
| something, it fades, exactly the same way many drugs do;
| repetitive experiences fade in the same way; we long toward
| the past in part due to that sensation of everything being
| vigorously new, exactly as drug addicts always miss the
| early addiction when the high was far better, before
| repetition eroded it).
|
| We long for the early Internet / Web, because we've done so
| much Internet'ing, and every time you do it, it fades. It's
| not the old Internet that people actually miss. The problem
| is the experience repetition dulling everything, and that
| can't be rolled back; people miss the glorious experience
| of a new big world to explore online for the first time,
| that excitement. You can tell that that's the case, because
| people half my age experience the same sensation of missing
| what to them is the 'old' Internet (eg when they first
| started hanging out on Minecraft socializing online, or
| similar). Same concept, same longing, different Interwebs,
| same dulling over time due to experience repetition. Young
| people today will be longing for the exciting early days of
| TikTok, when they were doing dumb dance clones and it was
| stupid and silly and they'll miss the hell out of it,
| because it was all so new to them; like I might have missed
| hanging out on ICQ in its early days. And when those young
| people are 40, they'll still be able to go online and
| create short videos of themselves doing dumb dances, but
| they won't really want to, the repetitive experience effect
| will have dulled it all, it will no longer be new and
| exciting, and that can't be fixed, the life experience
| queue moves in one direction.
|
| If you're fortunate, you get to decide what the meaning,
| the purpose, of your life is. The purpose of my life will
| always be to seek out new experiences, pursue new things
| that I find interesting. And that means not burning much
| more of my life in chat rooms, I already did plenty of
| that.
| mattkrause wrote:
| I am much the same way....but it would also make my day if
| someone reached out like that. Go for it! (I should too!)
| scruffyherder wrote:
| I used to do it a lot, it was great. So many people I've
| met IRL just as I had a perfect job where I was always
| going to random places.
|
| The first time it was weird, I was going to meet this girl
| on irc about some forum drama, and it felt even more silly
| telling customs. But we had a fun night and I realised that
| people have weird fringe interests and that there is
| literally dozens of us.
|
| It's never too late
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Almost every blog I used to read 10-15 years ago has
| transitioned from a hobby to a form of content marketing or
| self-branding social media get-followers game. In that sense, a
| lot of the magic has disappeared. Maybe new people have taken
| their place and I just haven't found them yet
| trey-jones wrote:
| As far as I'm concerned it has nothing to do with joy. The
| internet enables a lot of things that _can_ improve human
| knowledge and prowess. It also enables the opposite. This has
| always been the case, but I think the hindrances are
| progressing faster than the helpers.
|
| Here are a couple of the best things that I think the internet
| provides, both of which have been around basically since its
| inception:
|
| 1. Instant communication ie. email and instant messaging
|
| 2. Free sharing of knowledge ie. scholarly articles, and yes,
| Wikipedia
|
| If you have an Android phone and have ever used the Google news
| feed (from AMP), then you've seen what I think are the worst
| parts of the internet today. As far as I know it's grown more
| and more prolific over the years:
|
| I'm talking about content that's created solely as a vehicle
| for advertising. It's either speculation (which may provide
| some value) or simply "reporting" on information that has
| changed hands many times. In other words, while the original
| source might be available on the internet, you will never find
| it because it's been re-reported by ten thousand other sources
| that all want a slice of the ad revenue.
|
| Proliferation of misinformation, both accidental and
| intentional, goes along with the above, though there are other
| opportunities for this as well (like social media).
|
| There are countless pros and cons that I don't even know about
| of come in contact with, but I would agree on the whole with
| the idea that the internet is a poorer tool for good than it
| was, at least 15 years ago, and probably 20 as well.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| That free sharing of knowledge more or less destroyed the
| music industry, and commoditized many other things too. It's
| extremely hard to make a living wage at many things now. We
| have a fake gig economy to replace middle class jobs
| deeg wrote:
| I'm totally with you. Most of these lamentations are not people
| missing the old internet but their old selves, when everything
| was new and exciting. The OP rues the loss of Geocities but
| most of those sites were terrible and hard to read.
| hootbootscoot wrote:
| I disagree. I miss Geocities, and, more recently, Myspace.
| Both let YOU, the user, customize and design your "home".
|
| So what if it was hard to read with 20 blinking GIFs and an
| autoplaying music player, it was YOURS.
|
| The worst things about Facecrook are not it's monopoly, ok
| that's the worst, but I rather dislike that blue boring nav
| bar, 5000 friend limits (their graph DB can only handle that
| many or what's the bottleneck? cheap bustards!) and the
| generally lame mainstream design of the whole building. Like,
| who approved "pokes"? Even Friendster was hipper than
| Facehooked.
| Black101 wrote:
| > I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and
| find their place in it with all the joy I used to.
|
| I might as well say that I know that this isn't true because
| they don't know what the Internet could be... all they know is
| the centralized cloud.
| mycologos wrote:
| You _know_ this? As far as I can tell, it 's still possible
| to find weird little sub-sub-sub-culture groups on the
| internet if you actually want to, and curious kids can do it.
| Maybe most kids aren't, but I don't think there was ever a
| time when most kids were exploring the full possibilities of
| the internet either. Put another way, maybe the fraction of
| internet-using kids doing stuff we'd think is cool was higher
| back in the day, but I think the fraction of kids in general
| doing stuff we'd think is cooler is higher now.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| You used to be able to find high quality information, by people
| who loved the topic. Now the top search results are SEO
| commercial sites; the old sites are gone or filled with ads;
| and the new sites... there aren't any new sites like this.
| Maybe stackexchanges are the closest (recently sold).
| maccard wrote:
| I've seen this sentiment more and more over the last few
| years here (and on Reddit). Can you give an example of some
| high quality content that loses out to SEO clickbait at the
| moment? As far as I can see, a "correctly" crafted query
| (read: the querymy parents would ask, not the query I would
| ask) will lead me to a well thought out response on Google
| 9/10 times, which is judtas often as it did 10 years ago.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| I have some first-hand experience with this problem. I'll
| give a specific example:
|
| In 2005 I published one of the Internet's earliest articles
| on the "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon"[1], also known as
| Frequency Illusion. In the intervening 15 years, thousands
| of sites have linked to my article, so you would think it
| would rank really well.
|
| Instead, my article is barely on the first page of Google's
| search results. Above mine are more recent copycat
| articles, few of them containing any meaningful details
| beyond what I included in mine. Some of them are so similar
| that they are clearly just lazy rewrites of my article
| (similar jokes, etc). They appear to be ranked higher than
| mine solely due to being more recent, and presumably some
| SEO shenanigans.
|
| This is not the only example--far from it--but it's one of
| the clearest.
|
| [1]: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-
| phenomeno...
| maccard wrote:
| Thanks for replying! There's clearly some "google-
| washing" going on here, as searching for "baader meinhof
| phenomenon" on google places the Damn interesting article
| 5th in my search results. The other results above that
| may not have huge differences, but they do offer at least
| the same information on "more reputable" (read: names
| that I recognize in 2021) websites which would likely
| Garner a click from Mr..
| andyfleming wrote:
| The landscape has changed, but that doesn't mean there isn't
| high quality content available anymore. For example, a lot of
| content is on YouTube. That may or may not be someone's
| preferred medium to consume, but there's definitely good and
| niche content.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| It's weird that YouTube and Google is now synonymous with
| "the internet."
| keithnz wrote:
| I think a lot of expert content is now mostly video
| content. A lot of the time I'm finding I'm just typing
| things into youtube rather than google if I'm after some
| kind of expertise.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| People still make good websites. You just can't find them
| with Google (unless you're writing keywords to search for the
| exact site).
| christophilus wrote:
| Search engines were pretty crappy when I first used the
| internet in the 90s. I'm not even sure that we had search
| engines, actually. Anyway, crappy search results were par for
| the course. The interesting content required some work to
| find. I think it's still the same. There's more content than
| ever, and a huge % is crap. Maybe that % is larger today then
| when we started, but there's still a trove of good stuff out
| there. Way more, in absolute terms, than when I started.
|
| I'm thankful for the internet and the career it's given me.
| There's plenty of room for improvement, but all the same,
| it's pretty great.
| jiofih wrote:
| > I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could
| talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling
| novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and
| get into an exhilarating flamewar about it.
|
| But where? The venues where that happened are gone. You can
| have a public discussion with 100.000 eyeballs, but not the
| kind of more intimate, local environment that were earlier
| boards and chat rooms.
| v_london wrote:
| Hey, I'm currently building a website that I think would fit
| well with what you're looking for. It's called Reason, and
| it's designed to help find small (3-10 users per chat or so)
| group chats about the topics you're interested in. I started
| working on this specifically because the casual, small places
| to meet like-minded people on the internet have kind of
| disappeared. http://www.reason.so/
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Discord servers seem to be the place where it is happening
| right now. There are still some community forums, and maybe
| Facebook groups. On a more public scale, there are some well
| managed subreddits.
|
| Edit: Plus the oldschool, geeky stuff like BBS, usenet,
| mailing lists, IRC etc... that still exist but are usually
| limited to technical people and subjects.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| BBS forums are still in abundance. Many of them seem
| relatively clunkier now and are niche, but they exist. And
| they all end up starting Discord servers.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I completely agree. A lot of times I'll see people dig up old
| stuff from Something Awful forums or whatever and... honestly
| it's not as funny as I remember. It's just as lame and stupid
| as what people are passing around today.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Have you ever lurked wallstreetbets? It seems (or seemed,
| before the Gamestop stuff brought many new people in) like a
| sorting function for the now-older SA/4chan demographic, and
| they're the most consistently hilarious people I've ever seen
| on the Internet (still toxic af, of course, but less-so than
| in the old days, like tastefully mellowed with age).
| emodendroket wrote:
| Not for me but I probably would have liked it when I was
| younger.
| jasode wrote:
| _> I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we
| were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about
| various things in the world changing and becoming less magical.
| But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and [...] I don't
| want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3
| kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical
| because _I_ was a blank slate._
|
| Thank you for writing that. I also expressed the same sentiment
| a few months ago about getting older distorting my perception
| of tech's evolution:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897792
| scruffyherder wrote:
| Time scales too. Remember how long the death March to Chicago
| was? It was 1993 and NT had finally shipped, Linux was
| slightly useful and this was OS/2's era to shine as Microsoft
| had stagnated with no consumer releases of any meaning post
| Windows 3.1. 1993 finished, and 1994 came and went as well.
| IBM pushed out Warp as this was their chance to arrive early,
| and then it was late summer of 1995 that Chicago finally
| shipped.
|
| Now look at the window of the MacPro 2013 to 2020. And it
| felt like nothing. How long has Windows 10 been a thing?
| Feels like only yesterday we finally moved all production off
| of Linux 2.6
|
| Time really telescopes
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| I can't tell if this is a "getting older" thing or a "I got
| used to marking time with exponential growth in tech and
| tech-adjacent culture" thing.
|
| 2000 to 2010 felt like a huge jump, and it was -- you had
| the explosion of broadband, enabling huge MMOs like WoW
| which was a life-absorbing phenomenon for me, and computers
| and GPUs went from scrawny, green-board things to beefy,
| pro-sumer luxuries blazing with LEDs. Fat client IMs and
| social media redefined how we connected to people online.
|
| Compared to that, 2010 to 2020 feels like an inertial
| flatline. We dropped Skype for Discord, which is the best
| IM since WLM (yet still inferior in many ways lol), GPUs
| have gotten beefier since they're purely parallel compute
| machines (and yet nearly 70% of people still have a 1080p
| display according to the Steam Hardware Survey[0], a
| resolution that was readily available on LCDs 13 years
| ago!). Motherboards have more LEDs than before, and look
| more and more like exotic alien space cities, which is
| awesome. SSDs have gotten... slightly bigger. Ray tracing
| and VR, which seem like the only major innovations of the
| decade, are both _kind of_ here, but only kind of, and not
| enough for a WoW equivalent or genre to capitalize on. The
| games we play or their graphics haven 't changed
| significantly. I started using Linux and learned
| exponentially more about tech than in the prior decade, and
| I now play those samey games on an open source OS, and
| that's cool. :p Crypto came, and a lot of security lessons
| have been learned in the tech world. That's nice. But it
| feels like bacteria filling out the blank spots of a petri
| dish that's stopped expanding.
|
| 0: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
| bsder wrote:
| Telecom monopolies are to blame for the flat line in tech
| from 2010-2020.
|
| Computer advances follow network bandwidth increases.
| Network upload bandwidth has been stagnant for almost 20
| years.
|
| Give everybody symmetrical gigabit and watch the sparks
| fly.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| It's a bit of a downer response. I think there's plenty to get
| excited about on the internet still, and I'm in my 30s. You
| don't have to accept boredom/apathy as a consequence of aging,
| although the catalysts will change. I don't expect an adult to
| scream with jubilation about toy trains.
| thom wrote:
| That's not really what I was trying to say, but perhaps I've
| still not mastered the medium after all these years, eh? I
| founded a company with people I met on Twitter who were all
| doing the same hobby, scraping data from the web and trying
| to make meaning out of it. The company started as a blog
| (remember those!) So yes, still excited by the Internet. But
| I'm not going to beat myself up (nor the youth of today)
| trying to recapture the feeling of the 90s web through the
| eyes of a teenage me, because I think that's impossible.
| FireInsight wrote:
| It is still possible to find great communities outside of the
| corporate monopolies and fun websites, you just have to dig and
| spend time on the internet. Sometimes it is hard to escape your
| bubble of watch-time-increasing or addiction-inducing algorithms
| of giant ad-filled sites. Some sites cause addiction due to
| community and some due to algorithm.
| scrutinizer80 wrote:
| There's a search engine that indexes only traditional HTML based
| websites at: https://wiby.me
| every wrote:
| I had been in DOS for almost a decade when I got my first (dial-
| up) unix shell. I had been using ported unix utilities (MKS
| Toolkit) for some time so it was somewhat less painful than being
| thrown into the deep end. Now I have a terminal Debian container
| on my Chromebook and can wax nostalgic whenever I wish. And no, I
| do not conflate the internet with the web...
| superkuh wrote:
| There are two mutually exclusive views of the web. As a set of
| protocols set to allow individual humans to share information
| about things they love and the web as a set of protocols to make
| a living.
|
| Profit motivated web presences want views, they want attention,
| they need nine 9s uptime, need to be able to do monetary
| transactions absolutely securely, and they want to be an
| application not a document. They live and die on the eternal wave
| of walled garden's recommendation engines because that's the
| network effect and that's where money flows. It doesn't matter if
| this means extremely high barriers to entry because money solves
| everything.
|
| Individuals' websites are freeform presentations about the things
| that person is interested in. They are the backyard gardens of
| the mind and the most important thing is lowering the friction
| from thought to posting. There's no need to get tons of traffic
| instantly (or ever), they're mostly time insensitive.
|
| The old web (and other protocols) still exist but they're much
| harder to find because they are not constantly updated. The time
| sensitive search engines deprioritize the static sites or even
| drop them after a handful of years.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| From the thread:
|
| > If you've never had to configure a sendmail.conf you've had it
| easy.
|
| Been there, done that. Even with the usual .mc files and m4, once
| I had to dive deep into the rabbit hole of sendmail.conf to
| figure out what was going wrong.
|
| Nowadays, I just use Postfix. :)
| superasn wrote:
| Is there a term for when people reminisce something and think
| those were the days at the same time think everything
| contemporary has gone to the dogs?
|
| Like my uncle who is an old car enthusiast who thinks ambassador
| was the greatest car ever made in India yet if you are really
| objective about it was truly a bad car (wrt milege, comfort,
| safety, design, etc).
|
| I feel the same reading the comments here. Really don't miss
| anything about the old internet, especially the era of VSNL which
| was a downtime provider with some internet in between. Everything
| is much more amazing now. Want to learn anything from programming
| to chemistry there are hundreds of freely "animated" tutorials.
| God how easy my studies would be with the wealth of easy instant
| knowledge we have now. Add to that the amount of crazy content
| created everyday for every niche, it is just amazing (you just
| need to know where to look).
|
| E.g. I just found out about two channels recently called Captain
| disillusionment and Great scott on youtube and I've learned so
| much about two really different things, things which I didn't
| even know I was even interested in.
| jeliotj wrote:
| "Romantic", as a noun for a person who has an idealized view of
| reality, especially one that has passed.
| uncertainrhymes wrote:
| Old.
|
| I kid, but it does seem a function of age. I've always seen a
| dividing line between people whose fondest memories are in the
| past, versus how much they look forward to making new memories.
|
| I am right in the middle right now, and trying not to let it
| swing too far into curmudgeonness.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I'm in my late 40s and already feel that curmudgeon voice in
| my head. Ignoring it is harder and harder every year. New
| Internet sucks because it's too commercialized. New software
| sucks because it's all cloud based rather than native. New
| cars suck because you can't wrench them. New music sucks
| because everything sounds the same. New movies suck because
| they are made for people with a 5s attention span. Everything
| else sucks because it's more expensive than I remember. It
| feels truer and truer every year.
|
| My newest car is late 2000's and that's also around when I
| stopped subscribing to new stuff and adding new things to my
| home media library. I look at my parents who are kind of
| culturally stuck in the 60s-70s, and then see myself getting
| more and more stuck in 90s-00s. Happens to us all I guess.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| There is a term, it's called memberberries:
|
| https://youtu.be/OJoQJKTc3nM
| nix23 wrote:
| Hop over to
|
| https://neocities.org/
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| Its still there, its just buried under all the other crap.
|
| As more and more people generate content, more and more bullshit
| exists. Unfortunately, Google etc. - despite all their big
| announcements - can obviously not keep up filtering out that
| bullshit. We drown in bullshit.
|
| Where's the semantic web that was promised? I wonder if we're
| still paying for the mistakes that were made with the whole XML
| stuff ...?
| torh wrote:
| I have been playing with the idea of making good old internet
| portal. A curated list of links to the good stuff. No FB,
| medium, Instagram or anything like that.
| bufordtwain wrote:
| I had the same idea, I think this is the ultimate solution.
| Would need to be easy to add links and allow moderators to
| approve submitted websites and provide a good search
| capability. Would only include quirky websites.
| vkk8 wrote:
| Additional properties it should have:
|
| * Basic HTML only, no Javascript
|
| * No user interaction (comments, etc.)
|
| * Gets updated occasionally but not all the time, perhaps a
| few times a year
| torh wrote:
| Yeah, I was thinking static html pages generated once per
| day or once per week from a database, depending on how
| often the backend is updated.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Wiby.me and oldinter.net are both good starting points
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| So who takes on the full-time job of curation? Could probably
| get donations eventually, but the portal would have to
| sufficiently succeed first.
| torh wrote:
| Yeah, that would be the hard part. But in the spirit of the
| old internet, make it first and then, if it becomes
| popular, deal with it.
|
| Just have to read up on the history of Yahoo and watch that
| last season of Halt & Catch Fire. ;-)
| MentallyRetired wrote:
| Wiki? With a double approval before the edit happens?
| robjan wrote:
| Just bring back DMOZ, it was by no means perfect but was
| a great curated directory of the old internet despite
| SEOs always trying to spam it. Apparently Curlie is
| trying this but I haven't really looked much into it:
| https://curlie.org/en
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Portals are still sometimes made to make it easier to
| discover independent content, you aren't the only one
| concerned about this. However, the problem is that
| independent creators often stop paying for hosting or domain
| registration at some point, so any manually created directory
| eventually abounds with 404s.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| What about a curated directory of archive links to decrease
| the rate of link rot?
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| I would suspect that even fans of independent content
| would be turned off by browsing through a large amount of
| Wayback Machine links, because Archive.org insert their
| own markup, and often the images in posts don't get
| archived.
|
| People like using the Wayback Machine when they know that
| certain content used to exist, but not necessarily to
| discover new things unfamiliar to them.
| Sleepytime wrote:
| IPFS mirroring would probably be ideal for simple
| websites like this.
| titzer wrote:
| > Google etc... can obviously not keep up filtering out that
| bullshit. We drown in bullshit.
|
| It's worse than that. They are _shoveling_ bullshit. They
| turned on the bullshit magnet and lit up the bullshit bat
| signal. They created a bullshit attention economy and sold
| bullshit tickets to bullshit artists. Literally everthing about
| Google and Facebook is creating one opportunity after another
| to jab you in the eyeballs with ads and /or trap you in a
| never-ending cycle of "engagement" that has few paths out. It's
| a trap to monetize every aspect of your interactions with the
| digital world, to monetize your very attention span. Once you
| are in, you are at the mercy of a metric assload of computation
| designed to trap your little rat ass so your eyeballs can be
| strapped open and ads sold to the highest bidder piped right
| into your brain. And there are basically zero financial
| incentives for them to stop or slow down.
| BruceEel wrote:
| well put...
| imiric wrote:
| Sheesh, and I thought I was jaded :)
|
| You're right, it's just not that apocalyptic. I think we
| should be worried, yes, but this can be mitigated with
| stricter regulation and better public education. And of
| course engineers choosing to work for respectable companies
| instead of following the digits on their paychecks.
| j_wtf_all_taken wrote:
| Yeah, bullshitting was always the easiest way to get people's
| attention. Specifically if the bullshitters believe their own
| bullshit, I mean, they're sooooo confident in what they're
| saying, the gotta be right, right?
|
| Just seems like a human weakness, always believe the person
| that appears the most confident, no matter what they say. And
| a bullshitter will say anything that people like because they
| need positive feedback because they're so convinced that what
| they have to say is pure greatness, and they don't even
| realize that they just always say whatever gets the most
| applause. And man, these people are good in that specific
| respect (and literally nothing else). They perfected their
| bullshit to a degree that its really really hard to see
| through it, at least it will take time. And then the next
| bullshitter comes along and one's fooled again because fuck
| they're good.
|
| And yeah now we got a system called social media putting
| those people on steroids. Its not like that didn't happen
| every time we invented a new way of communicating. But every
| fucking time we believe this time it's different and people
| are better now and all that shit won't happen.
|
| And of course then you get in a competition between those
| bullshitters, so they have to turn the heat up more and more
| to beat their fellow bullshitters. And what gets the most
| heat? Well, hate and fear and division and polarization of
| course. And now we are where we are and have to deal with
| fucking QAnon bullshit.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The bullshit asymmetry therom predicted this. Filtering
| bullshit is so hard it's easier making money selling it
| yourself.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| But this also means there is a need to filter bs that can
| be addressed.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Hence the problem. Spam for example has ruined email to
| the point that only a few large providers control the
| majority of email flows, if you make them mad, you cant
| send email. Same thing happening with content.
| vkk8 wrote:
| The beauty of the old internet was that there was no need for
| filtering, because it was done by the users by choosing which
| platforms to participate. Instead of many fragmented, special
| interest platforms we now have a few generic mega-platforms
| like Facebook and Reddit, which naturally get filled with
| garbage. In the old web, a place for discussion would have been
| a small special interest discussion forum with perhaps around a
| hundred active participants and a few hundred less active ones.
| The outsiders (i.e. the people who would post garbage) did not
| participate in the discussion because there was some threshold
| of participation (finding the website, registering, etc.).
| Instead they would have their own forum somewhere else with
| similar dynamics.
|
| I think it's very natural for people to divide into communities
| of tens or, at most, hundreds of people. The modern web
| platforms don't respect this at all.
| ravenstine wrote:
| If you miss the old internet, then don't be two-faced and support
| big corporations that centralize it and act as ministries of
| truth. That's not what the old internet was about.
| cdrini wrote:
| I think the big change, which the author hints to at the end, is
| one of scale. It's not that the cool kids joined the internet;
| it's that absolutely everyone did. The internet went from being a
| small town of people, to a city of people in the ~90s, to a world
| of people in ~2010s. The internet can no longer contain a single
| culture; it's too big. It will always from now on be acultural,
| since there are simply too many people using it for too many
| reasons.
|
| As result, you now need micro-internets to have a culture. An
| example of one was YouTube near when it started. And you see the
| same issue repeated there as YouTube grew from a city to a world
| itself. There was a lot of controversy around the YouTube year in
| review videos YouTube released in recent years, because everyone
| felt misrepresented. That's because YouTube now contained too
| many cultures to represent in one video. It, like the internet,
| no longer contains a culture because there are too many people
| using it for too many reasons.
|
| Let's look at cars as an analogy. When cars were first invented,
| the only people who owned/used cars were enthusiasts. There was a
| barrier of entry (technical knowledge and interest/passion) that
| selected a subset of the population to create a culture. As cars
| became easier to use, that "selective membrane" disappeared, so
| there was no longer a culture associated with car ownership.
| Similarly, as the internet has become easier to use for not
| technical, not passionate people (in part due to websites like
| Google, Facebook, etc.), there is no longer a selective barrier
| separating internet-users from everyone else, and hence there is
| not, and can never again be, an "internet culture".
| hrtk wrote:
| I have never seen the old internet but looking at the remains of
| it, it does appear really interesting. It is sad that the most
| popular search engine throws complete garbage at you when there
| still exist fabulous websites with real content.
| eecc wrote:
| To each it's own Eternal September
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Would there be much interest in a large pubnix system? A high-
| trust social network of a sort, with the big system as a base?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I actually enjoy today's Internet much more. I'll lay out the
| reasons:
|
| 1) Easy access to many high quality contents. For example HN is a
| good platform for accessing new knowledge. Note that I say
| "access", not "learn". Reading HN sometimes give people the false
| impression that they are learning new knowledge, which usually is
| not the case. I treat HN as a platform to get a peek at certain
| new knowledge, but reading books, watching videos and most
| importantly implementing it by myself, IMO, is the only true way
| to learn.
|
| 2) Fast enough to view high quality videos without any delay.
| Again this is related to learning new things. It is also
| important for me because it's one of the few ways that I
| entertain myself.
|
| 3) This might be arguable, but getting knowing a lot of different
| people from different places is a lot fun. People who comes from
| different culture usually have different standard of "good",
| "bad" and other moral judgment and it's fun to read all of those.
| This was doable 20 years ago but far fewer people were online at
| the time.
|
| 4) It's a lot cheaper. 20 years ago only a company can afford
| something faster than 1M (back then I had a 56K Modem I think but
| can't be sure) in my country and it was very expensive even for
| the modems. Nowadays pretty much everyone has access to some high
| speed internet. Even if they cannot afford a computer (which is
| actually a rare case), they have Internet access through mobile
| phones.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I do believe you're conflating high-bandwidth content with
| high-quality content.
| robjan wrote:
| Regarding speaking with lots of cultures, I feel the current
| platforms have bring out the worst in people. Society has been
| completely divided in many places and well developed
| democracies undermined by the current incentives to promote and
| widely disseminate information which provokes strong reactions.
| This has been largely made possible by centralisation and
| consolidation of the internet.
| mrtksn wrote:
| > Easy access to many high quality contents.
|
| On the contrary, I would argue that the content quality is
| drastically lower because of optimisation for revenue and much
| less purer motivations.
|
| The video quality is really much much better though. Original
| video scene is great as the business side of the things is a
| solved problem. Yet again, it suffers from optimisation for
| advertisers as less and less things are kosher.
|
| Oh and the movie scene is terrible IMHO as a whole, despite
| having some amazing movies. Netflix is also optimising and the
| most optimum content for the business of Netflix is often not
| that optimum for many people. Not many tall poppies came out of
| it.
|
| It's funny how a pop singer made a song about our optimised
| happy lives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um7pMggPnug
| mda wrote:
| Completely disagree, there is probably 100x more content now
| compared to 10-15 years ago, sure garbage also increased but
| excellent content is there and internet of today is better
| overall.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I think, the old internet did not have much original
| content and we consumed what was available pre-internet but
| without the scarcity. The original ones were created by
| privileged people in relatively tiny community.
|
| The current internet content is made for the internet. A
| lot of great things were made of course but I think the
| optimisation is diluting it into mediocracy. Every single
| day it gets more and more optimised for revenue or
| influence through time dominance. If you pay for it, it is
| designed to keep you pay for it(not necessarily pay for it
| and consume it but keep paying. Games are mostly freemium
| where you pay if you want to enjoy, movie subscription
| services will pile sh*t in font of you to give you the
| impression of endless content, optimize scenarios for
| retention etc.). If it is free, it is designed to pay by
| proxy(purchase something or give political power to an
| interest group).
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The past internet I remember was one of absolute noise search
| results and big invisible blobs of SEO text. To find
| something, you had to know already where to look.
|
| Go back past the search engines, and most knowledge simply
| wasn't on the internet yet.
| Zak wrote:
| > _On the contrary, I would argue that the content quality is
| drastically lower because of optimisation for revenue and
| much less purer motivations._
|
| I think the signal to noise ratio has decreased, but that
| doesn't mean there's less signal; there's just a lot more
| noise.
| Growling_owl wrote:
| the Internet is now being used by 4 billions people, so it
| basically mimics humanity
|
| Back in the 80s and 90s you were cherry picking the elite
| and the intellectuals, the internet of back then was never
| going to be representative sample of humanity
| karaterobot wrote:
| That's only relevant if the noise gets filtered out. I
| think there's a lot of evidence that our most prevalent
| platforms filter content for how much attention it can
| hold: which is to say, for revenue or less pure
| motivations. This is probably considered "quality" content,
| by some incredibly cynical metric of quality, and maybe the
| adoption of that cynical approach is the underlying change
| that has occurred on the internet in the last twenty years.
| ipython wrote:
| I don't know about the content argument. Yes it's true that
| there is a lot of low quality content out there. And that low
| quality content drowns out the good stuff. But there are some
| absolute gems out there - things that didn't exist 20+ years
| ago. Khan academy for example is a treasure of amazing free
| content.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| The early internet did #3 much better than today. I'm still a
| member of a ~50 member forum that's been going for 20 years,
| and the ability to discuss nuanced topics is much better than
| it is here, even if the average quality of the persons
| themselves are much better here.
|
| A key reason this is because of "weirdness budgets". If I
| independently arrive at a solution and try to communicate that
| to you, the more work it takes to verify(so I can easily tell
| you some prime factors, but not say uhh.. UFOs exist) the
| result and the more different it is from your prior, the less
| likely it is to succeed.
|
| This is magnified by the n ( n - 1) / 2 cost of communications,
| where n is the number of people. We all have different norms,
| and it's nearly impossible to work out where another persons
| norm is within a single comment, so mostly people surpass your
| weirdness budget and you ignore them.
|
| This means that we can only meaningfully talk about things that
| the general public are on the same phase of. This is just
| another way to state the Overton window. But now that we
| understand what creates the Overton window, we can attempt to
| evaluate what we can do to mitigate it.
|
| Now when we evaluate Facebook, reddit, YouTube comments, HN,
| message boards, BBS, and 1720 Venice coffee shops we can see
| them for what they are. The more you bump into the same people,
| the more nuance you can find. Nuance is where the insights
| really come from. No one can work it out themselves.
|
| Another depressing reality is that when you do find a tight-nit
| community that is able to create these insights, all you have
| done is segmented yourself from the general public's Overton
| window. Now your just another weird LISPer, and the Java
| programmers that have libraries and drivers behind their
| projects will run circles around you even though you are
| correct. Correctness isn't enough.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Counterpoint. It is disappointing to me that most of the "web
| sites" people interact with now transfer more data on a single
| page load than an entire operating system and applications from
| 25 years ago, when you could get "on the internet" with a PC
| running Windows 3.11 and Trumpet winsock, or Slackware. And,
| yeah, a lot of that is because of much higher quality media,
| but a lot of it is advertising and tracking, too. If we did NOT
| have high bandwidth now, the internet would simply be unusable.
| And for what? I'm not any better informed these days. Slashdot
| was the HN of the day, and it's about the same vibe. Videos and
| podcasts are jokes, taking 100x longer to make the point than
| simple text. Social media brought everyone to the publishing
| "party," and that's worked out just as well as you'd think. In
| fact, I can't think of any way that the internet is
| _fundamentally_ improved over the past 25 years. In additional
| fact, I think a lot of what 's developed in that time is
| harming society.
| ipaddr wrote:
| A lot more people and more voices adds abut
|
| But the quality of even photos have been downgraded since
| phones.
| Lapsa wrote:
| HN used to be better imho
| randomguy3344 wrote:
| I disagree with point 3)
|
| People used to have big desire to meet each other and exchange
| information. Internet evolution has throttled that desire
| greatly, we don't have one to one or group conversations any
| more, not nearly as much as we used to, social media &
| mainstream access are the culprits.
| ratww wrote:
| That's fair, but the technological improvements in the network
| layer that made it faster, more accessible and cheaper are not
| _directly_ related with the complaints by the author.
|
| We can have one thing without losing the other.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I agree with you. Too much bloat somehow.
| krychu wrote:
| It's now mostly "top 10 whatever-you-search for", or pages that
| generate automated comparisons. People unconsciously craved for
| authentic experiences after supermarkets, and chains. And same
| goes for the Internet.
| mymythisisthis wrote:
| Any groups/clubs that engage in slow html?
|
| I like hand written html pages / don't like css.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I blame Facebook and Apple. The old Internet was doing great
| right until the "Web 2.0" idea combined with everyone getting
| access to it. First app installed on their new iPhone? Facebook.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS/iPadOS)#Of_All-...
| boboche wrote:
| Remember the "back in my days" talk about some old stuff that you
| didn't know or fully care about, or in some rare cases sparked
| some curiosity? Time is brutal and some of us have become that
| old dude. Scary. Cycle of life and evolution vs. nostalgia I
| guess.
|
| I'm cuttently soldering a rs-232 to wifi modem
| (https://subethasoftware.com/2018/02/28/wire-up-your-own-rs-2...)
| to get my amigas back online. Pimiga is nice but too far from
| that 1:1 experience. Lots of telnet BBS out there.
| StavrosK wrote:
| That's a nice hack. Also, if you can power it from somewhere,
| you can use a bare ESP8266 module and put it in the serial
| enclosure to make it fully self-contained.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I think what this person is lamenting is that the personal stuff
| was readily more discoverable and that there was more personal
| authenticity. I think that is a legitimate criticism and boils
| down to "Everyone is online now and Eternal September is
| everywhere all the time."
|
| You could have those niche fan sites in part because you weren't
| likely to be trolled for it and if you were, it was likely to be
| annoying comments, not things like doxxing or SWATting. The
| former can get you fired from your job. The latter can get you
| killed.
|
| It probably tended to be mostly relatively well off nerds doing
| things for free out of personal ideals. Now that "the internet
| has eaten the world" it's everyone and many of those people have
| really shitty lives and can't get a regular job and are desperate
| for money and the internet has made them more savvy and informed
| about some things and so on.
|
| I'm someone with sort of a foot in each camp and I've written
| about that for a long time. This piece comes to mind which spent
| a little time on the front page of HN at some point:
|
| https://witnesstodestruction.blogspot.com/p/a-pragmatic-appr...
|
| I don't know how we solve this. I currently have something of a
| troublemaker on a forum I run, someone very much "like me" who is
| similar in age to me and has similar problems to mine (health
| issues, crap eyesight) but unlike me isn't trying to fill their
| time with blogging and running a zillion reddits and so forth.
|
| And I'm trying to do for this person what I had kind of wanted
| people to do for me when I was a lot sicker and kind of give them
| pointers on how to interact with the forum in a way that is
| comfortable for them without being disruptive and without
| derailing every conversation with their personal drama and it's
| really challenging because this person seems to not want to take
| responsibility for their own life.
|
| I have a bunch of websites and reddits rooted in things I found
| helpful when my life was much more in the toilet than it is now
| and none of it is very popular and I feel like I mostly don't get
| taken very seriously etc.
|
| Lots of people with more comfortable lives feel that people who
| currently have sucky lives cannot be helped to get their life
| back and cannot be expected to do anything constructive about
| their problems. They see such people as _charity cases_ and, at
| best, they want to throw a few bucks at such "losers" (often
| called _UBI_ ) and basically write them off.
|
| I was one of the top students of my graduating high school class.
| I was expected to do great things with my life and my life was
| derailed by a confluence of events, including a terrible health
| crisis rooted in a genetic disorder, so it isn't due to bad
| choices on my part.
|
| And I spent years homeless and the help many people imagine
| exists for people like me simply doesn't. Programs tend to have a
| lot of hoops you need to jump through and are often poorly
| designed and so on.
|
| I don't know how the world can make this better. I know what has
| worked for me to see some improvements and I struggle to try to
| find some way to share that process and make it easier for others
| and help clue people so others don't simply have to make
| everything up from scratch and have a bit of a jumpstart compared
| to me.
|
| This is not me being political. This is me being me and this is
| what I think about when I read such articles and it's amazingly
| tiresome to try to leave a good faith comment and have people be
| dismissive and act like it's political and doesn't belong here.
|
| You don't have to agree with me. But please try to see the
| comment as a good faith effort to add additional perspective from
| someone who hangs here a lot in spite of being something of a
| demographic outlier for HN.
|
| Edited to add a missing _not_. Always a kick in the gut typo to
| make.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This is a classic. It was put up 18 years ago, and still has
| plenty of relevance: https://www.internetisshit.org
| globular-toast wrote:
| This touches on something a bit different to the linked author
| which is people thinking the internet is something it is not.
| During my time at university I didn't initially use the
| library. Why would I? Everything is on the internet, isn't it?
| Not by a long shot. Once I went down the rabbit hole of
| scholarship I was amazed just how much information could not be
| found online. And this was just one tiny subject I was
| interested in. A real eye opener.
| Sr_developer wrote:
| I miss web directories, like old Yahoo or Altavista. Does anyone
| still use or miss those ones?
| akudha wrote:
| I guess this is a good thread to ask - can you share your
| favorite, lesser known, hidden gem corners of the internet that
| are still around?
| jumploops wrote:
| Admittedly, I miss the "old internet" too, however I have hope we
| can build it again.
|
| As I see it, there are two main issues to solve:
|
| 1) It's no longer trivial to build a "home" page that fits one's
| diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which
| prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy
| for people to freely add content to their "pages" , in whatever
| form they envision?
|
| 2) The "early" internet (or what is left of it) is largely
| outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new
| information has been heavily commoditized by industry. Parallel
| to this shift, people have moved to podcasts, news articles and
| videos for their daily content. The group of people that consume
| text is no longer the majority. In many ways, each new social
| media platform is attempting to recapture an aspect of
| community/shared experience that has been achieved before. The
| good platforms extend this reach, the bad suffocate it. A truly
| decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster
| diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to
| capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather
| than novel and groundbreaking tech.
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| > 1) It's no longer trivial to build a "home" page that fits
| one's diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which
| prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy
| for people to freely add content to their "pages" , in whatever
| form they envision?
|
| In the olden days, you were either affiliated with a university
| or you signed up to Geocities. Nowadays, you can go to
| WordPress and add your fill of content pages: it's not just a
| blog. I'm pretty sure the modern web is a win for ease of
| access to genuine user-controlled pages. Probably you had more
| control over the skin of a GeoCities site than a free WordPress
| page, but I'm not sure to what extent or how important that is.
|
| I think the issue here is more that people don't just want to
| make content - they want to have readers. You're more likely to
| get and know about your readers if you post on Facebook or
| Twitter than if you post on WordPress.
|
| > 2) The "early" internet (or what is left of it) is largely
| outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new
| information has been heavily commoditized by industry.
|
| I think this is important. The modern web doesn't provide
| discoverability to independent content produced in good faith.
| Either you have to agree to donate it to Facebook or you need
| to do a lot of work drumming it up. Google become popular
| because it cared more about the content than the primitive SEO,
| and the web was small enough you could plausibly use dmoz.org
| to browse the internet. Now, advanced SEO is better than any
| search engine algorithm and there's too much godawful content
| to be excited to read content without some kind of active
| recommendation.
|
| > A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential
| to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring
| out how to capture this value with variations of digital
| signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech.
|
| I recall another article posted here a few weeks ago, where the
| author argued that centralisation dominates over
| decentralisation. But the argument in this place (at least till
| I went to bed) was that because there was technical
| decentralisation, there was no centralisation.
|
| I don't know which view represents the mainstream view of
| technical people today, just which view seemed to have the most
| advocates while I was reading the thread.
|
| What I do know is that it seems hopeless to me to hope that our
| best and brightest will help decentralise the internet again. I
| think the Gemini project has it right when they do whatever
| they can. I wish it were more prosocial though; it mostly
| consists of isolated gemlogs without the opportunity to reply.
| (I mean, you can reply, but all you're doing is posting a new
| page. If the person to whom you are replying doesn't know you
| from a loaf of bread, it's more practical to just go wash the
| dishes. If someone wants to correct me, by all means: I'm all
| ears.)
|
| Btw, I don't want to imply that the Gemini folk aren't the best
| and brightest: Just that the path to a decentralised internet
| is the same as the path to free software - wearing the
| straitjacket and doing the work. And even then, it's easily
| lost. How much centralised, non-free software do we all use
| even if we've never installed it!
|
| I think the main problem to solve is interaction without
| inauthentic action (spam). Centralised systems allow one person
| to cut off the spammer once, and that stops them from affecting
| everyone. If you imagine a decentralised gem/weblogging network
| with a reply facility, then if you write a logpost (on a log
| hosted on your own computer) and send a trackback to mine (on a
| log hosted on my own computer), then I probably consider that
| interesting. But if now a spammer writes a logpost and sends a
| trackback to yours, you need a way to cancel that. And once
| you've cancelled them, they can still post to mine! Each
| spammer will annoy each logposter as many times as they can get
| around the spam protection: it's an exponential problem. With a
| centralised system, once you've cancelled them, they are much
| more likely to encounter difficulty trying to trackback to my
| log: it's a linear problem - or even less.
|
| The other issues are probably surmountable - it shouldn't be
| impossible to create a decentralised network of posts and
| replies and threads that can be viewed together. It probably
| starts with something more like RSS than Usenet.
| okamiueru wrote:
| Regarding 1. When you say "no longer trivial", I would point
| out that if it isn't now, then it surely never was?
|
| Not using a framework (by which I assume you mean the likes of
| wordpress or squarespace) is still as much possible today as it
| ever was. And, the knowledge on how to do so is ever more
| accessible.
|
| I can see your point that when provided with easy ways to do
| things, you are limited to design decisions and choices of
| those frameworks. However, I think the progress of open source
| has lowered the bar significantly for creating a completely
| custom platform.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I had a friend with zero programming experience who put up a
| simple webpage for her small business in 1995 with just a
| text editor and some photos.
|
| Yes, it was much simpler. And it was encouraged, because most
| ISPs offered free web page hosting - including a free URL,
| and email - with an access account.
|
| Wordpress is a nightmare in comparison. And a fully
| engineered blog stack is far beyond the reach of most users.
|
| You could argue that the modern equivalent is a Facebook
| page, but of course web pages were _fully public._ You were
| in a public space, under your own name, limited only by your
| willingness to learn some very basic HTML.
|
| It's a completely different experience to being in a
| privatised space with its own content management tools, which
| you only have very limited user level access to.
| okamiueru wrote:
| Isn't the anecdote only valid if your friend would somehow
| be unable to do the same if it were today?
|
| I do get the sentiment that is expressed, but I also think
| it is wrong. The possibility to create, and the resources
| with which to do so is astronomically better than it was
| growing up. Imagine having access to YouTube and the
| thousands of excellent tutors. Just because convenience can
| lead to mediocrity, doesn't excuse it.
| donatj wrote:
| I agree entirely with your second point. I feel like a lot of
| the creative energy that had gone into the old web now goes
| into YouTube and TikTok, for better or worse.
| superkuh wrote:
| Most of this is because the people you are talking about don't
| actually use a computer to access the internet. They use a
| mobile computer. Mobile computers don't have the networking or
| energy storage (due to radio usage) capabilities to be able to
| participate in the internet as an equal. They almost all don't
| have a routable ipv4 and for those ones that do have ipv6,
| often it doesn't come with control over ports.
|
| If these people were accessing the internet from a home
| computer they could just install a simple static webserver and
| put HTML files, jpegs, gifs, etc in a folder, forward ports on
| their router, and bam, they're on the web.
| mopsi wrote:
| > _It's no longer trivial to build a "home" page that fits
| one's diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which
| prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy
| for people to freely add content to their "pages" , in whatever
| form they envision?_
|
| 1. Sign up to $5/mo virtual hosting service and choose a domain
| name.
|
| 2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress".
|
| 3. Open Wordpress.
|
| 4. Write and publish whatever you want, structured however you
| want.
|
| This is much-much easier than working with Frontpage or
| Dreamweaver was in the olden days. Connecting to a server via
| FTP alone was a huge hurdle. Now it's all WYSIWYG in a browser.
|
| Obstacles to self-hosted personal websites are smaller than
| ever before, but the corpo web has turned everyone from
| homeowners into hotel guests who have to follow their house
| rules. It's a cultural problem, not a technical one.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > 1. Sign up to $5/mo
|
| You already lost most people here.
|
| > virtual hosting service and choose a domain name.
|
| Actually, people don't even have to have a domain name for
| their webpage. But ignoring that - how will people know that
| this is what they need to do? "I want to create a homepage, I
| don't know what 'virtual hosting' is. I don't know why I need
| to be looking for 'services'."
|
| > 2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress".
|
| In their what now click what now?
|
| How are you so sure this is always possible?
|
| Also, what about search engines (cough-Google-cough) under-
| ranking individual pages in favor of larger, corporate-
| favored sites?
| sseagull wrote:
| > how will people know that this is what they need to do?
|
| Why has the tech community at large completely failed to
| educate people on the basics of something used by billions
| of people daily and affecting increasingly-important parts
| of their lives?
|
| Is it because we keep infantilizing them the way you seem
| to be doing, pretending they are too stupid to learn
| anything new? Or is it because in an effort to simplify,
| everyone simplifies to a different way, resulting in even
| more complexity? Or is it because tech really doesn't care
| and sucks at explaining anything?
|
| A bit of all three (and probably more) if you ask me
| tempest_ wrote:
| You don't need that many steps.
|
| Wix/SquareSpace, and I am sure a dozen other options will
| make this 1 step for you if you are willing to pay a small
| premium.
| ratww wrote:
| I love how everything about your list is harder and less
| flexible for non-technical people than what existed in the
| 90s... while also glossing over non-dev-focused solutions.
| It's like the famous HN Dropbox dismissal [1].
|
| Buying virtual hosting, domain names and using a control
| panel to install Wordpress is already harder, pricier and
| less anonymous than most users had to endure in the 90s.
| Also, Wordpress doesn't allow you to easily edit the
| templates the same way Dreamweaver and Frontpage allowed.
| Those tools were useable by anyone with knowledge about Word.
| But to customise Wordpress you need deep HTML knowledge and
| time. Most Wordpress templates are way more bloated than some
| bespoke HTML made with Dreamweaver.
|
| You could have said Tumblr, or, if you wanna go commercial,
| Wix or Squarespace, but self-hosted Wordpress is like the
| worst of both worlds put together...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
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