[HN Gopher] The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back
___________________________________________________________________
The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back
Author : ColinWright
Score : 584 points
Date : 2022-01-25 22:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (cheapskatesguide.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cheapskatesguide.org)
| Jonovono wrote:
| This is why I am building a fun mobile browser:
| https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/wapps-fun-private-browsing/id1...
|
| Would love anyones feedback!
| winternett wrote:
| Now that we've found that the Internet is fraught with bots and
| scams, and that social media was all a ruse to lure us into
| marketing funnels, we're trying to go back to the happier and
| less ad-infused independent web...
|
| But finding out that the death grip that major corps have on
| hosting costs, IP lawyers, data accessibility, regulators, search
| results, and on audiences will be the biggest obstacle to
| overcome.
|
| I'm stoked to see what happens with the rebellion, even though I,
| like many other independents are a bit jaded about ranting that
| this was gonna happen years ago when nobody listened... hah.
|
| Our best tools at this point are probably to bring back RSS and
| to re-establish more cost-effective independent hosting
| alternatives.
| masswerk wrote:
| I think, something which is missed, is what I'd call the
| "mediametic horizon". In the "old days", people weren't just
| "doing their thing", there was more to it. Even, if you
| entertained just a small site, you were somewhat playing big
| media (compare the vintage radio allusions or the ubiquitous news
| signations that popped up about 1997.) Small websites were
| pulling for reach, dreaming of a mention on "What's cool" lists.
| (Besides other functions, HN may be the last true what's-cool
| list today.) Even those building professional sites were driven
| by this "mediametic horizon": you wouldn't build the same website
| twice, not even the same concept. Adding to and enriching what
| was the known standard, the known functionality, the known
| capabilities of the Web was the _raison d 'etre_ of any new site.
| Becoming known and mentioned for such a feat was a major
| incentive, both for the designer-developers and for the clients
| (again, for reach and prestige). The truth being, the "old web"
| essentially required and depended on brokers of reach and
| prestige to develop this drive, and I do not see any candidates
| for fulfilling this function. (Apart from HN, that is.)
|
| P.S./Edit: This was still true for the early 2000s: back then, I
| was involved in a major relaunch of the site of a telephone
| carrier and the clients were scanning relevant Usenet groups for
| critiques in order to evaluate their success. (Surely, this
| wasn't the norm, but it still did happen.)
| [deleted]
| pavlov wrote:
| _> 'Some people use the term "Web 3.0" to refer only to
| decentralized blockchain-based networks without considering that
| all personal websites have essentially the same goals, be they on
| the regular Internet or on the new blockchain networks. Those who
| use the term "web 3.0" seem to have forgotten that self-hosted
| personal websites that run on home servers and are accessible
| over the regular Internet are inherently decentralized.
| Unfortunately, despite common goals, some on today's old Internet
| are hostile to blockchain technology. I am not sure why.'_
|
| What goals does today's crypto-token-powered "web 3" vision share
| with the old Internet? It's not enough to say "well it's
| decentralized" and do a handwave.
|
| Consider the NFT exploration Moxie Marlinspike did recently:
|
| https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
|
| This is essentially a system that lets you buy DRM'd metadata
| that points to servers owned by a corporation funded by billions
| of VC dollars, and transactions are recorded on a ledger that
| spends more power than the entire country of Finland. The only
| purpose of these activities is to speculate on prices of these
| make-believe digital assets.
|
| None of these things have anything to with the old Internet:
| cargo cult DRM, billion-dollar VC funding, enormous energy waste,
| artificial scarcity where none is needed.
|
| That website on dial-up was slow because of real physical
| constraints, not artificial constraints erected to make VCs
| richer at the expense of the planet's ecosystem.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| I got bored the other day and thought it would be funny to make
| a copy of the most expensive NFT and set that as my Twitter
| profile picture because they added that silly feature.
|
| So I downloaded MetaMask, got everything set up, and went to
| one of the NFT marketplaces to try to make one. Uploaded the
| image and got a big scary warning:
|
| > (paraphrased; I don't have a screenshot) This image was found
| too many times on the internet. If this image is not yours,
| this is ILLEGAL AND A VIOLATION OF COPYRIGHT LAW, and may
| result in your NFT being removed from the marketplace.
|
| How on earth is this decentralized? Like yeah, I get wanting to
| protect your "asset" from "theft," but what central authority
| gets to decide what copyright law we abide by- further, what
| happens when an NFT marketplace removes your NFT? Does it get
| removed from the blockchain? I legitimately don't know how this
| works.
|
| The user experience is also TERRIBLE. I am rather technical
| (hell, I used to do Bitcoin back in like 2015, or whenever it
| was about $4k/coin) and still don't really know how the hell
| MetaMask works. I imported the wallet on my phone... maybe? The
| randomart image it showed initially was different, but
| apparently the iOS app just defaults to a different kind of
| randomart.
|
| You also have to use the MetaMask browser on iOS. It sucks.
|
| Also the MetaMask connect buttons barely work across different
| sites. It had a _really_ hard time telling if I had a wallet.
| Not sure if this is an implementation issue on the dev end but
| as a user it was super confusing.
|
| Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is
| actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much easier
| than creating a user/pass for every site- just click Sign and
| go. That's basically the only good UX of web3 as it stands.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| This is Moxie's point. Web 1.0 is actually decentralized and
| permissionless. You can actually host that image on your own
| Web 1.0 without any gatekeepers being involved.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Not strictly speaking true. Your local government can raid
| your servers for serving content that violates local laws,
| or in cooperation with a foreign one.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| > Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is
| actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much
| easier than creating a user/pass for every site- just click
| Sign and go.
|
| I agree. The only thing missing is a way to recover your
| account (wallet) if you lose or forget your password.
| a_t48 wrote:
| > Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is
| actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much
| easier than creating a user/pass for every site- just click
| Sign and go. That's basically the only good UX of web3 as it
| stands.
|
| We already have this with SSO though - what would be the
| difference? Decentralization? Though it should be possible to
| host your own SSO.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Right, and if you don't _want_ a single trackable identity,
| which lots of people don 't, a nice modern phone can also
| WebAuthn using say a fingerprint reader+ and so you can
| have one step sign in (tap sensor, sign in) that way with
| the resulting "identity" living only on that one site.
|
| + You might be thinking wait, we don't want to be
| trackable. WebAuthn doesn't have any way of sending
| fingerprints to anywhere, the phone is using the biometrics
| to make this not work for bag snatcher, or for the guy
| snooping your desk while you go get a coffee.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I think NFT's are just the equivelent of those that use the
| fine art world for tax avoidance.
|
| Web 3.1 is probably coming but it is going to be something we
| have not fully figured out yet
| [deleted]
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| We better figure it out before we hit Web 3.11 for
| Workgroups !
| josht wrote:
| > So I downloaded MetaMask, got everything set up, and went
| to one of the NFT marketplaces to try to make one. Uploaded
| the image and got a big scary warning:
|
| One NFT marketplace shows you an error message and therefore
| the technology is not decentralized? That's a bit of a
| stretch. That NFT marketplace might have restrictions in
| place for their own legal reasons, but using that as an
| excuse to say that the technology isn't decentralized is
| unjustifiable.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Don't know if you read moxie's article linked in root, but
| OpenSea is actually where almost all sites get their NFT
| information from (even metamask iirc). That's not the site
| where I got the error, granted, but what happens when
| OpenSea (a central marketplace) removes your NFT?
| deckard1 wrote:
| Obfuscation is the point.
|
| None of it designed to make it easy or to make sense. Because
| if people realized they are being taken for a ride, no one
| will show up and empty their wallets. It's what corrupt
| businesses and dictatorships do. Confuse and conquer.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| It's worth noting that there is a core of people doing real
| work in crypto who are not trying to peddle NFTs or other
| sleight of hand rungpulls designed to separate the gullible
| from their money.
|
| Ethereum, for example, is full of people building interesting
| things like off-chain low-cost trading using non-interactive
| zero knowledge proofs and actively working to make crypto less
| energy intensive and more useful. They don't want to sell you
| an NFT and it's not part of some elaborate rugpull- There are
| plenty of examples of people doing this important work because
| they legitimately believe that a world where fiat control is
| divorced from the levers of governmental power is a positive
| change.
|
| There are also, of course, people trying to use those
| achievements as part of a weird shell game where the end result
| is giving gullible strangers nothing in exchange for something.
| That's sort of the human condition.
| agentultra wrote:
| > There are plenty of examples of people doing this important
| work because they legitimately believe that a world where
| fiat control is divorced from the levers of governmental
| power is a positive change.
|
| Regardless of their intentions this is a bad idea and
| deserves every line of criticism it receives.
|
| Governance, law, and financial regulation exist for reasons
| that programmers have no place or reason to replace.
|
| Wether they wish it or not there is a centralization of
| authority that will happen. In Ethereum's case either the
| oligarchs with the most money will set the rules, or more
| likely, actual governments with armies and the ability to
| enforce laws will.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Yes there are people with 100% good intentions working in
| this space. There were also people with 100% good intentions
| working at Theranos.
| tata71 wrote:
| With the obvious exception that...it's impossible to fork
| an entity like Theranos when they become sufficiently evil
| such that the community no longer believes in their
| direction.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Well, Theranos was a fork of existing, well-understood
| blood testing methodology. It was a house of cards built
| out of lies and falsehoods in order to enrich the founder
| and associates.
|
| Exactly like crypto often is.
| tata71 wrote:
| "www companies are just a way for VCs to make money
| faster. "
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| hunterb123 wrote:
| You're proving his point, there are also people with
| good/bad intentions working in "web2" and everywhere for
| that matter.
|
| Don't criticize the tech, criticize the individual bad
| actors, like you did with Theranos.
|
| One of the main talking points "web3" critics yell is
| "scams!", like they don't exist elsewhere.
|
| If you do want to criticize the tech, leave the moral
| crusade out of it and say _technically_ what is wrong with
| it, so we can have a _technical_ debate about the feature
| in question.
| kravens_last wrote:
| It's not an issue of simply having scams. The issue is
| that, by its very nature, the ratio of scams to
| legitimate functional work is likely 1 million to 1, and
| the entire ecosystem does not only revel in this, but
| actively encourages even more scam-like behavior. This
| all stems from blockchain as a concept's decision of
| baking in valuation to EVERYTHING.
|
| It's the purest distillation of the "greater fool theory"
| in human history.
|
| I'd rebuke your framing of leaving the morality of it
| aside. The more valid framing of a debate for new
| technology should be to prove that there are non scam-
| like applications of the technology that are superior to
| currently existing ones.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| The tech is great. I'm a huge fan of all crypto use cases
| that actually exist today and are actually used by people
| and don't involve money laundering or accidental Ponzi
| schemes.
| dleslie wrote:
| So long as fraud and theft remain crimes, then Governments
| will still exert control over currency; fiat or not.
| josht wrote:
| This. IMHO, those who criticize crypto tend to experience the
| fallacy of incomplete evidence (aka "cherry picking" [0]).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking
| sprkwd wrote:
| > off-chain low-cost trading using non-interactive zero
| knowledge proofs
|
| As a layman, I'm not touching crypto until I know what this
| means.
| bsamuels wrote:
| Seems a little silly since one wouldn't expect most laymen
| to understand how TLS works, but enjoy:
| https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/05/zksnarks-in-a-
| nutshell/
| tata71 wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/loopringorg/comments/qz3bj5/zk_p
| roo...
|
| Yes, it's too complicated right now (so was
| https://www.!).
| [deleted]
| drdeca wrote:
| 1) "knowledge proof" : proving that you have some
| information . E.g. suppose I claim that a graph can be
| colored with only 3 colors. I can prove that I know a
| coloring for the graph with 3 colors, by presenting you
| with that graph.
|
| 2) "zero knowledge" : Suppose I want to prove to you (or at
| least, give you very strong evidence) that I know a
| 3-coloring for the graph, but I don't want to give you any
| information about how to color the graph with 3 colors.
|
| This can be done in a way where I first randomly permute
| the 3 colors, and then commit to a particular coloring
| without showing you anything about it (e.g. I give each
| node on the graph a random salt, and show you the hash of
| (the color and the salt appended) for each node ), and ask
| you to pick any two nodes of the graph. I reveal the color
| and salt for those two nodes, and you can check that they
| make the hash I said they did. If the two nodes are
| connected by an edge, then the colors I give have to be
| different (if they are the same then my proof is invalid
| and you shouldn't believe my claim that I have a coloring
| of the graph with 3 colors.)
|
| By repeating this process many times (each time I randomly
| permute the colors/names-of-the-colors, and make a new
| commitment about each node), and each time you choose a
| random pair of (adjacent) vertices, then, if I didn't
| actually have a coloring of it with 3 colors, there's a
| high chance you would eventually find that the pairs you
| asked me to reveal, have the same color. So, if we keep
| doing this, and I'm telling the truth, eventually you
| should have strong evidence that I have a coloring for it,
| but without you getting any information about that coloring
| (other than that it is one) (because by permuting the
| colors each time, the only info you get about the nodes you
| asked about, is that the colors are different, which is
| already implied by it being a coloring.)
|
| So, that would be a zero knowledge proof that I know how to
| color that graph using only 3 colors, with no 2 nodes
| having the same color.
|
| (of course, the thing with coloring graphs is just an
| example, one which is relatively easy to give a protocol
| for.)
|
| 3) "non-interactive" : accomplishing the same sort of
| thing, except instead of us sending many messages back and
| forth like in what I described above, instead, I just do
| one computation (using the knowledge I have), and then I
| give you the output of that computation, and you can check
| that with some algorithm, and the algorithm says "yep" if I
| gave you a good output, and "nope" if I gave you a bad
| output, and, if I had the info I claim to have and used it
| for the input to my computation, then you will always get
| the result "yep", while if I don't have the info I claim to
| have, then the probability that I succeed in giving you a
| good output, one which would make your program say "yep",
| is negligible.
|
| __
|
| Hopefully that helps make the idea more clear?
|
| You might be wondering why this idea is applicable to
| cryptocurrency stuff?
|
| A number of reasons. Being able to prove that you have some
| information that satisfies a given property, without
| revealing the information, is fairly powerful.
| Miner49er wrote:
| You can't trust Ethereum at all. When it comes to picking
| between their principles, and money, they'll always pick
| money. This is all shown by the hard fork when the DAO was
| was "hacked". The code was supposed to be law, until it meant
| they lost some money.
| theelous3 wrote:
| Yep. That fork was a big fat juicy dead canary. Absolutely
| infinitely worse.
| willhinsa wrote:
| And! The ledger isn't used by the main marketplaces or wallets
| (eg OpenSea & MetaMask) when you're trying to look at your
| assets. You can be deplatformed from those places, unable to
| trade your assets with anyone on those sites/using those
| wallets.
|
| From that Moxie Marlinspike article:
|
| > A crypto wallet like MetaMask, Rainbow, etc is "non-
| custodial" (the keys are kept client side), but it has the same
| problem as my dApps above: a wallet has to run on a mobile
| device or in your browser. Meanwhile, ethereum and other
| blockchains have been designed with the idea that it's a
| network of peers, but not designed such that it's really
| possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of
| those peers.
|
| > A wallet like MetaMask needs to do basic things like display
| your balance, your recent transactions, and your NFTs, as well
| as more complex things like constructing transactions,
| interacting with smart contracts, etc. In short, MetaMask needs
| to interact with the blockchain, but the blockchain has been
| built such that clients like MetaMask can't interact with it.
| So like my dApp, MetaMask accomplishes this by making API calls
| to three companies that have consolidated in this space.
|
| > For instance, MetaMask displays your recent transactions by
| making an API call to etherscan > ...displays your account
| balance by making an API call to Infura > ...displays your NFTs
| by making an API call to OpenSea
|
| > Again, like with my dApp, these responses are not
| authenticated in some way. They're not even signed so that you
| could later prove they were lying. It reuses the same
| connections, TLS session tickets, etc for all the accounts in
| your wallet, so if you're managing multiple accounts in your
| wallet to maintain some identity separation, these companies
| know they're linked.
|
| > MetaMask doesn't actually do much, it's just a view onto data
| provided by these centralized APIs. This isn't a problem
| specific to MetaMask - what other option do they have? Rainbow,
| etc are set up in exactly the same way. (Interestingly, Rainbow
| has their own data for the social features they're building
| into their wallet - social graph, showcases, etc - and have
| chosen to build all of that on top of Firebase instead of the
| blockchain.)
|
| > All this means that if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it
| also disappears from your wallet. It doesn't functionally
| matter that my NFT is indelibly on the blockchain somewhere,
| because the wallet (and increasingly everything else in the
| ecosystem) is just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs, which
| began returning 304 No Content for the query of NFTs owned by
| my address!
| tata71 wrote:
| > spends more power than the entire country of Finland. The
| only purpose of these activities is to speculate on prices of
| these make-believe digital assets
|
| This'll get almost as much traction as activists decrying
| HTTPS/SSL because it took more compute, and therefore obviously
| more pollution!
| steelstraw wrote:
| Vitalik's response to Moxie is worth a read:
|
| https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ryk3it/my_first_im...
| Animats wrote:
| Buterin: _" Moxie's critiques in the second half of the post
| strike me as having a correct criticism of the current state
| of the ecosystem (where (1), (2), (7) and (8) are the only
| things that we have working code for), but they are missing
| where the blockchain ecosystem is going."_
|
| Right. In other words, what we have now sucks, but you
| shouldn't criticize it because we have this proposed scheme
| which might be better.
| [deleted]
| Melatonic wrote:
| The thing that is telling to me about all of these
| "revolutions" is WHO is doing the hype and to what end.
|
| Web 1.0 it was the nerds saying it was going to change the
| world and the people with no knowledge of how the internet
| worked saying it was BS.
|
| Web 2.0 for the most part just seemed to naturally happen
| without a ton of specific hype and was what finally got all the
| naysayers of Web 1.0 on board.
|
| Web 3.0 is all the OG naysayers saying it is going to change
| the world while the nerds roll their eyes.
|
| Personally I am looking forward to Web 3.1 :-D
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I'm waiting for Web 3.11 for Workgroups. At least it will be
| useful for something.
| graycat wrote:
| I'm no fan of NFT (non-fungible tokens) _crypto_ and do not
| now, never have, never intend to own any, but, and maybe part
| of _Web3_ , am guessing at some useful purpose -- a convenient,
| low overhead, way to move many small amounts of money to pay
| for Internet usage.
|
| E.g., Sam runs a Web site and wants to charge each user some
| small amount, say, $0.001 up to $0.10, including users in
| foreign countries, for each visit. Sam is eager to let his
| users pay with some major NFT.
|
| Joe wants to use Sam's site and other sites with such a
| charging technique so buys in whatever fiat currency his
| country uses, say, $10.00 worth of some NFT. Then Joe uses
| Sam's site and pays with some NFT money. That NFT tokens can be
| divided into many parts is crucial here.
|
| Once a day Sam converts all his NFT revenue to dollars (or
| whatever fiat currency is used in his country).
|
| So, net, the money flow is from Joe's fiat money to $10.00
| WORTH of some NFT to Sam's revenue in NFT to Sam's revenue in
| his fiat money.
|
| Point 1: The NFT is held by Joe and Sam for only a short time
| and is used only as a convenient way to move many small amounts
| of money.
|
| Point 2: Neither Joe nor Sam cares what each _whole token_ of
| the NFT is worth.
|
| Point 3: _Investors_ who want to speculate on the long term
| value of a NFT tokens have risks from "unknown unknowns".
|
| Point 4: If each of 1 billion people do what Joe does, hold
| nearly all that NFT, and on average hold only $10.00 worth,
| then we have an estimate of the maximum the investors can make.
| drdeca wrote:
| This seems to be, disregarding the entire meaning of "non-
| fungible" ?
|
| NFT doesn't mean "token". If you just mean "token", say
| "token"?
|
| Unless you mean like, "tokens which represent a fractional
| share of a particular NFT" ? But why would you use this as
| the thing to denominate payment in?
|
| If Joe has $5 worth of something, and Carl has another $5
| worth of the same thing, and outcomes are equivalent if they
| swap what they have, then, the thing they have is fungible.
| graycat wrote:
| Thanks for the lessons!
|
| I'm a total novice in the world of NFT (Google says that
| abbreviates "non-fungible token"). You are way ahead of me.
| I'm such a novice that I don't yet even know how to use the
| words!
|
| I don't yet fully understand your lessons!
|
| Maybe roughly I have the scenario of Joe, Sam, and the long
| term investors correct.
| yyyk wrote:
| >a convenient, low overhead, way to move many small amounts
| of money to pay for Internet usage.
|
| AKA digital currency. For this we can simply use a digital
| currency (crypto or otherwise). NFT is irrelevant here, an
| extra unnecessary complication when the same thing could have
| done with the ETH chain it's already based on, or a new side-
| chain or many other methods.
| graycat wrote:
| Thanks!
| Animats wrote:
| I follow the NFT thing, at least in its metaverse incarnation,
| and it looks like it's about over. None of the 3D worlds that
| have NFTs have significant usage. The reaction of game
| companies is mostly "do not need or want". The reaction of
| gamers is "hell, no". Nobody is doing much with their
| overpriced "virtual land". Where it even exists. There are many
| wannabe virtual worlds that never actually launched a 3D world.
|
| There isn't much of an NFT resale market. There are minters,
| and there are suckers. Any chance to make money flipping NFTs
| was used up last year. NFTs may stay around as collectables,
| but to make money that way, you must have fans who buy your
| merch. You need to own an NBA franchise, be a famous performer,
| or have a major collectable brand.
|
| NFT sentiment on Reddit has gone from positive to very negative
| in the last three months. The hype isn't working any more.
| Without hype, it dies.
|
| Then there's enforcement. About twice a month, the US SEC
| brings the hammer down on some crypto-related crook.[1] They're
| still working through the Initial Coin Offering scam backlog.
| They'll get to NFTs as the complaints start coming in.
|
| [1] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-
| acti...
| aeturnum wrote:
| I have never understood people who mourn the death of the "old"
| internet because I do not feel I have lost it. Particular
| communities come and go, as they always have, but I have found
| that the I can find the same sorts of gathering places for the
| same kinds of people I always have - in about the same numbers
| too.
|
| The thing that has changed is that a huge swath of new people
| have come online and, though some of what brought them online is
| wider access to connectivity, a lot of what brought them online
| are new kinds of communities. They showed up for social media and
| most of them just aren't that interested in the things that made
| up the "old" internet.
|
| I put "old" in quotes because people have kept and maintained the
| parts they love. You can still play MUDs, you can still visit
| BBSes, people still run Hotline servers[1]! Many of these
| communities have changed because the world has changed: lots of
| people who played MUDs in 1990 have moved on to other online
| games, but lots have not! Critically - tools have continued to be
| developed. You can use IRCCloud (and be told it makes you a bad
| IRC'er), you can play MUDs on your phone, etc. These communities
| have changed with the times and improved for it.
|
| My sense is that the absolute number of people who are involved
| in these communities has dropped, but not actually by that much?
| Maybe half as many people play MUDs now as they did at the peak -
| but it's a steady half. I think of it like the communities around
| vinyl or around film photography: less central than they once
| were, but healthy and vital.
|
| I am really glad that people who were not online at all during
| their peak are discovering these older forms. We have kept them
| for good reasons. But don't call it a comeback, they have been
| here for years.
|
| [1] https://hotline.fandom.com/wiki/Clients
| yakireev wrote:
| > I have found that the I can find the same sorts of gathering
| places for the same kinds of people I always have - in about
| the same numbers too.
|
| My personal experience does not match that. There was a time
| (2010-2012 or so where I used to live) when communities were
| migrating from older "forums" to new and shiny "social
| networks" - and inevitably ceasing to be communities.
|
| One of these communities was niche enough (and I was involved
| enough) for me to personally knew all the regulars - they are
| mostly still online and still care about that thing which
| brought us together, but there's no meeting place for us online
| anymore. Facebook groups and Twitter wars do not facilitate
| meaningful discussion, and the old forum... "Who uses forums
| nowadays anyway? We have FB and Instagram and stuff", I hear
| from them, but I believe they're deeply mistaken and it's the
| other way around. FB has them, and it kinda took them away from
| me.
|
| old_man_yells_at_cloud.jpg
| executesorder66 wrote:
| Is there any reason a subreddit wouldn't work for that
| community? Or is that not "forumy" enough?
|
| I'm genuinely curious.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Subreddits don't work well for long form stuff.
|
| Like for example a project log where you are restoring some
| old car, solving problems and sourcing parts. In a forum it
| is cleanly self contained. On a subreddit it would be a
| bunch of scattered posts you would have to take the care to
| link to.
| godshatter wrote:
| The old PHPBB software (or whatever it was called) was
| much nicer. You could have a thread about restoring your
| old car, and there might be 50 pages, in order, that
| someone could look through if they wanted to or just skip
| to the end so they can see what's currently being
| discussed. They can reference a comment on page 42 and it
| will always be on page 42.
|
| Reddit follows this infinite scroll idea, that everyone
| now seems to follow, that I absolutely hate. You can
| search for a particular topic but you can't see what
| topics were around it. But I guess it encourages quick
| one-off posts which increases engagement or whatever.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Discussions would last days on the old phpBB boards.
| There wasn't that same pressure to spend all day on the
| same website. You'd make your post and visit every few
| days. This encouraged effort and reflection.
|
| With reddit and other modern platforms, if it doesn't
| happen in the same 12 hours then it's old news.
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| Apart from privacy concerns like Twitter and Reddit sharing
| your data with FB (Maybe they share with Google too, not
| entirely sure), you create a healthier community in a forum
| than Reddit, Twitter etc.
|
| This would be different if you are in a subreddit for a
| niche topic, sure. But there are higher chances of creating
| healthy online interactions in Forums than a subreddit. You
| meet with regulars more often. Knowledge transfer is better
| cos you know the skill levels of different people based on
| your interactions and experiences. This is opposite cos in
| a subreddit depending on the topic. There is a high amount
| of irregular folks. This means you have no idea how to rate
| the interactions than to take them on face value. These are
| all small but important things that are important when it
| comes to a community.
|
| Think of forums like your neighborhood. You participate and
| nurture it. You know most of them and the rate of new
| people are less than you can catch up with the pace among
| other things.
|
| PS: These are some of my thoughts, people have different
| ideas and opinions on forums.
| imglorp wrote:
| Reddit is as always a mixed experience.
|
| I think any successful forum depends heavily on its mods
| (notably like this one) to maintain community and
| civility, to remove spam, abuse, brigading, and
| astroturfing. This works despite the corporation trying
| to monetize with both hands. Reddit still has some subs
| with good mod teams where kind, productive communities
| are carrying on. This could happen on any decent forum
| software.
|
| And yeah the rest is commercialized filth.
| awild wrote:
| I agree a lot with this. I'm in a lot of niche groups of
| my hobbies and of those most are really quite trash
| (usually pedantic ideological battles) even if they claim
| to be otherwise. There's however one that has such a
| strong moderation team that it's become a kind of meme,
| BUT the discussions if they do happen are always strong
| and factual by a weird mix of industry professionals and
| hobbyists alike, with a good focus on citation and cross
| referencing.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Yeah, and I'll jump in with a contrary opinion.
|
| I think people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on
| forums, and nicer on Discord than either.
|
| My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll
| past long-running inline reply wars that would suck
| people in. The fact that this kind of thing gets
| quarantined to a downvoted sub-tree (on Reddit) or just
| scrolls into the past, accessible only by search (on
| Discord) helps keep these new community platforms a lot
| less toxic.
|
| And yeah, the newer platforms (especially Discord) are
| maybe a little less valuable as pure stores of knowledge,
| but I think the structural resistance to domination by
| assholes is very valuable.
| epicide wrote:
| I think parts of your comment and your parent's comment
| are correct.
|
| IMO a lot of it isn't about technology, but the size of
| the community, the people within it, and the norms of
| that community.
|
| For me, the biggest heuristic on whether a
| subreddit/forum/Discord has the potential to feel like a
| community is the size. For various reasons, subreddits
| _tend_ to be larger than a forum. The larger the
| subreddit, the more it feels like yelling into the void
| of Twitter. It 's hard to "know the regulars" when there
| are thousands of people talking in the same place at the
| same time.
|
| Smaller subreddits have no guarantee to feel like a
| community, but they have the potential. If there are
| regulars that show up and moderators that fairly
| moderate[0], subreddits basically "fall back" into being
| a forum.
|
| Of course, there is the elephant in the room of Advance
| Publications, Inc. [1] wanting to make economic profit
| and, therefore, push for Reddit to grow and overcome the
| likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Most forums never really
| had/have the same dreams of world domination.
|
| Overall, as someone who has been a moderator on a larger
| forum (about 10-15 years ago) and seen tight-knit
| subreddits and Discords, my advice is:
|
| Regardless of the wallpaper, pay attention to the people
| and the customs of your community and strive to improve
| those. There's no guarantee it will flourish, but it
| _cannot_ if enough people don 't act similarly.
|
| [0] e.g. delete spam, lock flame wars, and generally
| contribute to the well-being of the community. [1] The
| effective owners of Reddit.
| yvdriess wrote:
| The SomethingAwful forum somehow survived the migration and
| keeps going strong. Goons do populate Twitter and Discord,
| but it did not empty the forums.
|
| I think that the strong moderation has helped to make the
| forums offer something you cannot easily find on the newer
| social platforms.
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| I think while tech is always known to be in constant change,
| a lot of the things have settled down since it started I
| guess. The practices, protocols, the conventions, browsers
| etc.
|
| For all the communities that we have lost, there are still a
| ton of IRC servers. I came back to IRC a few months ago after
| like 10ish years or so. There are new platforms like Activity
| Pub platforms, Matrix and others.
|
| > when communities were migrating from older "forums" to new
| and shiny "social networks" - and inevitably ceasing to be
| communities.
|
| I forgot who wrote the post. But I read this tweet or blog
| post long ago that people who are using social media to
| create communities will eventually grow out of it. This has
| been a accurate remark by her who wrote the post. I recall
| some communities who have started off in social media but
| eventually created their own website/platform to create
| unique experiences that are needed for that particular
| community.
|
| Forums are making a come back. Manjaro Linux's forums was my
| social media for like 5ish years. Discourse has been dominant
| in this area but I like Flarum which is promising -
| https://flarum.org/.
|
| Social media can cater to a large array of communities but if
| the community needs to grow, they will have to create their
| own platform. Cos social media platforms are general. Many
| will be happy with it. But indie folks, self hosting folks,
| power users and tinkerers will always be there to shuffle
| things up. ;)
|
| There are more to be hopeful than there is for not to be as
| messed up as things might seem. :)
| mymythisisthis wrote:
| I find that community groups that started before Facebook, or
| have avoid Facebook, have done better/do better. With
| Facebook you get locked into using the platform and the group
| doesn't grow. In fact the group just get worse over time as
| original member leave. Content and group information is
| locked into the platform.
|
| Even if a group just sticks to using email, it is better over
| the long term. People in the group are forced to take on
| responsibilities of maintaining the email list and content.
| Passing that information on as they leave. You can also scale
| up the organization, make it more formal. Start collecting
| dues, and paying for server space. People take pride in their
| roles, and the organization.
| amatecha wrote:
| Ah, I love that the top voted comment is someone mentioning
| Hotline. I'm logged into my friend's server - one I've been
| frequenting regularly since it was started in 2001 - at this
| very moment! I also ran my own server for years, of course. I
| really want to build "IRCCloud but for Hotline" sometime. I
| mean, just a basic self-hosted thing to start with. One of
| these days... haha
|
| Recently I've started noticing people hosting gopher sites and
| I've actually noticed two different people specifically
| mentioning they have finger support on their servers! This was
| especially surprising since I haven't heard someone mention
| finger since the 90's. Very cool.
| wizzzzzy wrote:
| Which Hotline client are you using out of interest? I have
| nostalgic memories of using Hotline as a teenager and just
| assumed all clients are now dead in the water.
| aeturnum wrote:
| When I was a freshman in college I ran into an elder geek who
| was dating one of the dorm RAs. They were super cool, had
| neat hobbies, seemed much smarter than me and I was desperate
| to impress them. The only thing I mentioned that made them
| seem to re-evaluate me was when I mentioned spending time on
| hotline. It was a fascinating place around the year 2000!
| mattlondon wrote:
| Shameless plug: I recently wrote a gopher client library for
| Deno, just for fun. https://github.com/matt1/deno-gopher
|
| I also cleaned-up the weird formatting of the Gopher+
| protocol and put it on github as a formatted markdown file
| since it was never and official RFC so trawling through an
| unstructured txt file when trying to implement the protocol
| was a pain: https://github.com/gopher-protocol/gopher-plus
|
| Hope it is useful for someone implementing new gopher code
| like I was! :)
| qwertox wrote:
| The moment you are forced to install WhatsApp because it is the
| way the community decided to communicate about the topic for
| which the group was created, instead of just signing up to a
| site self-hosted by a member via phpBB or some other forum
| software, you'll know what this is about.
|
| Now I'm granting information (IP-Address, rough location with
| it, content of the group) to Facebook without having the
| slightest desire to do this.
| leokennis wrote:
| I do not miss the old internet per se, but I do feel sad that
| in 1997 I had a 56K dial in modem on a Pentium II running
| Internet Explorer and today I have a 1Gbps connection on a M1
| MacBook running a modern browser, and web performance is still
| more or less the same.
|
| Instead of spending our extra processing power and bandwith on
| useful stuff, we spent it on tracking and JS frameworks and
| other bullshit.
| heurisko wrote:
| > sad that in 1997 I had a 56K dial in modem on a Pentium II
| running Internet Explorer and today I have a 1Gbps connection
| on a M1
|
| Images took ages to download on 56k. Performance today is
| vastly better.
|
| There are cases where progress has moved backwards eg. new
| buggy JS Reddit, but I by no means have rose tinted
| spectacles for the past.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| There was a period between 1996-2000 where we had broadband
| and the old web and it was faster than today. But I
| remember an article in Wired around 2000 about two guys
| that owned a diamond business in Canada who moved to L.A.
| to start a dotcom for their business. They moved back to
| Canada after a year and their assessment was the web was
| nothing more than a massive direct marketing platform. I
| wish I can find that article because it was quite
| prophetic.
| piokoch wrote:
| I do understand such people. A lot of forums died, they were
| moved to Facebook groups, since this is so simple to create a
| group. As a result some communities are not accessible or
| annoying to use for those without Facebook.
|
| In Europe GDPR was the last strike, nobody is going to maintain
| forum while being forced to be responsible for "Integrity and
| confidentiality" of registered user's data. Who will risk huge
| fines because phpBB has some bug and "precious" user data like
| first and last name were leaked? Who will deal with "right to
| be forgotten" requests, who will respond with requests to
| download user data and so on - even if software has such
| capabilities, responding to user requests is time consuming and
| big no-no for hobbyists.
|
| End result is that everything that is happening, is happening
| on Facebook, maybe Reddit, obviously there are niches, like HN,
| but there is less and less of them.
| bloak wrote:
| None of what you mentioned sounds particularly onerous. Just
| don't ask for personal data and advise users not to post it.
| Let people delete their own posts and have a way for an
| administrator to delete a post if it might in some way be
| illegal (probably nothing to do with GDPR), and if people
| want to download stuff, tell them to use "wget --mirror". On
| othe other hand, dealing with spammers and eccentric/mad
| troublemakers could be a real headache. The frequency of such
| people probably depends on the topic of your forum.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'd say, with a very exaggerated tone :), it would be like
| saying you can still find trees in New York, so really nothing
| has changed since settlers came.
| root_axis wrote:
| I don't think this is an apt analogy because trees were
| bulldozed to build the city, not true of the internet which
| has essentially infinite real-estate. Nothing was bulldozed
| to create the "new" internet, the new internet was created
| and _new_ people joined it, the old internet just never
| achieved "web scale" and never could because it isn't a
| corporate product being driven by growth hacking and
| marketing spend.
| jefftk wrote:
| Pedantic aside: trees weren't bulldozed to build NYC, they
| were used for lumber and firewood far before the invention
| of the bulldozer.
| root_axis wrote:
| A worthy pedantic aside. Thanks.
| skinkestek wrote:
| An analogy that works here is "used all the oxygen in the
| room".
| root_axis wrote:
| I don't think this is an apt analogy either because it
| still suggests that something was lost, when that's not
| the case, rather the internet _grew_ in new places that
| have come to dwarf the places that came before. The
| overwhelming majority of users on the new internet _didn
| 't exist_ on the old internet.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > I don't think this is an apt analogy either because it
| still suggests that something was lost
|
| Here we disagree and you are wrong ;-)
|
| Of all the old forum lore most of it is lost for the
| overwhelming majority of internet users.
|
| Some copies exist on old drives here and there, some
| exist in the internet archive but nothing has been
| migrated to newer platforms.
|
| Mailing lists were for a long time conserved by Google
| but forums just disappeared.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I mean, of course "something" was lost? But...things were
| lost all of the time at the height of the old internet as
| well. No tech change needed. Communities would rise and
| fall, maintainers would move on and stop making things
| available, etc. It seems to me That is just how things
| change over time.
|
| Like...if IRC was still the height of community, many of
| the IRC communities that were the most popular in 1998
| would still be dead and gone now. Their archives would
| probably still be lost (it's not like we were better at
| archiving then). Like for any particular community that
| you can look back on and see people moving away from it
| into something else, I suspect people would still have
| moved away - they just would have moved away to a new IRC
| instead of...twitter or github or discord or whatever.
|
| It just seems, to me, that people see normal cyclical
| community transition and blame the fact that it happened
| at a time when new kinds of communities were rising. I am
| not convinced that the two have much to do with each
| other.
| pedrocr wrote:
| There's a reasonable argument that we're actually in a
| golden age of forums. Subreddits have allowed many more
| niche communities than before and even traditional style
| forums have prospered in plenty of cases. There is
| definitely migration to newer platforms like Discourse
| and others.
|
| If you think about it with an archivist mindset there are
| definitely plenty that was lost to time. But that will
| happen just from natural churn, even if the total is
| still healthy. And in this case as far as I can tell it
| is healthy. People talk about all kinds of things in
| hosted forums of various kinds. I'd be very surprised if
| the total forum traffic on the internet hasn't been on a
| steady rise forever, it just rises slower than the total.
| agumonkey wrote:
| fair enough, but even on the infinite web, i have a limited
| scope, and it's now filled with lots of annoyances, whereas
| in the past it was effortlessly chill all around
| root_axis wrote:
| You get to decide the scope, so don't fill it with
| annoying things.
| agumonkey wrote:
| that's not true, even if I prune it's still leaking and
| i'm never far from a 'web 2.5' revamp ala reddit
| bottled_poe wrote:
| Sorry if I'm interpreting inaccurately, but this seems
| nostalgic, anecdotal and ignorant of the gravity of social
| network effects. Certainly, communities are more online and
| connected than ever, but the claim from the article of "old
| internet" coming back don't seem substantiated here.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| That's a very charitable assessment. The problem is the
| oversaturation of everything with politics (politics is the
| lowest-common-denominator subject that everyone can argue
| about). The loud politics minorities are so numerous now that
| they can easily sway the attention of even niche communities.
| You can see that most glaringly on reddit where pretty much all
| important conversations are destroyed by becoming the same old
| politics debates, like how /r/technology is politics or
| r/coronavirus is politics . Lots of people stay in HN exactly
| because it moderates against politics but HN exists because YC
| doesn't mind running an unprofitable site.
|
| Most forums shut down because they are unsustainable, and the
| reason they are unsustainable is that the current mobile/social
| media vortex is hoovering all the attention. This leads to a
| negative spiral where people don't make good self-hosted forum
| software / community software anymore and so on.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I do think that the way politics interacts with communities
| has changed over time, though I think that has been driven by
| how the US and Europe (where most community members live)
| political climates have changed?
|
| > _The loud politics minorities are so numerous now that they
| can easily sway the attention of even niche communities._
|
| I kinda know what you mean, but my memory of the 90s / early
| 2000s is that loud political minorities were everywhere and
| commonly created a lot of drama in communities. It was just
| rare-er for...the moderators to step in? Often because they
| were the loud political minority who had opinions that people
| felt were divisive.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| > HN moderates against politics
|
| I would push back on this quite a bit. Many of the posts and
| discussions on HN are political masquerading as science.
| taubek wrote:
| I do feel nostalgic about old days (I got on Internet in mid
| 90s) but as Internet has grown and matured so have I. I've
| never played MUD but I've used IRC a lot :)
|
| Internet is now so much more than it used to be. Before you had
| to have much more knowledge to accomplish some things. It was
| not hard to learn but it was not accessible to everyone.
|
| I see it like fetching a water from the creek or turning on the
| tap in your kitchen. You will get water in both cases. The
| first one requires more effort.
| wruza wrote:
| You're describing the internet 15 years ago. Today you come
| to the kitchen, and it is full of people between you and the
| tap. Walls are littered with advertisements, and all those
| people ask you if you want to try their water. Look, my water
| has no asbestos, only 2.79$/lbs. Wait, wait, I know
| everything about water, it consists of hydroxidegenium atoms,
| which Archimedes invented 3570BC, so.... Wait, did you know
| you can make water yourself? I'll show you but you must
| subscribe for great watering courses. No, stop all of that.
| iWater. Just water. A golden touch-tap that can only be on
| and off, _that_ simple (30% of your pie is ours).
|
| When you're away in the creek, they are discussing whether
| using creek water and locking them in the kitchen is at all
| legal or moral. Do you even have any idea how much all that
| costs to them, freepourer?
| taubek wrote:
| I was referring to the fact is that Internet has become a
| basic infrastructure this days and people just use it. They
| don't ask or understand "where does it come from". They
| just use it. When you are born into something ("digital
| natives" as some call them) you don't even consider how it
| used to be. Current state is normal for you. This is your
| starting point and you build upon it. Same as electricity,
| you turn the switch and the light is on.
|
| I had a black and white TV with no remote for most of my
| child hood. I remember it with nostalgy but I don't miss
| it. I had a TV with cathode tube until some 4 years ago.
| Then I switched to LCD TV but I had LCD monitor for some
| 16-17 years at the same time.
| peakaboo wrote:
| We didnt have giant tech companies saving every search, every
| click you do, selling/giving your personal and private
| information to advertising and intelligence agencies.
|
| We also didn't have this kind of massive centralization where
| most of the global internet traffic goes to Google, Netflix,
| Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc.
|
| Sure you can find tiny spots on the Internet with 10 people.
| It's still not the same at all as to what is used to be.
| questiondev wrote:
| i think they are referring what we use to be allowed to say in
| chat channels and on forums. it was a lot more raw, a lot of
| offended people starting getting online and treating the
| internet like it was real life, part of the beauty of the
| internet was how non-regulated it was, granted the quality has
| gotten better, safer spaces for things like business, finance
| and other sensitive information but we also lost the jokes that
| the internet use to have, on the main channels at least. back
| in the day you could get kicked from a mainstream irc channel
| but it too a lottttt to get banned from an irc network or even
| an online forum. which granted you can still find sub
| communities like you mention that still cater to hacking, off
| jokes and crazy information but it's not tolerated on the main
| channels of communication like before, which is fine for people
| who weren't into that stuff because it didn't change for them.
| but overall there has been changes, not terrible but def not
| the same as irc/usenet/bbs's during their hayday. information
| was widely accessible but a lot of it is a paywall these days,
| also torrenting was a lot more common and i could call someone
| a moron without getting flagged. but yeah we still got some
| freedom and there are better quality services in some ways, i
| guess it just depends on your personality and how much it has
| limited expressing ones self authentically.
| dudouble wrote:
| I mostly agree with your points, but I click upvote for your
| last sentence.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Well, the old internet was much about communities and
| enthusiasm. And these communities were diverse. It was feasible
| to operate your own blog server, where original content was
| published.
|
| You either knew your communities through hear-say or search
| engines (read "The" search engine) found them. For a long time
| advertisement or the "attention economy" was not a thing.
|
| Nowadays original content is hard to find and very much
| concentrated: Reddit, Stackoverflow. As search engines no
| longer seem to find relevant content from sites which do not
| pay add fees, there is no traffic to these sites.
|
| In a sense money made the internet thrive and ruined a lot at
| the same time.
| nuccy wrote:
| For me the enthusiasm part was very important in car DIY
| forums, communities of which nowadays moved not even to
| facebook groups but to messengers. Which in a first glance
| sounds great, since you can be assisted in real time. But in
| reality what was created in messengers remains there never
| being indexed by search engines so the knowledge cannot be
| shared with non-members.
| yvdriess wrote:
| Old internet is where entering the name of a product would
| yield reviews or discussions about the product.
|
| New internet is where any useful information about said
| product gets buried in marketplaces and producer pages,
| following half a dozen paid-for ads.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Old Internet was where the primary content was content.
|
| Ads appeared as a curiosity in 1994 but didn't start taking
| over until around '96, which is when the ad networks
| started to become more industrialised with tracking and ROI
| metrics (of a sort).
|
| New Internet is where the primary content is ads and
| behaviour mod. Virtually all big-reach content is only
| there to make the ads and behaviour mod work.
|
| And of course the goal of Meta is to personalise ad
| delivery even further and make it even more intrusive and
| impossible to ignore.
|
| This isn't just a technical difference. There's a huge
| difference in culture and motivation. Old Internet was
| about exploration, play, and sometimes debate. New Internet
| is about exploitation, driven by psychological and
| emotional manipulation.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I agree with you in that there are still any number of small
| communities pretty comparable to what was on the "old"
| internet, including as you say, on the servers still running on
| the old applications.
|
| The main difference would be on accessibility, where the "old"
| internet were mainstream services that people just flocked to
| almost by default, while now you have to do your homework to
| join communities that will match the same criteria.
|
| It is not old at all, but to me Reddit is a good representation
| of that: at some point it was small enough you'd just go there
| and find something interesting. From there the communities
| stayed, but you had to heavily filter what you wanted to see.
| And now you'll be using specific clients, disable the crap in
| your settings, force the old interface, or any of the trick du
| jour to keep having a sane experience.
| jchw wrote:
| I do agree that the "old" internet is not totally dead, but in
| my case communities I used to be in and even a couple I had
| direct involvement in were gutted because people left in favor
| of participating in communities via websites like Twitter. IRC
| channels I was in dwindled in numbers, draining instead to
| massive Discord servers.
|
| The thing is, the "old" Internet was _always_ somewhat anemic
| compared to the "new" Internet. It was never all that big. IRC
| channels I was in that felt like communities would stay dead
| for hours at a time, and sometimes topped out at under 100
| members. Yet, they had a feeling of community that I rarely
| experience much on today's internet.
|
| With how many people are on the Internet today, you'd expect
| that this standard could be upheld even with minimal
| participation, but I find that not only are there less people
| participating in the "old" internet, but also in addition to
| that, the people still participating have far less of their
| attention and time dedicated to it. As it was, the "old"
| Internet was, as many things are, powered by the unpaid time
| and effort of a relatively small number of people. Those people
| still exist, but their attention is far more divided. There's
| just more stuff going on overall. The "new" internet allures
| people with more "passive" participation vs the active
| participation that was often demanded by forums and IRC
| channels.
|
| As an icing on the shit cake, you link to Fandom/Wikia as a
| community hub. Fandom and its behavior has torn apart a lot of
| smaller communities with its practices. See, for example, what
| happened when the Touhou wiki's community collectively decided
| they no longer wanted to be on Wikia: old administrators were
| banned, new ones were appointed by staff, and now the site is
| effectively forked. Apparently, if a wiki is too important for
| ad revenue, the admins will literally just fork your site. Of
| course, I'm not saying they did anything illegal, but what they
| did is a major fuck you to the community that poured hours of
| work into the site. It would be like a forum host that decides
| to ban all of the admins and appoint its own in their place.
| Maybe a bit like Reddit...
|
| While I don't know exactly how much and why the "old" internet
| is dead, I do have my suspicions that it has a lot to do with
| the evolution of monetization on the internet. My hope is that
| the patron model can help here...
| ahefner wrote:
| What's the deal with these wiki sites that seem to consist
| entirely of user generated content, but absolutely bury it
| under mountains of ads? How do these places exist, and why do
| people continue to contribute to them?
| account42 wrote:
| One reason they _continue_ to exist is because Google will
| often rank the add-laden Wikia site higher than the
| respective community-organized wiki.
| pferde wrote:
| Websites with mountains of ads have simply become normal
| and accepted. It's sad, but it happened.
| jchw wrote:
| Wikia started out very differently. It became what it was
| slowly, over a long period of time.
|
| Miraheze is now the preferred wiki host of community-driven
| sites, I hope that it will not eventually transform into
| Wikia/Fandom.
|
| Many of the other "wiki" sites on the net are just
| rehosting GFDL content and slapping ads on them, then
| trying to SEO to get ahead of real wikis. Blame Google for
| not coming up with a good solution on that one, IMO.
| bri3d wrote:
| Hmm. I have pretty much the same kinds of interactions on
| private Discord servers which I had on IRC 20 years ago.
|
| It's harder to find particularly skilled or like minded
| people in some niche areas or fields, but with simply more
| people online, this seems inevitable - more haystack to sift
| through. Of course there are worrying corporatization or
| centralization arguments vs. IRC, but ultimately the end
| result doesn't feel that different to me in terms of
| community.
|
| I'm not really involved in any fan communities or anything a
| Wikia would involve, so I can't comment on that facet.
|
| I suppose for what I do (reverse engineering hobby stuff,
| mostly), what would have been a "team" or "group" blog site,
| possibly with some useful collaboration plugins or the like,
| is now a GitHub repo, but that's more of a convenience than a
| drawback compared to the "old" Internet to me.
|
| Overall, it does seem like things are more centralized and
| therefore a bit less unique, but at the same time, I have to
| spend less time securing bespoke web servers, buying crappy
| VPS hosting, and dealing with routine maintenance and setup
| to collaborate with like-minded people on projects.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Yah - there was a "collective social moment" that was how
| people came together around exciting new (at the times)
| forms. That's a kind of irreplaceable moment that is always
| happening for some community somewhere, but it never lasts
| forever and it always moves around with the times.
|
| I know what you mean and I am also nostalgic about it - but
| my life has also changed and I suspect that my nostalgia for
| times gone by involves nostolgia for that moment in my life.
| Even if there was the same energy around the places I hung
| out in the late-90s and early-2000s, I would not be there as
| much or with the same aims.
|
| > _you link to Fandom /Wikia as a community hub._
|
| Oh man, I was not intending to link to them as a community
| hub. It was the first source I found that indexed some
| current Hotline trackers and clients. But I think the Fandom
| treatment of communities is informative of how the times have
| changed.
|
| I think, 20 years ago, this information would have been
| stored on a server maintained with the sweat and love of a
| single individual. Sometimes real collectives existed, but I
| found them to be rare. Often, if that person got distracted,
| or found new interests, we could lose a useful source (and
| for people in the community enough - a friend). Now there are
| commercial entities that will "preserve" that information
| while cutting the community out entirely. Like you I am not
| sure that is "better" - but it did allow me to find a list of
| Hotline clients in ~10 minutes of searching, and I suspect
| the "real" Hotline community is still _on hotline_ as it was
| before.
|
| So...I do think it depends on where you see the old internet.
| People do different things as passion projects now. I have
| found that I can go back and find many of the things I see
| other people mourn as lost, and I am sorry to hear that you
| have not had the same experience.
|
| Writing my first post made me go find this - it's a web
| player that collects thousands of keygen MIDIs:
| https://keygenmusic.tk/# (using the hard work of the good
| people at http://www.keygenmusic.net/?lang=en - donate if you
| like the music!)
| drewcoo wrote:
| > I have never understood people . . . because I do not feel .
| . .
|
| I think I've spotted the problem!
| aeturnum wrote:
| You caught me! I am actually a terminator. :)
| sitta wrote:
| I discovered a Dave Gahan fan site [1] last year that looked like
| it was a holdover from "the old internet". I loved it and was
| even more delighted when I discovered it was created in 2021 [2]:
|
| > I realize that static websites like this were more popular in
| the internet's early days, long before the rise of social media
| and the emergence of user-created Wikis, and have now somewhat
| fallen out of fashion. However, there were a lot of static
| websites like this dedicated to Dave Gahan and Depeche Mode back
| then that had a level of quality that I just don't see nowadays.
| Sadly, many of them have disappeared or have been abandoned.
| There is something to be missed about websites like those,
| though, with their eye-catching graphics and pile of links that
| took you on a journey as if you were walking through a museum,
| and I want to bring that experience back through this website, as
| outdated as that experience may very well be.
|
| Beautiful. Bring back the old internet.
|
| [1] https://www.davegahandevotion.com/
|
| [2] https://www.davegahandevotion.com/site/about.php
| aluminussoma wrote:
| The Internet today feels like a big box strip mall in suburbia.
| While visiting my home town, I looked for a local, independent
| hardware store. There was only Home Depot and Lowe's. Then I
| realize how few independent businesses were left.
|
| On the Internet, you have Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook,
| Twitter. Much of the good content is hidden in their secret
| gardens (Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly Reddit).
|
| Discovery needs to be reimagined. Google search directs traffic
| but now everyone has a SEO manager to get their site to the top.
| If we want to see the Internet like before, original content
| needs to be prioritized over content like Pinterest, without
| needing to do anything special.
| nullwarp wrote:
| Discovery really is hands down the biggest issue. I follow a
| lot of cool blogs and read a lot of neat stuff from them, but I
| found them mostly by stumbling upon them on Mastodon.
|
| Actually side note one of my favorite ways to kill time is by
| going to https://wiby.me and hitting "Surprise me" and reading
| whatever comes up. I've really discovered some quirky but
| extremely fun spots on the web with it.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I think this is exactly the wrong way around. Discoverability
| is the _cause_ of the destruction of original content on the
| internet, because as soon as something is discoverable it turns
| commercial and mainstream and gets blown up.
|
| Niche internet communities could exist when they weren't
| discoverable because that was the only reason people who mess
| them up stayed out of them. Keyword 'Eternal September'.
|
| The internet is now almost entirely transparent and everything
| that is transparent is uninteresting, because the eyes of
| everyone are on it, and nothing that's actually fun ever
| happens in public.
| [deleted]
| ravenstine wrote:
| > On the Internet, you have Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook,
| Twitter. Much of the good content is hidden in their secret
| gardens (Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly Reddit).
|
| Is it really? I think that was true for a period of time, but
| that period had come and gone for the most part.
|
| Google searches are pretty bad, and it's only a matter of time
| before it even loses its remaining relevance with normies.
|
| Amazon, I can't really find much wrong with to be honest.
|
| Reddit hung itself by its own rope with its redesign that
| turned it into yet another infinite scroll content site, taking
| the focus away from conversations and to memes and gifs. The
| site is a garbage can, and it's mostly crazies who are left.
| Reddit will remain relevant until people no longer use it as an
| alternative for finding real opinions that they can't find
| using Google. Its days are definitely numbered in terms of
| relevancy. _You know it 's bad when you're on your home feed
| and they shove in a live cam of a girl jiggling her rear end
| that you never subscribed to._
|
| Facebook? I know almost no one under 60 who actually uses it or
| makes posts. Everyone's moved on to Instagram. I have 20
| cousins and we communicate through Messenger (not my idea, I'd
| prefer Signal at least), but even a handful of them aren't even
| on Messenger anymore. Most of the groups are crap, though the
| Marketplace is halfway decent, which isn't hard to do when your
| only competition is Craigslist.
|
| Twitter has remained relevant because of celebrities and
| journalists, and fewer and fewer people care about either of
| those groups anymore. More alternatives for different niches
| are going to pop up and while Twitter will never go away, it's
| well on its way to being nothing more than a sad joke.
|
| > Discovery needs to be reimagined.
|
| Right-o. As someone pointed out the other day, I think big
| search engines in their current form are on the way out.
| Hopefully we can move on to something that can rely on
| independent niche search engines instead of allowing
| megacorporations to be the gateway to the web. At this point
| I'm either using `site:` syntax with DDG or using the search
| features directly on certain sites. The only search terms I
| seem to get much useful for with DDG or Google is coding
| documentation. Anything else seems rigged and controlled.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > Discovery needs to be reimagined. Google search directs
| traffic but now everyone has a SEO manager to get their site to
| the top. If we want to see the Internet like before, original
| content needs to be prioritized over content like Pinterest,
| without needing to do anything special.
|
| Discoverability is a big part of why the independent web is
| struggling. And it's not just big tech's fault, people are
| really bad at linking to each other. I've been trying to raise
| awareness about this[1] and it has made a bit of a difference
| and a couple of dozen sites have taken me up on my call to
| action, but people are still really shy about linking to pages
| they like even though I'm sure nobody minds getting linked to.
|
| Overall I feel classic search as well as community aggregation
| (like reddit) suffers from being too manipulable. You just
| can't find good content produced by humans over there anymore.
|
| I've been experimenting with various alternative paradigms. I
| think there probably is a better way, but I honestly don't
| quite know what the answer is just yet. You've got to contend
| with link rot as well, which is the bane of manual curation.
|
| [1] https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/19-website-
| discoverability-c...
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Yeah a lot of the aggregating effects start from search
| engines, which is why SEO rankings are such a big deal.
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| I definitely agree with this point. Discovery in the long-
| tail of content (without resorting to sort by new which is a
| nightmare) is a must solve problem in a
| independent/decentralized web.
|
| I have a feeling the "answer" is "all of the above" options;
| the ability to choose what discovery/recommendation
| mechanisms to use. Being intentional about which lens your
| viewing your recommendations through. Being able to easily
| swap between lens. Allowing for corporation owned lens and
| community owned lens. Allowing yourself to look at an issue
| through the lens of an individual or institution that you
| trust.
|
| > people are really bad at linking to each other I wonder if
| the underlying point here is that the initial set of
| recommendations comes from small "communities". The readers
| of a certain blog suggest similar content to others in a non-
| spammy way. An independent music label links to artists that
| they enjoy listening to. I think there's missing
| infrastructure that makes it hard to form these communities
| though; any barrier to entry makes it less useful. I could
| see the "web3 ownership economy" thing helping here if it
| ever becomes a thing; creating this infrastructure as a side
| effect of the other stuff they want to accomplish. It'd be
| like if a subreddit was automatically created for every
| content creator, which could then be used to find
| recommendations of similar content.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| I was reading a security paper today that made a killer
| observation about trust infrastructure: public trust
| systems will always succumb to problems of informational
| asymmetry (moral hazard, adverse selection) so responsible
| users must always rely on private trust assessments first.
|
| Same problem with information discovery--trust, reputation,
| it's all the same social mechanism. Any public signaling
| will be degraded by information asymmetry. My point is that
| content discovery is a hard problem.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > public trust systems will always succumb to problems of
| informational asymmetry (moral hazard, adverse selection)
|
| Ironically, this is something that the "smart contracts"
| powering some future development of Web 3.0 might
| eventually solve. By making it possible to verifiably put
| real-world money behind one's assertions and trust
| assessments, these problems are significantly reduced.
| beej71 wrote:
| I think I'm misunderstanding. Wouldn't this just make us
| trust the people with the most money?
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Being charitable I think they mean some sort of betting
| site where people put money behind opinions and lose it
| if they are wrong or gain it if they are correct. Giving
| a sort of wisdom of the crowds. This of course is still
| subject to some authority who can say what is right or
| wrong on any particular issue so doesn't escape the trust
| problem. Also the credulousness of the current crypto
| users makes me question how valuable any signal from it
| would actually be.
|
| The idea of merely trusting people because they've spent
| money is hilarious in the face of propaganda and
| advertising.
| naasking wrote:
| > Being charitable I think they mean some sort of betting
| site where people put money behind opinions and lose it
| if they are wrong or gain it if they are correct. Giving
| a sort of wisdom of the crowds.
|
| They're called prediction markets, and they already
| exist!
|
| * https://www.predictit.org
|
| * https://www.metaculus.com/questions/
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Ahh, creeping dystopia!
| naasking wrote:
| I dunno, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea.
| Exploiting the wisdom of the crowds to make predictions
| could be a very good thing in fact. Unfortunately they
| fall afoul of gambling laws in some states/countries, so
| they're pretty limited right now. Scott does a decent
| overview here:
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/metaculus-monday
| jollybean wrote:
| Discovery is an existential issue for the net now, it wasn't
| back when it started, because there are 100000x more places
| to go these days.
|
| The old web was simple, but it was also small.
| president wrote:
| A big problem today is that platforms only highlight only
| popular/trendy or paid content. What I would like to see are
| platforms that give regular people a chance either through
| chronological or random discovery. There is so much great
| content out there that doesn't make it into the limelight
| because of algorithm bias or because creators don't have the
| money/resources to boost their content.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah I think the long tail really suffers with a lot of
| popularity algorithms. Instead of a mixed bag with a bit for
| everyone you get the absolute lowest common denominator.
| giantrobot wrote:
| The long tail isn't in unalloyed good for producers of long
| tail content/products. While _some_ sales /views are better
| than no sales/views no individual site is making bank on
| sales.
|
| It's great if you're Amazon or Google Ads which basically
| _serve_ the long tail. They benefit from the entire tail.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| That's assuming there is something to sell.
|
| A page like this is absolutely fascinating, but not
| something you'd ever find on the major platforms, and
| also isn't helped at all by Google Ads:
| http://www.jamesriser.com/Machinery/Machinery.html
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Such a good way to put it. I couldn't agree more.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The problem is, a lot of the content quality is pretty bad. I
| remember being a kid in the '90s and viewing page after
| Geocities page on "Pokemon hacks" which were collections of
| hearsay versions of what is now known as MissingNo hack, many
| of which were just plain incorrect. Some of these sites would
| ask people to send in $5 to get access to the hacks (which was
| obviously a scam.) The reason the SNR of independent sites is
| so high these days is because independent sites aren't under
| any competitive pressure; they're often made specifically to
| avoid dealing with the corporate web. A world made up of
| independent websites would suffer the same incentive and spam
| problems that today's walled gardens face, with none of the
| walled garden protections.
|
| Incentivizing good behavior and disincentivizing bad behavior
| has _always_ been the challenge on the net. People are getting
| emotional about SNR on the Web these days because it's much
| more ubiquitous in our lives, but Usenet and Email suffered
| from the same spam problems the web faces. Usenet faded away
| but Email also became, in practice, highly centralized the way
| the Web became, because the problem of spam (whether commercial
| or by crazies) is so hard to fight.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| We're human beings. For the best of us, 90% of the
| conversations and thoughts we have are junk and most of us
| are worse than that.
|
| Always has been. Probably always will be.
|
| Expecting any internet community to put out more than 10% of
| good content is an exercise in futility. The only reason why
| it seemed so much more engrossing and interesting when you
| arrived on the scene is that you had not acclimated to the
| room yet, and you were consuming the best, easiest to acquire
| thought morsels that the community had scrounged out of the
| trough and recycled until it could stand the test of time
| within that community.
|
| Then, once you have consumed that bit of the best, you think
| the rest would be like that as well but instead you find
| yourself in a room full of people who all know the same
| things and think similar thoughts, and you season along with
| them, getting the better secondary and tertiary thought
| morsels, and maybe contributing some yourself. And then,
| finally, you see bright fresh faces coming in, following the
| same trail you followed, coming to the same wrong conclusions
| you came to, and you think, "There goes the neighborhood" and
| tell yourself how good it used to be when you were ignorant
| and didn't know any better.
|
| Eventually you reach the next point, which is realizing that
| it was always like this. You just didn't know any better. Now
| you know better, and you also know there is nothing you can
| do about it. You can stay and help others enjoy their Halcyon
| days, or you can flee in search of greener pastures.
|
| Suffice it to say, the internet has always been terrible and
| it has always been great, because it's full of people.
| danvayn wrote:
| We can try to be better. DAOs or some form of self-governing
| community are a strong option.
|
| If done correctly, they can provide the 'manual moderation'
| needed for these smaller communities.
| m-i-l wrote:
| I used a "high street filled with shops" vs "public library
| filled with books" analogy for the current internet vs old
| internet a year or so back:
|
| " ...imagine you live in a town which has a high street filled
| with shops trying to sell you things, and a public library
| filled with books trying to tell you things. If you want to buy
| something you go down the high street to look at the shops, and
| if you want to read something you go into the library to look
| for a book. Both activities can co-exist - good libraries do
| not put shops out of business or vice versa. But you don't want
| both activities to happen at the same time - you don't want a
| library filled with salespeople trying to get between you and
| your books, because that would be distinctly unhelpful at best
| and downright annoying at worst. The problem is that the
| internet has turned into a city that is all shops and no
| libraries. Not even local independent shops at that, just giant
| out-of-town retail malls... "[0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25454867
| aunty_helen wrote:
| _cough_ Look at the forest you 're in.
|
| Everybody mourning the "old" internet while posting on a text
| only news board with a great community of people, constant
| traffic, new inspiring stuff daily and best of all without ads or
| pervasive trackers.
| toto444 wrote:
| Also the top link right now is pointing to a forum :
| https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/2022-01-25-issue-with-tl...
| squarefoot wrote:
| Slightly related: I may want to contribute to the cause by
| building a very small personal site on a broadband connection
| (unfiltered public dynamic IP plus DuckDns) after I solve some
| health problems and relocate, hopefully within a few months. If
| I'm lucky I should get a better connection than the roughly
| 60down/22up I have now, which would seem ridiculous for that use,
| but I'd make a strictly static site, no Javascript, small images
| and no or extremely small downloads (torrent might help for
| bigger ones, if any). I don't plan to build any community around
| it, just to document projects I would discuss on newsgroups and
| possibly here, so no user input would be involved. Anyone here
| who had a similar experience can share more information, caveats,
| suggest tools, etc? Thanks.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Are you saying 22Mbps upload is ridiculous for hosting a
| website? I may be parsing your comment wrong...
|
| Anyways if it's a static site with little JS and not too many
| smallish images, that'll be plenty of bandwidth for a personal
| site. If a page load is 1MB (that's a lot for this sort of
| website!) that'll let you serve up to ~2.75 requests per
| second/86.4k requests per day which is a lot of traffic! And if
| the burst is double that, then your page load will merely take
| twice as long.
| mrlemke wrote:
| Apache with server side includes (SSI) will allow you to
| quickly and easily template websites without adding new tools
| or processes. I find this to be a decent balance between a
| static site and DRY. I don't care for most static site
| generators since I prefer to write my site content in HTML as
| much as possible.
|
| For example, your index.html may look like:
| <!-- #include virtual="/top.html" --> <h1>My Website</h1>
| <p>A bunch of content</p> <!-- #include
| virtual="/bottom.html" -->
|
| top.html could be something like: <html>
| <head> <title>My Website</title> <!--other
| header info --> </head> <body>
|
| And for bottom.html: <footer>
| <!-- footer stuff --> </footer> </body>
| </html>
| riantogo wrote:
| I hope it is true. I have been nostalgic about old school forums
| and during covid lock down built a platform for anyone to host
| one (and hopefully make meaningful revenue). However, I'm finding
| it really difficult to get traction. I hope it is because of my
| poor marketing skills and not because no one really cares for the
| old internet beyond some fond memories.
| jabbany wrote:
| I feel like this article doesn't address the reason why people
| moved away from the "old" Internet --- most people only care
| about their _content_ not the particular technology that backs
| it.
|
| In the old times, you could only host content if you were really
| good with the technology. The people who had websites were people
| who knew how to set up and run a web server, and to compose the
| HTML content that was being served. Similarly, communities who
| ran BBS forums, mailing lists, IRC, etc. all needed at least some
| people who could set up and manage the technology for them.
|
| Centralized services (Web 2.0) changed that. Now all of a sudden
| you didn't need to run your server --- you could just type some
| text and click some buttons to put up a blog on a shared service
| (myspace? blogger? wordpress.com?). You didn't need to run your
| own forum or mailing list or chat rooms, you could just put your
| community on an existing service that provided that (Google
| groups, FB/Whatsapp/<insert your IM> Chat). Need a forum? You
| have reddit. What is Twitter if not just a collection of mailing
| lists that you can openly subscribe to but not post on?
| Centralization allowed the vast majority of people to do what
| they wanted to do while "outsourcing" the technology part to
| somebody else, because most people don't care about the
| technology they care about their content.
|
| The problem with the modern decentralized web (3.0?) is that we
| haven't focused on solving the real problem --- making it easy to
| manipulate _content_. If anything, setting up a Web 3.0 presence
| is _harder_ than it was on a centralized service, and as long as
| it remains harder, the new "old" Internet will always be a niche.
| alfl wrote:
| For now. My company kubelt.com is fixing this.
| jonwalch wrote:
| Your white paper isn't loading for me. Is there somewhere
| else I can read it?
| alfl wrote:
| How's this?
|
| http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNfXy5uCQjEWabnAsvJJPGkKNc6wSZu9M9w2cN
| x...
| alfl wrote:
| Latest is on GH: https://github.com/kubelt/whitepaper/blo
| b/main/kubelt_whitep...
| lioeters wrote:
| 404 Not Found - That repo doesn't exist, or maybe is
| private
| Gareth321 wrote:
| I fully agree. Technical people often get lost in the weeds. I
| recall someone trying to extoll the virtues of a self-hosted
| YouTube alternative (the name escapes me). To him it was
| _clearly_ superior to YouTube. So I installed the solution, and
| spent an hour trying to set up and subscribe to the required
| indexing services. I gave up and went back to this person and
| explained that no one is going to spend even _10_ minutes
| messing around if they just want to see funny cat videos.
|
| I've built my career on trying to explain this human element to
| technical people, and if anything, my job security only
| improves year over year. I see this same attitude in the Linux
| community: a willingness to work around UX issues because of
| perceived benefits in other areas. This is why Linux remains
| such a niche OS for consumers. No user should ever, for any
| reason ever, have to open a CLI to install a program. But try
| arguing that on any distro forum and expect a world of hurt.
| diamondage wrote:
| Whilst we can debate whether open source is better or worse
| code, noone debates whether open source has better or worse
| ux/ui. Clunky UI is what we expect from open source
| projects...if web 3.0 could create incentives for this
| phenomena to change.. It would be a lot more interesting
| jeltz wrote:
| This is not true at all in all areas, especially not for
| tools aimed at devs. PostgreSQL has way better UX than any
| commercial database I have used.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _In the old times, you could only host content if you were
| really good with the technology. The people who had websites
| were people who knew how to set up and run a web server, and to
| compose the HTML content that was being served._
|
| I don't see what's particularly difficult with hosting a static
| or mostly-static site, and why you'd have to be really good
| with it (many early content creators weren't). With Apache
| shared hosting (where your domain, certificates/acme, and basic
| htaccess are setup for you), this is a matter of putting a
| couple of HTML and optional CSS files into your document root
| via ftp/sftp back in the day, or scp, or WebDAV. And HTML is
| really not that complex a format (or at least used to be before
| responsive/mobile web), being based on SGML which was designed
| as structured text format that can be created with a plain text
| editor in a way that's being taught in secondary school for
| decades now, and tips available in magazines etc.
| largely_sitting wrote:
| Its the data centers that are going to be responsible for end
| of web2, when they figure out they can undercut web2 and offer
| a continuous federated open data storage system and virtual
| machine. Advertisers will pay them for access directly. Google,
| Meta, would just be third party indexing services.
| lovemenot wrote:
| At best that could be only marginally profitable. Such a
| service would have to be a commodity in order to be
| interoperable. If it _could_ have high margins the index
| owners such as Meta would keep it in-house. As long as they
| control the services users want, they control the market.
|
| Your prediction could come to pass only in the case of the
| open backend being tied to a massively popular service that
| could compete with those giants
| intrepidhero wrote:
| And I think the heart of it is that most people working in this
| space want that. They want the niche back.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Today I see some people spend more effort tailoring their
| content to a specific platform than I spent inside FrontPage
| (yes, I know) and uploading the files to my ISP-hosted website.
| Which, unlike some of these platforms is still up, despite me
| not having touched it for two decades and having changed ISPs
| like a dozen times since. (But maybe I just got lucky with that
| ISP ?)
| mikotodomo wrote:
| toto444 wrote:
| How many of you mourning the old internet frequent neocities or
| have their own personal website ? I don't think the the answer is
| 'a lot'.
|
| Everyone on HN complains about everything being turned into a
| business but everyone also wants to create their own start up and
| turn it into a unicorn.
| eitland wrote:
| I'm at http://erik.itland.no and also my old blog is available
| online at https://techinorg.blogspot.com
|
| I also have a mastodon account.
|
| I'll happily make money from my efforts, but my thoughts goes
| in direction of creating something useful and offer hosting for
| it, not ads. So far I have created "nothing" (at most something
| I created was used by up to maybe a couple of hundred happy
| souls for some years to simplify the life of a local community,
| and I didn't make any money from it).
|
| I simultaneously want to downvote you for your dismissive
| attitude towards everyone here while I also want to upvote you
| to bring all examples provided to the front. I chose to upvote
| but now you know the reason.
|
| Also remember: many people here are shy and won't post so I
| think there is probably a lot more going on.
| cobbaut wrote:
| No.
|
| I have several personal websites, the oldest contains some fun
| and personal stuff since 1997
| (https://web.archive.org/web/*/cobbaut.be) that is still found.
| One other contains books that I write and give as pdf for free
| (linux-training.be).
| paganel wrote:
| Just for anecdotical purposes, I do have/host a few of my
| personal projects on a dedicated Linode which I've had since
| the summer of 2011, that's more than 10 years now (wow! times
| does fly).
|
| Never ever have I thought of "monetising" them, I mean, even if
| I wanted that I don't see there being that big of a market for
| people interested in the location of Medieval villages in
| Walachia (even though some of them had first been mentioned in
| documents written during Vlad the Impaler's reign, maybe I
| could market that) nor for knowing where exactly were the
| locations and houses that used to belong to former Bucharest
| Jewish residents (that is until they were nationalised post-
| WW2), as I also have an interactive map for that.
|
| I've worked for most of my career (~15 years now) in start-ups
| and small companies (that's what I think actually made me
| pursue those personal projects, I think working in a big
| company/corporation would have numbed me down) and I don't
| personally find unicorns that interesting, there's one located
| just down the street where I daily walk my dog and I don't feel
| any need to stand behind a big thing like that, I would have
| way less time to walk my dog plus I'd feel that experience
| would also numb me down, in a different way from working in a
| corporation, but numb me down nevertheless.
| nils-m-holm wrote:
| Anecdatum: I have maintained my web site since 1995 and have my
| own domain since 1999 (http://t3x.org). I have never had a
| "business" nor have I dreamt about big money. Give me back the
| old internet anytime!
| toto444 wrote:
| I like your 'Who am I page'.
|
| I have started an 'old internet' like website about 3 years
| ago and I love working on it. It is my space of creativity
| and freedom. If you want to check it out it is in my bio.
|
| I think the reality is that no one really want these websites
| anymore.
| verytrivial wrote:
| ... well there goes my weekend. Great looking site!
| [deleted]
| galoisgirl wrote:
| 1995 webmasters unite!
| ekanes wrote:
| "who am I" is fantastic. Thank you.
|
| http://t3x.org/whoami.html
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| Love your book covers and your book Lisp From Nothing was a
| fun read. Thank you.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > How many of you mourning the old internet frequent neocities
| or have their own personal website ? I don't think the the
| answer is 'a lot'.
|
| I don't, but I've been meaning to have one for a long time now.
| I even started and got a vps from hetzner but they blocked me.
| I can't really decide where or how I want to host it.
|
| > Everyone on HN complains about everything being turned into a
| business but everyone also wants to create their own start up
| and turn it into a unicorn.
|
| That's not true at all. Today I want creative communities and
| community-built software & hardware projects more than ever. I
| wouldn't mind having my own business that is beneficial to a
| community (same way e.g. how Olimex or Raspberry and PCB
| manufacturers are beneficial to people building open source
| hardware and don't have the means to fabricate circuit boards
| at home) but I don't think everything should be monetized and
| turned into business.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Best analysis I've read on HN in a long while. Straight to the
| point. My generation (the people between 35 and 50) is the most
| nostalgic about the good ole Web of yore, yet we are the
| generation that turned it into the ad-ridden cesspool we
| currently complain about. What we're missing is not the
| Internet-that-was, rather our ability to spend time on useless
| projects in a wilder environment without thinking about the
| economic implication. In a way we just miss being young. Our
| only advantage was that our parents' generation mostly didn't
| know what we were doing (especially here in Europe), so they
| certainly didn't expect for us to get a dime out of that
| blipety-bloop computers or whatever-they're-doing-in-their-
| room. The good news is that a big part of that Web is still
| alive, in different ways, in small secluded forums and
| communities, inside multiplayer gaming platforms, and so on.
| The problem is that today EVERYTHING can be monetized, and
| everyone is sort of expected to do that. Just remove the layer
| that tech capitalism has ingrained in our brain, and you'll see
| the old internet is still here. We just changed, and capitalism
| adapted is all. Do something for the sake of doing it. On the
| Internet or otherwise, and you'll magically get back at least a
| sliver of that feeling you're missing.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Well said too.
|
| Those NOT doing what is "expected" of "big money" need to a
| better ways to connect, support each other and work togther
| against those expectations.
| blacklight wrote:
| I've been running my own self-hosted blog server, IRC server,
| git server and (more recently) Nextcloud server for almost two
| decades. And I definitely have no interest in turning them into
| unicorns: they're just my space on the Internet, and not
| everyone is willing to turn their houses into party mansions.
| Most importantly, nobody but myself (or maybe a massive DNS/BGP
| outage) can take these spaces down, which is a pretty big pro
| in today's centralized world.
|
| But I'm also aware of being an exception. I'm aware that
| people, on average, don't like to run their own servers. So
| just let people be people. I don't like all this nostalgia
| about how good the times of BBS, IRC, RSS feeds or self-hosted
| websites were, because these things still represent they way I
| consume the Internet in 2022. People have changed all around,
| sure, hype mounts and dies, but I don't care. People are
| people, let them put all of their pictures and sensitive
| information on a computer run by a creep like Zuckerberg if
| they like. But I'm unwilling to compromise and follow this
| craze.
| chomp wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20220125222736/https://cheapskate...
| alamortsubite wrote:
| This post is from yesterday. Why the Internet Archive link?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Cheapskate's got a pretty low-end server, doesn't want a lot
| of traffic.
| post_below wrote:
| Because sometimes HN hugs things to death. I went straight to
| the comments for the alternate link when the site was still
| loading after 10 seconds.
| chomp wrote:
| Site was down when I attempted to read the post.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Makes sense, especially in the context of The Old Internet.
| Thanks.
| femto wrote:
| A slightly dissonant title on the article, as the premise of the
| article is that the Old Internet never went away. Rather, more
| people are beginning to discover that the Old still exists as
| they reach the limits of the New and start looking for
| alternatives. Welcome to October! :)
| dmz73 wrote:
| To me the biggest difference between the "old" internet and
| current web is the advertising. It is not just the adds that are
| so much more prevalent, the web sites are designed to be visually
| appealing and that detracts from any content that might be there.
| "Old" internet had information and links to other information.
| "New" internet is all about facade with little content, just a
| title here, picture there, short video to grab attention and then
| hopefully serve as many adds as possible without (or before)
| turning you away.
| beej71 wrote:
| I want a search engine that penalizes results by the amount of
| advertising on the page. :)
| ceocoder wrote:
| "technology is cyclical" -Dennis Duffy, 30 Rock.
|
| Jokes aside, I do not know if this is me getting older and
| becoming more grouchy and/or some of the tools (Gmail, Google
| Search, macOS/MacBook <whichever>) we've been using for a while
| are becoming more obtuse and less user (or power user) friendly
| in name of <some product goal>
| [deleted]
| jacobr1 wrote:
| many tools are attempting becoming (and often failing) to
| become more beginner user friendly. And while that implies
| dumbing down the tools at times, they still have advance
| features which are either progressively shown in context, or
| hidden behind additional advanced user menus or modes. Thus it
| makes it harder to reason about (as a power user does) and you
| are reduced to incantations rather than deduction. On top of
| that there is an increase of change, which prevents one from
| better learning the system. In effect, to a first
| approximation, the systems are now non-deterministic. For a
| causal user, they never care about that anyway and for the best
| systems, the UX improvements work. But for power-users, the
| non-determinism is going to drive one crazy.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Agreed. Another negative side effect is that power users
| cannot help casual users anymore. They become dependent on
| the developer of the software in question and won't learn
| about the pipeline of how things are created.
|
| A beverage dispenser has a good UX, but its usage is fairly
| restricted.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I don't think Web 3.0 is going to be the kind of decentralization
| people are all hyping up now - we are still too close to Web 2.0
| and the innovations are nebulous at best.
|
| However I do think there will be a Web 3.0 and it is going to
| come about when processing power, battery life, efficiency,
| global internet, and easy power generation all start reaching a
| critical point. Combine that with a general psychological
| backlash toward mega surveillance, concentration of power in
| massive corporate entities, and mass automation and we will be
| ripe for a world where low tech becomes stylistically cool again
| but with just the best of the tech world when wanted.
|
| If you plucked someone out of ancient Rome and brought them to
| this society a lot of the technology might really seem like
| magic. I am imagining independent adhoc networks that can be
| easily setup to servicing a small remote village completely
| disconnected from the outside world and just as easily instantly
| connect that village to a high speed global network. And it all
| runs off a few solar panels or some other source of cheap power.
|
| The decentralization of Web 3.0 will come about when we have the
| hardware to actually do things like that. When the ratio of cheap
| power generation to power use blows away what we have now. Who
| knows what crazy stuff people will come up with!
|
| Or we could go the Wall-E route and it all goes to shit
|
| Lets face it though - version point 0 is often a buggy mess.
| Bring on Web 3.1 !
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| What does the cheapness of power generation have anything to do
| with web3? If power was 1/10 the price, Proof of work
| blockchains would use 10X as much.
|
| But there is web3 and blockchains without proof of work
| lpcvoid wrote:
| I think he means web 3.0 as a semantic followup to web 2.0,
| and not the useless crap that cryptobros want to push as
| "web3".
| Ldorigo wrote:
| I've been collecting some remnants of what the author calls the
| "old web" at https://github.com/ldorigo/awesome-list-of-
| specialist-websit... . Would love for more people to contribute.
| These passion websites give me a genuine feeling of nostalgia and
| happiness.
| freeflight wrote:
| The old culture, social and technical, will never come back.
|
| In the mid 90s the Internet was a medium that only around 1% of
| the world population had access to [0].
|
| Getting online wasn't just some casual thing, people had to
| invest, money, time and effort to get online, so the whole
| "online experience" used to be treated _very_ differently.
|
| As everybody had to jump trough these hoops to get online, there
| was usually at least some shared interests about people that
| managed to find each other online.
|
| Contrast that with today, where thanks to smartphones the
| majority of the world (65%) have access to the Internet like the
| most normal thing in the world, in most cases no special
| knowledge or major effort required anymore to "get in".
|
| That Eternal September-esque [1] change in culture can't be
| reversed. Maybe it could be emulated on way smaller scales, with
| a lot of effort and segregation, but that would defeat the whole
| spirit and purpose of it.
|
| [0] https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| jsemrau wrote:
| I don't particularly like the current Internet. A lot of traffic
| is captured by social with the intention promote oneself. Yes, I
| am part of the problem as well. Yet, the current version of the
| Internet values outrage over quality trending towards the lowest
| common denominator. I, in my own personal opinion, have high
| hopes for a crypto based new new social which distributes the
| economic value to the content originators and not the meta-
| middlemen.
|
| /rant
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Thanks to the hard work of the W3C, soon we may come full circle:
| https://www.w3.org/2021/04/pressrelease-blink.html.en
| kstrauser wrote:
| I sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to
| stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little
| FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was
| hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't
| elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, _but it was mine_. I made
| that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned
| that service from end to end and had completely freedom to do
| whatever I wanted with it.
|
| That's what I want the Internet to look like for my younger
| family and friends. It'll probably never happen exactly this way,
| but I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on their
| phone to impress their friends. I know what their smile would
| look like because that was once my smile, too.
| SMAAART wrote:
| I want my BBS!
|
| <blink>This text could blink</blink>
| partomniscient wrote:
| I remember some boards where you had to wait for what seemed
| like ages to get to the actual main page because you had to
| wait for some fancy ANSI art to do its thing.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I'm sympathetic. My first personal website (after a couple of,
| ahem, not personal ones) was about the film "The English
| Patient", and yes, I know that smile.
|
| However, I think you're making a mistake that I also make quite
| often, of conflating the use and mastery of the technology
| required with the actual end goal.
|
| Lots of people might like to create their own dedicated
| websites focused on some particular interest of their own. Very
| few of them have any interest in Apache, Amigas, FreeBSD,
| servers, operating systems, bandwidth, IPv6 or any of the
| technology that would underpin them doing this.
|
| Hence ... Squarespace ;)
|
| We (computer technologists in general, and web folk in
| specific) failed to make running servers a trivial matter, and
| as a result in 2022, the honest truth is that running your own
| website no longer has much to do with any of the skills we
| might have smiled about back in the day. At least not for 99%
| of the people who don't already do it but might somehow have an
| interest in the idea.
| jjgreen wrote:
| Elaine Benes : [quietly] No. I can't do this any more. I
| can't. It's too long.
|
| Elaine Benes : [yells] Quit telling your stupid story about
| the stupid desert, and just die already! DIE!
|
| J. Peterman : [surprised] Elaine, you don't like the movie?
|
| Elaine Benes : [shouts] I hate it!
|
| [the audience shushes Elaine]
|
| Elaine Benes : [shouts back] Oh, go to hell!
| throwhauser wrote:
| How can a small website cope with GDPR compliance though? The
| rules that sprang up to constrain the social-media behemoths
| seem onerous for anyone but them to comply with.
| kstrauser wrote:
| As a practical matter, GDPR doesn't apply to personal sites
| outside of EU. They're not going to go after some personal
| site in Iowa, and if they did, so what? After the massive PR
| debacle that would ensue, the EU regulators wouldn't actually
| be able to do anything about it.
|
| The CCPA doesn't apply to personal, not-for-profit sites.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| All you have to do is not collect any data. Don't set any
| cookies.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Setting cookies is fine. If they are needed.
|
| You need a session cookie for the login function the user
| uses? - Use a cookie. No banner needed.
|
| The user puts something in their shopping basket? - Use a
| session cookie. No banner needed.
|
| You want to store information, not required, in order to
| identify the user again even though they didn't login,
| maybe to share the identity with an ad network? - You need
| a cookie banner where the user can opt out easily.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Not only that, but storing information to identify the
| user again requires affirmative consent. GDPR doesn't
| just require that the user can opt out of tracking, but
| that any tracking occurs only after the user has freely
| given informed consent.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Yes. If your users create an account with name and
| address data they need to agree to that data storage.
|
| If your shop just sells them a virtual thing there is no
| need to collect personal information.
|
| If you ask for the address and more or less directly
| print it on the label and then delete again it is a bit
| of an edge case where no explicit confirmation might be
| needed, however having a good data policy is good
| practice anyways and then having the extra checkbox in
| the order flow is not a big deal.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| By not collecting data it has no need for, and not passing
| that data on to third parties? By providing an ability to
| delete any user account, and for editing any personal
| information? By not using EBCDIC to store said information?
|
| Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be?
| lol768 wrote:
| > Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be?
|
| A large proportion of folks on HN seem to think GDPR is
| "out to get" everyone rather than a set of common sense
| regulations that should not at all be a concern for an
| individual who's serving a blog or personal site and doing
| nothing to collect PII/track their visitors.
|
| I don't understand why this view is so prevalent.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Companies whose bottom lines are affected by GDPR are
| screaming that it's too difficult to understand and
| apply. Many HackerNews, especially for some reason North
| American ones, are parroting what they hear in this echo
| chamber without giving it a glimpse of a thought.
|
| I think we underestimate the power of PR way too often.
|
| Last I've read GDPR itself it's been way clearer than any
| of the Terms of Service written by the very same
| companies who complain that GDPR is too incomprehensible.
| [deleted]
| rhizome wrote:
| I don't think "parroting" is very charitable. What I
| think is going on is that we have a bunch of people who
| are seeing the internet driven by ads that are only a
| synthesis of print ads and TV commercials. The fact that
| the medium of advertising (and business itself, evidenced
| by all the people who say that's the only way businesses
| can be run anymore) resembles the past _so much_ means
| the value of participating in it at all for Computer
| Science and nerdly interests in general is contained on
| the backend, _in the surveillance_. I think the
| resistance to this (not to mention the suit against
| Google to prevent them from eliminating third-party
| cookies from Chrome) is because advertising becomes
| boring without the PII shenanigans. If you can 't slice
| and dice people's activities into predictions about what
| they're going to click on if not buy, then what did I
| acquire these student loans for, to write HTML and
| JavaScript like a schmoe?
|
| Of course reality is more particularized and varied, but
| in the big picture I think GDPR and other threats to
| surveillance advertising is treated as an existential
| threat to an entire class of skills, skills that can buy
| houses.
| reificator wrote:
| > _I don 't understand why this view is so prevalent._
|
| Fearmongering from those actually affected by these
| common sense regulations.
| throwhauser wrote:
| > Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be?
|
| I'm not sure. I guess if one trusts the default logging
| settings on the server software to be compliant, and only
| uses static HTML, maybe that's adequate? But as soon as any
| third-party code or data provided by some other server gets
| involved, it's hard to know what might be logged elsewhere
| as a result of visiting your site.
|
| I mean, would an old-fashioned web visitor counter be
| compliant? It's tracking something in order to provide that
| number.
| corobo wrote:
| You can +1 a database `views` column without storing
| anything at all about the user. If you're just doing that
| you're good to go
| erulabs wrote:
| I mean, most "unique view counters" store the users IP
| address, so that would be right out. I'm fairly sure even
| being aware of what complying with a complex legal
| documents implies constitutes enough of a complication
| that it's worth mentioning.
|
| It _is_ a complication, but I believe it 's worded so
| that small companies and individuals are immune from its
| consequences.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| As long as you can describe the full extent to which the
| collected IP addresses are being used and which data they
| are being correlated with, and use a language
| comprehensible without requiring a legal degree, you can
| very easily be compliant. Once you involve an undisclosed
| number of "trusted partners" and start using weasel words
| to describe what you're using the data for and who you're
| giving them to, not so much.
|
| That said, an IP address is a shitty device to detect
| unique visitors. Session cookies, as long as you aren't
| trying to correlate them to usage patterns and such, are
| more reliable (you can tell that this is the same phone
| jumping networks, or you can tell apart users coming from
| behind multiple layers of NAT) and anonymous.
| martin_a wrote:
| You could always hash the IP on the client side before
| sending it to your counter. That way you have no
| information which you can backtrack to a specific IP and
| therefore a person.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Except there's so few IPs (v4) you could just bruteforce
| it in not too much time.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| There are different kinds of hashes. You can, for
| example, assign numbers to your incoming IPs. The first
| one to come in gets 1, the second gets 2, and so on.
| Numbers zero out at midnight, correlation between them
| and real IPs are at the load balancer. Good luck
| bruteforcing these.
| [deleted]
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| You tell us you have no idea what third-party code you
| add might be tracking from users. And say this is a
| reason why you/they should be allowed to do it? (With
| "it" being... anything the third-party sites want to at
| all?)
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah. That sense of ownership has been lost. Now corporations
| own everything. Nobody wants a domain, they want a @name on
| some social media platform. Nobody wants their own website,
| they want to post on social media. ISPs have cgNAT now, nobody
| is directly connected to the internet. Everything is just so
| _boring_.
| arvinsim wrote:
| I am pretty sure a lot of people want their own website and
| domain.
|
| It's just that a lot more inconvenient to have and manage one
| for most people.
| usrusr wrote:
| The subjective reward has gone down though: back in the
| days of webrings and the visit counter gif cgi, writing
| some content and then maybe fill in one or two "under
| construction" placeholders some months later you could
| easily delude yourself that you were on track to an amazing
| future. Perhaps not altavista.digital.com amazing, but
| maybe becoming something like a respected resource in your
| niche of a niche. Today there are so many lower hanging
| fruits luring from inside the walled gardens...
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| cgNAT is going to go away, even for the rare ISPs that use
| it, as more connections become IPv6-only.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > That sense of ownership has been lost. Now corporations own
| everything. Nobody wants a domain, they want a @name on some
| social media platform. Nobody wants their own website, they
| want to post on social media.
|
| I don't think the self-hosting people with their own domains
| ever went away. They're all still out there.
|
| The difference is that the internet isn't _just_ for those
| people any more. Everyone is online, and the average person
| has no intention of learning how to host and maintain and
| design their own website when they can just as easily post
| the same content on an easy to use platform.
|
| A lot of the nostalgia in this thread isn't so much for the
| technologies of years past. It's for an internet that was
| just for us nerds, without the regular people participating.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| > A lot of the nostalgia in this thread isn't so much for
| the technologies of years past. It's for an internet that
| was just for us nerds, without the regular people
| participating.
|
| Pretty much. It's painful to watch the mass commodification
| of a technology you love, but that's how the world
| advances.
| throwaway98700k wrote:
| A mix of both. When I see a Medium post by a programmer I
| feel sad.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| A lot of what used to happen was a form of altruism. You
| had to be willing to give up time, money, and hardware to
| dedicate running many of these tings. That works if you are
| getting along with everyone. But once you get a 'troll', or
| some demanding person, or need money because lost job, etc
| that altruism wears extremely thin. So outsourcing it to
| some other company to pay, for and keep the software up to
| date is extremely alluring. There are still people willing
| to do it. But they will come and go but mostly 'go'. But if
| you think about it, it makes sense. Someone new coming in
| is not going to pick up 20+ year old BBS software unless
| they _really_ want that. They are going to rock onto
| existing platform and start there. Then in 10 years their
| members will realize 'if you dont own it you are renting
| it, if you are renting it you are at the whim of the
| owner'.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| _sure hope that 's right. It was the best feeling in the world
| to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little
| FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was
| hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't
| elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine. I made
| that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned
| that service from end to end and had completely freedom to do
| whatever I wanted with it._
|
| Isn't this easier to this than it ever was?
|
| Granted, my 'server' is a VM in a server farm thousands of
| kilometres away, but I installed the server and wrote the HTML.
| What's even better is that he server was caddy and the html is
| html5 - both a marked improvement!
| wolpoli wrote:
| The barrier of entry was actually lower than that. We didn't
| need to stand up an Apache server. We could just sign up for a
| Geocities/Xoom/Tripod account and upload HTML or use the built
| in site editor to create content.
|
| Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized
| sites and started producing chronologically organized writings
| and content. These chronologically organized articles and
| content have dominated web content and social media ever since.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, I found it weird that the article called blogs "Web
| 1.0", I'm pretty sure that it was them that were first hailed
| as the new "Web 2.0" ?
| eitland wrote:
| Agree.
|
| As far as I remember web 2.0 was all about user generated
| content spruced up with Ajax experiences:
|
| Blogs (chronological as opposed to more freeform web sites)
| were arguably the first.
|
| The comments, follows ("blog rolls"), tagging, ratings and
| third party sites providing the same like del.ico.us and
| digg.
|
| RSS also was a web 2.0 thing in my mind at least.
|
| I think most people classify Facebook as web 2.0 as well
| but in my mind they aren't as much web as a silo built on
| web technology.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > The barrier of entry was actually lower than that. We
| didn't need to stand up an Apache server. We could just sign
| up for a Geocities/Xoom/Tripod account and upload HTML or use
| the built in site editor to create content.
|
| Reading this thread feels like everyone is anchored to
| whatever methods were popular at the time they entered the
| internet as being the peak. The BBS people think it was all
| downhill after BBS declined. The self-hosting people think it
| was all downhill after sites like Geocities/Tripod/Xoom
| became popular. The Geocities people think it was all
| downhill after blogging platforms became popular. The
| blogging people think it was all downhill when social media
| became popular.
|
| I think there's a heavy dose of nostalgia coloring the
| opinions in this thread. What people really yearn for isn't
| Geocities or Usenet or whatever. It's the feeling of
| excitement that came from first getting immersed in the
| internet when it was all new _to you_.
|
| > Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well
| organized sites and started producing chronologically
| organized writings and content. These chronologically
| organized articles and content have dominated web content and
| social media ever since.
|
| I don't see the problem with chronological ordering. Most of
| those platforms and sites make it easy to search for related
| posts. Worst case, the author can just drop some hyperlinks
| into the posts to tie them together.
|
| Curated and organized websites tend to fall out relevancy and
| decay very rapidly. Might as well just let people post as
| they see fit and then we can find it by searching.
| myself248 wrote:
| Nah, I'm a BBS person and I think it's been all downhill
| since social media.
|
| (Specifically, Livejournal was the tipping-point between
| blogging platforms and social media, Myspace was
| unquestionably downward, Facebook is the antichrist pure
| and simple.)
|
| I have no problem with chronological or hierarchical
| content. Whatever the author wants to put out, is their
| prerogative.
|
| What I have a problem with is walled gardens, stalking-as-
| a-business-model, and arbitrary automated deplatforming
| with no recourse.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I joined in the mid-00s and have to agree.
|
| Big social media and especially recommendation algorithms
| have ruined much of what made the old Internet fun.
|
| There's no longer the discovery or organic sharing;
| everything is just shoved down your throat by a soulless
| algorithm.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Ban algorithmic recommendation. It's the only way people
| actually start organizing and curating content. You know,
| like libraries do.
| naasking wrote:
| Interesting thought I hadn't considered before. Without
| algorithms, all aggregated content was curated by humans.
| With the advent of algorithms, a lot of this has probably
| stopped because humans just can't keep up.
|
| Sometimes that's a good and useful thing, like with
| search engines. Clearly not always though.
| Mezzie wrote:
| I was one of those humans, and it's more that the
| algorithms were initially designed under the assumption
| that we would keep doing that work for free, forever, but
| once the communities we were doing it for were destroyed,
| why bother?
|
| Also there was a lot of pushback and poo-pooing the human
| element; lots of well-regarded (at the time) people
| saying that there was no future in human-curated content,
| and I know that I (as a young person) believed them. Look
| at the cool stuff they were making; they have to be
| right! They're smart adults, they would know, right?
|
| It just stopped being fun to curate.
| chrononaut wrote:
| I agree that nostalgia plays a part, but one could argue
| that it _was_ at its "peak" in the "early days" and
| "declining" since (quoted words by whatever definitions as
| it is all quite subjective). Such that chronologically no
| matter what time a given person first experienced the
| Internet, they established the peak at that point since
| they didn't experience what was before, but they could
| universally agree that it became worst since their own
| relative point, and that can be true agnostic of nostalgia.
| If a given system is reliably getting worse over time for
| any attribute, the relative peak for a given observer will
| always be when their first measurement is taken.
|
| You could also work backwards from what you stated. For
| someone who first experienced digital connectivity via
| BBSes, would they also state the Geocities "era" was better
| than the blogging platforms era? Perhaps?
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Curated and organized websites tend to fall out relevancy
| and decay very rapidly. Might as well just let people post
| as they see fit and then we can find it by searching.
|
| Your points about nostalgia I sort of agree with but this
| part I take issue with. Many sites use _blog_ software
| which does the whole chronological ordering. Unless the
| site 's particular blog theme exposes archives, a sitemap,
| or the author meticulously tags (and the theme shows tags)
| it can be stupid hard to navigate around blog-like sites.
|
| Blog-like sites also tend to have a partial chronological
| list of posts at the root of the site. If you're writing
| some personal journal or topical things that makes sense.
| For someone writing about some particular topic(s) this is
| a navigation anti-pattern. It doesn't matter if the
| _latest_ post on Topic A was posted on Monday. As a reader
| interested in Topic A you want _all_ of the posts on it.
| Most blog-like sites make this challenging to find or don
| 't expose it.
|
| I don't really like "just search" as a replacement for
| categorical organization because most _search_ sucks
| anymore. That might have been ok for Old Google, before the
| DoubleClicking, but now it 's just another navigation anti-
| pattern.
|
| Interestingly, had Web 2.0 concepts been implemented a bit
| better by CMSes, navigation of sites _could_ be ably
| handled by user agents. A site with an OPML /Sitemap XML
| pointed to with an "alternative" meta tag could let a user
| agent (or service) build nice navigation for sites
| automatically no matter how the blog-like CMS organized the
| HTML.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "I think there's a heavy dose of nostalgia coloring the
| opinions in this thread. What people really yearn for isn't
| Geocities or Usenet or whatever. It's the feeling of
| excitement that came from first getting immersed in the
| internet when it was all new to you."
|
| Certainly there is nostalgia.
|
| But back then the web was not controlled by add financed
| mega companies - and the dreams of the teens using it, were
| not mainly to become a influencer. Meaning getting somehow
| famous and then sell that attention for - advertisement.
| [deleted]
| majormajor wrote:
| I agree with this. You can still do _all those things_! And
| there are still people doing all those things. It 's just
| not novel or exciting to us anymore. And I might be more
| disappointed now that my Geocities about a comic book never
| gets any hits, while there are influencers on Instagram and
| TikTok making $$$$, than I was in 1999 when that wasn't
| really conceivable. (And then there are the neat things
| that weren't even possible back then - Roblox gets a lot of
| shit for its financial model these days, but 1999 me
| would've eaten up an easy-to-use game programming interface
| to show off cool shit to my friends back then.)
|
| However, I do think there is a lot of lost value due to
| today's "search for it" attitude replacing curation. Yes,
| curation takes a lot of work, but that also makes it more
| robust against SEO spam and such. But I _also_ don 't think
| it added enough value that people would pay for it -
| original web companies were benefiting from wildly
| optimistic funding numbers for "eyeballs" and display ad
| rates that are never coming back.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > But I also don't think it added enough value that
| people would pay for it
|
| There was non-commercial curation back in the day, DMOZ
| was the most prominent example. In general, commercialism
| was very rare on the early Internet. "Business" sites
| were thought of as somewhat exceptional, not the norm.
| bregma wrote:
| It's all been downhill ever since the eternal September
| started.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| The barrier to entry may have been lower if you were willing
| to host on someone else's hardware, but from my reading
| that's not truly decentralized or owned by the user such as
| in the spirit of the parent comment.
| eloisius wrote:
| > Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well
| organized sites and started producing chronologically
| organized writings and content.
|
| For news or personal diary-format blogs, it makes sense, but
| I agree. Why did the blog become the default way to present a
| page on the internet? Aside from serving as an indicator of
| 'freshness,' publication date usually has no relation to the
| content I read. It's weird that most content is organized
| around publication date by default.
|
| I like reading old bike websites with stories about touring
| and such published around the 90s [1][2][3]. Most sites back
| then had a small section called "News" with short blurbs
| letting readers know about the status of the author, or new
| content added to the site, but it was not the main content
| itself. Content was usually organized in a way that makes
| sense to humans, rather than feed aggregators and content
| recommender systems.
|
| It's so much better to explore a site by navigation through a
| few index pages. Ken's site [1] is especially a pleasure to
| browse. Right on the home page he lists his directories along
| with straightforward descriptions of what you'll find in
| them. On a directory page will be a list of pages organized
| under subheadings, and each one has a brief description. To
| me, this may be peak internet. It's easy to get a sense of
| what's there, how to get to the part of it that interests me,
| and doesn't keep me on a treadmill searching for something I
| want to read co-mingled with everything else.
|
| I can't help but think that if WordPress was the default when
| Ken decided to make a website, it would be much worse. Each
| page does have a tiny 'last updated' date at the bottom, but
| as a reader 30 years later, the publication date has no
| relevancy to me any of the content here. It would be a pity
| to center everything on the site around that minor detail.
| And adding tags or category labels to blog pages usually
| doesn't help. It still squishes is all into a feed, just a
| subset feed.
|
| [1]: https://www.phred.org/~alex/kenkifer/www.kenkifer.com/bi
| kepa...
|
| [2]: https://web.stanford.edu/~jcolwell/
|
| [3]: https://sheldonbrown.com/
| rpdillon wrote:
| Almost everything I read on the internet is informed by the
| publish date. One of my biggest frustrations is sites that
| don't include publish dates because it makes the content
| 'evergreen'. Really frustrating.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Hah yes if I can't see a publish date on something I
| often look for something else. Not saying things need to
| be formatted/sorted by publish date (which I think is
| grandparent's actual point) but definitely it helps with
| contextualising content.
| eloisius wrote:
| You got my point. I do appreciate the created/modified
| date on pages, I just prefer content to be organize by
| something pertinent to the content itself. Sometimes that
| is the publication date, sometimes it's something else.
| XorNot wrote:
| The counter point is that the rise of quality search engines
| has reduced the value of "well organized".
|
| Consider that one of the premier features of the Jetbrains
| IDE is "search everywhere" which will search command help
| text for you as well and then return the command as a
| possible result - much easier to describe what you're trying
| to do and be led to the exact command, then try to understand
| the mind of the person who did the categorization.
| zrm wrote:
| > The counter point is that the rise of quality search
| engines has reduced the value of "well organized".
|
| I wonder how much of this is still true.
|
| Google results from a few years ago were much better than
| they are now. That's a combination of SEO ruining the
| results by Google assuming anything not hosted on a
| megaplatform is suspect and not showing it plus SEO ruining
| results by still being there in them despite that, but it
| happened.
|
| If someone made a curated list of interesting small sites
| by category, it would be a lot more useful now than it was
| before that happened.
| chrisfinazzo wrote:
| I have to wonder if the degrading of search results came
| solely from SEO dark patterns that do more harm than
| good, or if Google actively believed that small sites
| were becoming less relevant as social took off.
| Objectively, looking at PageRank might convince them that
| Facebook and Twitter were where people were spending
| time, but that particular firehose is so big it can - and
| eventually did - dilute nearly all the other relevant
| results.
|
| _Pipe dream: If someone wishes hard enough, maybe we can
| convince the Apollo guys to leave Yahoo alone so it can
| return to its roots as (surprise!) a directory._
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It was the rise of tagging and folksonomies (now known as
| #hashtags) which made the blogs halfway usable. Because
| they allow you to search within the archived posts for the
| sub-topic you're interested in.
| chrisfinazzo wrote:
| But wasn't the raison d'etre of Google links to _other_
| sites, thereby giving some sense of how popular a given
| page was?
|
| This helps individual sites, but says little about why
| the overall quality of links has nosedived. Who they link
| to continues to matter, except that now there is so much
| noise this is very difficult to get right unless you are
| extremely clever, lucky, or probably both.
| detaro wrote:
| What stops you signing up for a boring webhosting package and
| uploading HTML today?
| adrianN wrote:
| You can still make a Neocities account and upload HTML.
| walterbell wrote:
| Works well with static generators.
| amelius wrote:
| The thing that is missing in the DIY website space is
| discoverability.
|
| Fix that, and you might have a chance of competing with big
| corporations.
|
| (In the old days we had "web rings", but I'm afraid that's not
| going to work today)
| burrows wrote:
| I think it's all missing forums, places (both public and
| private) where people from different "home servers" can
| communicate.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Which is why I wish the webmention had taken off more than it
| did
|
| https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/
| zozbot234 wrote:
| We also had curated directories, DMOZ being the most common.
| Starting a bunch of DMOZ-like, federating (i.e. sharing and
| trusting one another to provide high-quality links, semi-
| comprehensive directories might be the quickest and most
| effective way of bringing "the old Internet" back to life.
| This might even become an acknowledged part of the Fediverse,
| if it leveraged the existing Web standards wrt. structured
| "third-party annotation" of outside Web resources, as issued
| e.g. by the W3C WebAnnotation Working Group.
| https://www.w3.org/annotation
| kradeelav wrote:
| Why not, with web-rings?
|
| I don't mean that snarkily: I have at least 2-3 webrings on
| my personal link page, and neocities is home to literally
| hundreds more.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Web-rings are linked lists, slow to navigate. Google gives
| you hashtable access to the web.
| sseagull wrote:
| Slow to navigate, but amenable to "browsing" and finding
| related pages and sites. Think of it as a built-in
| recommendation engine.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Maybe being slow to navigate is actually a feature,
| standing against the endless algorithmic torrent of 5
| second tiktok videos and meme doomscrolling.
|
| You're _supposed to_ take your time checking out cool
| shit people make for the love of it.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Slow to navigate, but far less vulnerable to corruption.
| Each link was intentionally made by a human, vouching for
| its integrity and usefulness. Each link is followed only
| if I trust a site enough to believe its recommendation.
| pratnala wrote:
| Yeah no, I wish we don't go back to that. It doesn't scale at
| all.
| ravenstine wrote:
| LOL If anything, a more barebones internet scales _better_.
| The less data you 're sending, the more connections you can
| handle simultaneously, and the less code you'll need. When
| communication is more decentralized, there's not much of a
| need for most sites to need to think that much about scaling.
| We don't need the _next_ Facebook or the _next_ Reddit. I 'd
| love to go back to more independent forums. Maybe with
| something better than vBulletin, at least.
| coldtea wrote:
| Who the fuck cares if it scales? It's better if it doesn't
| scale. Scale is what brought us Facebook and monopolies like
| Google.
| _jal wrote:
| Why does it need to?
|
| You are not Amazon. In the unlikely event you become Amazon,
| you will be able to rearchitect. Trust me, Amazon did.
| gary_0 wrote:
| Never worry too much about problems you _want_ to have.
| Guest42 wrote:
| True, but I think the point was to be original and random and
| perhaps be popular as a result, rather than tailor everything
| for popularity.
| mdoms wrote:
| Not everything needs to scale.
| emptybottle wrote:
| HTML scales exceptionally well
| adamrezich wrote:
| nimforum*, which powers the official Nim forums, doesn't
| scale for shit, yet totally works for the scale of that
| community. not everything needs to massively scale, and, in
| fact, I think the mistaken belief that everything has to
| scale has led to many people being dissuaded from building
| smaller communities like back in The Old Days.
|
| * https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum
| InefficientRed wrote:
| I still run a half dozen VMs with _genuinely ancient_ LAMP
| stacks and CGI code on a 5 year old desktop in my basement.
| People use those sites. Really the only thing that changed in
| last couple decades is that Docker makes admining those servers
| 1000x easier.
|
| The old web never went away, and the "new old web" will either
| fail to become popular or well become the "new new web".
| Eternal September is a social phenomenon and can't be solved
| with technology.
| na85 wrote:
| Who is your ISP?
| InefficientRed wrote:
| Verizon FIOS residential fiber.
|
| (I've never had an ISP that allowed hosting HTTP servers in
| its TOS. But I've always hosted HTTP servers, and I've
| never had any issues. FWIW Gemini servers are also
| servers.)
| ravenstine wrote:
| Same, although I'm no longer doing what you're doing.
| With today's average bandwidth usage, I don't know why an
| ISP would seriously give a crap about someone hosting an
| HTTP server on their home IP unless it was dealing with
| some insane amount of traffic.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| since they want to sell the more expensive business plan.
| And forbidding something in the terms makes it easy for
| them to cancel your account in case they have a different
| reason.
| eppp wrote:
| We make people pay for a business account and extra on
| top to get a static ip. The amount of support from people
| that know just enough to think they need to do home
| hosting is a multiple more than a typical home user.
|
| The people that actually know what they are doing have to
| pay more but I never hear from them.
| AndrewUnmuted wrote:
| This sounds just like my experience with Comcast
| Business.
|
| Except, because I came with my own modem, they won't let
| me get the static IP. They would need to come back to my
| place and replace my modem with their own version of that
| same modem, they tell me, before they will be willing to
| take my $50/month to give me a static IP.
|
| I told them I would agree to this if they would at least
| not charge me for the modem, but apparently this is not
| possible. I might try again one day, but really am just
| waiting until my area gets the local electric company's
| fiber connection they'll be rolling out in a couple of
| years.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Much as I loathe Comcast residential service, their
| business service has been solid except for that ludicrous
| requirement.
| buttercraft wrote:
| But I'm not allowed to have a business account if I also
| have HBO. Because I might be having large public viewings
| at my residence, I guess? Go Cox.
| jlarocco wrote:
| I think there's some kind of fallacy there.
|
| Nothing's really changed, in the sense that there's nothing
| stopping you (or anybody else) from running your own server
| that serves up simplehand-written HTML, if that's what you want
| to do.
|
| You can probably even do it on your phone, but I wouldn't hold
| my breath for the app to get accepted to any official app
| stores.
|
| Personally, I think the UI on phones is atrocious, and would
| never want to use one for any kind of development work, but to
| each their own.
| vecinu wrote:
| > Personally, I think the UI on phones is atrocious, and
| would never want to use one for any kind of development work,
| but to each their own.
|
| When the OP said
|
| > but I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on
| their phone to impress their friends
|
| I think he meant actually running the serving of the content
| from the phone's hardware, not actually doing the development
| itself on the phone.
| fullshark wrote:
| > I sure hope that's right.
|
| Yeah it's nostalgia speaking here, there's always gonna be
| hobbyists but the internet is now gonna be what it is today,
| massive conglomerates fighting for attention/eyeballs and
| monetizing it either through ads or pay services.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| > I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on their
| phone to impress their friends. I know what their smile would
| look like because that was once my smile, too.
|
| Wow. Do you know if there's any enthusiasts out there doing
| this? A phone would actually be a great hosting device for
| tinkerers. It's always on, always connected, and supports IPv6.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| A phone is a poor hosting device in a conventional sense,
| because it's battery powered and keeping the connection up
| will drain the battery. If you want to P2P-host something via
| your phone, it should be a service that can somehow piggyback
| on the ephemeral network connection strategy that mobile
| devices are already using. The closest thing I've seen to
| that might be SecureScuttlebutt, but even then it's not
| ideal. IPFS hosting _might_ also work, but again only on a
| highly ephemeral basis.
| miyuru wrote:
| I tested this with my old phone and it certainly worked even
| on non rooted android but I do not deployed it full time.
|
| There is however this starlink dashboard hosted by awlnx on
| starlink and its IPv6 only. https://starlink.awlnx.space
| vmception wrote:
| (blockchain, smart contracts, people are experiencing this same
| feeling again there, many for the first time. they release
| something on a public utility that others can interact with,
| and a GUI behind a domain name)
| lpcvoid wrote:
| It's just that there is nothing of value in regards to
| blockchain or smart contracts. They are a solution in search
| for a nonexistent problem, while heating up the planet.
| vmception wrote:
| Very few blockchains cause carbon emissions more than say
| browsers. A smart contract deployed on one that uses a
| proof of work system with a lot of competition can be
| deployed on another that does not, vote with your code
| FpUser wrote:
| >"It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't
| fast, but it was mine. I made that."
|
| I know the feeling. Even though I use Hetzner and OVH I also
| host stuff in my home office. Ordered business 1gbps fiber line
| with static IP for $120 CDN per month for that.
| wnolens wrote:
| I don't think it matters what any of us (HN) want or think is
| best.
|
| The generation born after social media began their socialization
| and individuation journey in life on snapchat/tiktok/instagram.
| This generation doesn't give a shit about google.
|
| I think the "web" is dying, paradigm of using a browser to access
| websites is almost gone by comparison to a decade ago. The
| internet is mobile-centric. All this metaverse shit is trying to
| get ahead of the platform curve. The success there depends on if
| it gets traction with 16-24 year olds.
| eezurr wrote:
| I think the reason the old internet was what it was was because
| the barrier to entry was much higher (computers cost a lot of
| money in the 90s/ early 00s, you needed to learn HTML (at a
| minimum) to put a website together, and you had to have a phone
| line available for dial up, you had to be curious or have curious
| friends to learn about the cool websites out there, etc.).
|
| All of those filters meant a narrow spectrum of the population
| participated on the internet. It also meant the ratio of creator
| to consumer was much smaller. The market sold to itself (other
| creators), not just consumers; or in other words, the community
| existed to serve itself.
|
| I think the same idea can be applied to any creative outlet
| (music, art..). As soon as everyone has access, and the old
| filters (e.g. the RIAA, publishers) are torn down, it loses its
| uniqueness and glamor and the culture collapses, morals aside.
|
| The next "big thing" will have a high barrier to entry, whether
| it be costing a lot of money, or requiring a specific skillset
| that takes time to learn. It will attract driven people who live
| to create and build. And like everything else, the barrier will
| eventually be torn down leaving mediocracy in its place.
| akprasad wrote:
| I'm glad the article hits the central point that what is valuable
| about this change is the rise of the _non-corporate_ internet.
| And fundamentally, what is valuable about non-corporate spaces
| (in my view) is that we have social ownership of them. A poster
| on MetaFilter has a very different relationship to their site
| from what a Reddit user might have to theirs.
|
| At the same time, the corporate internet means high investment in
| useful centralized platforms that reduce the expertise required
| to publish and share something to near zero. It's not clear to me
| that such platforms could survive in a non-corporate setting.
| Maybe if they were user-owned in some material way.
| chj wrote:
| Off topic rant on the date "1-24-22": Please just use YYYY-mm-dd,
| for the sake of future generations so that they don't have to
| check if it's 2022 or 2122.
| lopis wrote:
| We're definitely heading for a Y2.1K problem and we've learned
| nothing.
| mxbck wrote:
| Interesting read. I made a similar point some time ago im "Return
| of the 90s web": https://mxb.dev/blog/the-return-of-the-90s-web/
| graycat wrote:
| Good to hear -- my startup wants to be one more example.
|
| Irony: The opportunity, goal, purpose of my startup is to help
| people find such Web sites, especially little or focused ones,
| that they will _like_. Or the short description of my startup is
| to help people find Internet _content_ they will _like_ , say,
| via, roughly _search, discovery, recommendation_.
|
| A novel part is that the site gets some new data via a likely so
| far unique _iterative, interactive dialog_ , specific to each
| use, and then manipulates that data with some math I derived,
| likely new. A classic, but mostly neglected, advanced pure math
| result says that, in principle, the _iterations_ should converge
| to what can be regarded as the _right_ results!
|
| For more, no key words are involved. Can argue that the results
| give the user the results, content, with the _meaning_ they will
| _like_ best, i.e., make some progress on working with _meaning_.
| So, the _problem_ , the _challenge_ is to respond to the
| explosion of Internet _content_ , now often from specialized,
| focused, small Web sites.
|
| For one more -- there are no user IDs, logins, or use of HTTP
| _cookies_. In particular, two users who execute the same dialog
| on the same day (i.e., before I add to the database) get the same
| results. I.e., for the users there is some relatively good
| _privacy_.
|
| Here I'm just taking the opportunity of this OP to describe my
| _solution_.
|
| I wrote the Web site code, in .NET, and as far as I can tell the
| code is ready for significant production. As in the OP and some
| of the comments already in this thread, my plan is, indeed, to
| run my own server, using Windows Server, SQL Server, and, for
| hardware, an AMD FX-8350 at 4.0 GHz. I'm adding data, am not
| _live_ yet, and have not settled in a domain name yet.
|
| What'd you think?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| That's an interesting take.
|
| Just curious how you plan to make money off this. I think
| profitability is what has killed most recommendation ventures.
| It's easy enough to find something that's fun (like
| StumbleUpon). But they usually eventually self-cannibalize by
| inserting ads in the recommendations.
|
| On the flip side, if you attempt to do some sort of gated
| boutique thing where you need a subscription to see the
| results, you may encounter resistance when you attempt to
| discover recommendations (assuming you're crawling by yourself,
| which you'd almost have to I think).
|
| Don't mean to be a downer, but profitability is arguably _the_
| hard problem to solve in this space.
| graycat wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Yes, I saw StumbleUpon early on. I just intend and hope to do
| better pleasing the users.
|
| So, it's _recommendation_ -- maybe the user has heard of the
| _content_ but wants the _quality_ of the _curated_ results.
|
| Uh, now the Internet has a lot of _specialized_ content
| (e.g., as in this OP) and, presto, bingo, that means that
| there are also some specialized AUDIENCES, e.g., audiences
| the mainstream media (MSM), back to TV, radio, and all the
| larger newspapers worked hard to ignore -- instead, they went
| for the mass audience. One general result is, even now,
| floods of URLs where less than 1% are of interest to any one
| person. Early on a solution is to pick an audience (of
| course, one with good _demographics_ ), and more generally
| just to have better means of helping, pleasing users.
|
| It's _discovery_ -- the user has never heard of the content
| but the _dialog_ is good evidence that they will _like_ the
| results.
|
| It's _search_ -- the user knows about the content, it 's
| likely famous, will recognize it once can find, see it, but
| doesn't know where to find it, and it's not easy to find
| keywords that (accurately) _characterize_ it. Can get some
| examples out of the fine arts.
|
| The "interactive, iterative dialog", particular to each use,
| is supposed to be a more powerful, effective way to find, get
| to, have URLs for content the user will _like_. Here _like_
| is intended to be basically, short for, _like the meaning_ of
| the content. The user may _like_ the content for
| entertainment, information, curiosity, etc.
|
| It appears that now both Google and YouTube have seen the
| basic problem and have their versions of solutions. I'm
| hoping that my techniques do better where their solutions
| work poorly or not at all. I'm not trying to replace or
| compete with where Google, YouTube, Bing, ..., StumbleUpon
| work well. I'm a sole, solo founder and don't have to be
| worth billions to be successful.
|
| Yes, my plans are for my site to be ad supported. But I
| intend actually strongly to follow, say, the old newspaper
| standard of a _wall_ between (a) the URL results for the
| users and (b) the ads. E.g., as in this thread of "old
| Internet", at least early on, the ad _targeting_ is supposed
| to be maybe from only broadly the _demographics_ or some such
| of my intended audience, essentially independent of the user
| or the data from their _dialog_ , or hardly targeted at all.
|
| Right, better ad targeting could yield more revenue, and
| maybe the _dialog_ data could permit some especially good ad
| targeting, but NO WAY do I want to have even a hint of giving
| users URLs that help advertisers. Some such used to be called
| _payola_ and was made actually illegal.
|
| Or, so far, the code I've written to find the URLs to report
| to the users has nothing about ads.
|
| Maybe the long term situation would be that for some use
| instances the dialog data and the reported content URLs would
| do well at suggesting what ads would be especially effective
| but no way would ads influence what URLs are reported. Or,
| the connection between URLs and ads is a one way street: URLs
| can be used to pick ads, but ads can never pick URLs.
| hellschreiber wrote:
| It is very interesting that you describe a system which
| points people to web content they would like and yet you do
| not intend to collect data on these visitors. Or did I
| misunderstand? Wouldn't you need to "get to know" your
| visitors / customers / users before you are able to show
| them sites they will like?
|
| Also- I applaud you on the way you plan on serving ads. I
| do know that there are mechanism by which one can serve
| relevant ads with high likelihood of these being useful
| hence clicked and yet without the need to build user
| profiles.
| graycat wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Yup, you bring up some good points.
|
| In the usual senses, approaches of _getting to know
| users_ , essentially I don't want to do that: (a) Users
| can regard uses of such data as a threat to, compromise
| with, and an invasion of _privacy_ -- an important term
| but ill defined and with possible negative emotional
| reactions. (b) E.g., what a user did for the past month
| going deep into the NFL does not mean that they want the
| NFL for this visit. Instead maybe they want the NBA, a
| recipe for cheese popcorn, background music for a dinner
| party with her boyfriend, or an art print to hang over
| the sofa. Uh, what key words to type in to get an art
| print will like -- hmm ....
|
| Assuming that their purpose of this visit is much like
| that of earlier visits can irritate users. (c) Using
| information on users personally can require cookies, a
| user ID, their IP address, _fingerprinting_ , etc., all
| of which can irritate users, i.e., a bad _taste in their
| mouth_ , a bad _user experience_. Quite broadly, one way
| to anger people, to insult them, is to let them know you
| believe that you have categorized them, that they are so
| simple that you can _pigeonhole_ them. So, I want no hint
| of any such thing.
|
| Ah, besides, maybe they are shopping for an art print to
| give to their daughter for her to hang over the sofa in
| her new house -- so the visit isn't even about the
| visitor but about the visitor's daughter! Fine with me!
|
| So, instead of using general, old information about
| users, the _interactive iterative_ dialog is to get data,
| some _new_ data, I can manipulate to please the user for
| their _interest_ that brought them to my site THIS time.
| The phrasing "Users who give the same dialog on the same
| day get the same results" is partly to have the user
| execute the dialog and still be comfortable about
| privacy.
|
| In simple terms, my current guess is to have a narrow
| audience, e.g., maybe the BMW set. Then, sure, just from
| that, Cadillac, Tesla, Toll Brothers, Williams Sonoma,
| cruise lines, etc. may discover that their ads on my site
| are a bargain, have a quite good _click thru rate_. So,
| that would be _targeting_ just via broad _demographics_.
| hellschreiber wrote:
| This sounds extremely interesting and something I
| personally would love to try! Keep us posted on the
| progress of this project!
| graycat wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| I've always intended to announce _going live_ at Hacker
| News and still plan to. But this OP and thread raise
| issues so close to my project that here I took the
| opportunity to outline my work and to ask for reactions.
| These days I 'm gathering initial data, but there is some
| time to adjust some of the work. Maybe even more
| important, from the reactions here I can try to refine
| how I present this project to the public, e.g., so that
| the public or at least the intended users can understand
| how this project can help them and for me better to
| understand this project as others will see it.
|
| This project has been delayed by unpredictable external
| events independent of the project -- the project work has
| been fast, fun, and easy while handling the external
| events has been a pain from the head down to the feet.
|
| HN is likely the world's best collection, concentration
| of people to make perceptive reactions.
| taylorbuley wrote:
| > By the way, I think it is sad that I can't even make a comment
| on Hacker News about this article, because I've been banned. When
| someone else posts my articles there, many people want to read
| them, but when I post them, they are blog spam.
|
| Might be worth an unban, admin.
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| This is wishful thinking. The demographics of the internet have
| changed so much that you will NEVER get that 'old' back. You may
| get an imitation or evolution of it, but it will never return in
| full.
|
| The size of social media now is so gargantuan that almost every
| single member you get in an independent community will have been
| molded by it in some way, which is very different to how the
| webcultures of the day functioned.
|
| My experience running a small community post social media
| explosion, is that most newcomers want to treat it like Twitter -
| Personal Edition. They want to engage in recreational outrage.
| They want to be obsessed with America-centered identity politics
| and put down other people for not joining 'their' side.
|
| It's a far cry from the types of people I once met online. There
| is no sense of "The internet is not real life.", because, for so
| many of them, their internet handle _is_ their real life
| identity, and any joke against it is a strike against their moral
| fabric and an attack on their very being.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Content focus certainly changed as barriers for entry got
| lower. In classical TV there was certainly a degradation
| towards low production costs and simple content in the last
| decade. But it is still profitable even with a shrinking pool
| of viewers. I expect the fate of some mass social media
| platforms to be that same. Some people will always remain
| there.
|
| I don't know when we started to take internet comments
| seriously, I only know that I don't like that at all.
| no_time wrote:
| >their internet handle is their real life identity
|
| I feel like the west forgot how to be pseudo-anonymous on the
| internet. If you take a look at Chinese or Japanese internet
| users they still mostly prefer distancing their meatspace self
| from their virtual identity.
| heldtec wrote:
| It has the "Share on ... [Facebook] [Twitter] [Reddit] [Linkedin]
| [Hacker News]" in the right upper corner. Funny ?
| kxrm wrote:
| The "old internet" never went anywhere. I've been running my own
| websites since the 90s. My oldest website is now 20 years old as
| of today. People still use it. It doesn't get enormous amounts of
| traffic but it's built for a very specific community.
|
| I keep it going to keep myself sharp on how the underlying
| plumbing of the internet works. I definitely don't think it will
| scale well, but that isn't the point.
| taurusnoises wrote:
| I so wish these articles would give a 101 on _how_ to make an
| old-school, decentralized website. So many of us want that, but
| just have no idea where to begin anymore (and I made websites in
| the late 90s....) Love these articles, tho. The more the better.
| kevstev wrote:
| Is it really that obscure these days?
|
| 1. Have a computer in your house open exposed to the internet
| on port 80- port forward on your router.
|
| 2. Run an http server on that box. Apache is a reasonable
| choice but there are probably easier pieces of software out
| there to set up.
|
| 2a. Create an index.html or equivalent default page name and
| put some html in it even if it's just hello world- it can even
| be in plain text.
|
| 3. Technically you are now self hosted on the internet! Figure
| out your external IP from your router and point a browser to
| http://$YOURIP/ and you should see your page.
|
| The next steps are optional but kind of required to have a
| "real" site.
|
| 4. Set up dns. Since you won't have a static IP from your ISP
| almost certainly, you will need to use a dynamic dns provider.
| Noip.com is a popular choice. Once this is working you can
| register a domain name with GoDaddy or whoever and then point
| that name to your dynamic dns provider. Now you can load up
| http://www.yourdomain.com (or whatever tld you choose)
|
| 5. Set up https. For some reason beyond my comprehension google
| is forcing everyone to use https if they want to really exist
| on the internet in any real way even if they are just serving
| static pages. Let's encrypt can you there for free. Now you can
| go to https://www.yourdomain.com and your page will show up and
| Google et al might even consider you to be a real presence on
| the internet and index you one day.
| alphachloride wrote:
| To be fair, this is not a 101. Exposing port 80, figuring out
| a static external IP, or setting up DDNS, and https all need
| more hand-holding I think.
| kevstev wrote:
| If I was talking to my mom sure. But were talking on HN
| here, clicking around your routers web UI shouldn't be too
| difficult for anyone here to figure out. And honestly if
| you can't figure that out you shouldn't be exposing your
| stuff to the internet anyway, you will become a part of a
| botnet in short order.
|
| Setting up Apache properly is a much bigger PITA for
| anything other than a static html use IMHO.
| taurusnoises wrote:
| I wanna thank you for the time you took to lay it out.
| And, I'm gonna need to look up everything you mentioned,
| cuz it's more like a 301 for me not 101. I don't even
| know what a port 80 is!
|
| In the 90s I taught myself html to build out stuff, but
| never had to host anything.
|
| Apache? I've heard it a thousand times. Couldn't tell you
| what it was.
|
| So, yeah. Assume I'm yr mom.
|
| This is also a good example of why web2 came to be. Cuz
| people like me have zero idea what's being talked about.
| kevstev wrote:
| Let me just warn you- running a webserver requires
| technical skill- you will be providing an open door into
| your computer and network if you go down this path. But
| its not so hard if you google each of those sections, at
| least to get something basic going.
|
| I don't think anyone was lamenting that its not super
| duper easy to create a freestanding website these days,
| just that its becoming increasingly difficult to without
| requiring centralized services- most notably ssl.
|
| web2 also generally refers to web2.0 where we moved from
| static webpages and webpages that could only really
| change in significant ways if you hit refresh, to
| dynamically updated webpages, initially using AJAX, but
| there are now a myriad of ways to do so- but this allowed
| clunky web pages to have capabilities that are more or
| less at parity with desktop applications. Then again with
| all this web3 talk, what "web2" refers to may get
| distorted over time.
|
| But yeah- running your own web infrastructure is work and
| hence why wordpress and other blog service providers, as
| well as even things like Geocities were/are so popular.
| While it is a lot more common these days, but even having
| a computer that was on 24/7/365 was not common and this
| was reason enough to use a hosted solution. Most of my
| friends have some sort of media server setup that is on
| 24/7 these days, but we are admittedly likely still
| outliers on this, compared to entirely non-technical
| people.
| spicy_tendies wrote:
| I am extremely happy to be a part of this new Web3 movement. To
| me, it's a movement to return to smaller communities and more
| personable online experiences. DeFi is just one aspect.
| yazboo wrote:
| These niche groups for enthusiasts, tilde club or mastodon or
| neocities or aral balkan or whatever can't ever bring the old
| internet back. It's not coming back, it's really not, you just
| have to accept that the world you used to love is gone and find
| some new way to do things. Why make a dollhouse of your past. You
| must move on!
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Dollhouse, fine. Why not then, when I switch browsers and doom
| scroll on Gemini I read different crap that the crap I read
| here.
|
| I'm still frying my body and rotting my brain but at least it's
| different content.
|
| Yes that won't solve anything, but does it have to?
| gnubison wrote:
| Because some of us enjoy the "dollhouses"...?
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I remember the old internet (pre-1993) before the WWW. It was
| pretty fun. No one was trying to make any money off of it then.
| It was more like a great conversation than anything else.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| AsgridLong wrote:
| When talking about online communities and gathering places I
| think people make an incredible mistake: they consider relative
| values instead of absolute ones.
|
| Sure in many cases one has to look at how much something is
| popular relative to the general population, but do you really
| need to think like that when talking about websites and forums? I
| mean, from an absolute point of view there are many more forums,
| personal blogs, rss feeds and independent projects than ever
| before, even if their relative popularity has declined. But what
| do you care? A forum hosting 300 active users is already
| incredibly crowded, it's very difficult you will get to know even
| half of all them in your own lifetime, why do you need everything
| to turn virally popular?
|
| Would you want your local _NIX club to suddenly jump from a few
| tens of members to thousands? No, because the point is to create
| a community. Who cares if some_ NIX club residing on Facebook has
| 100.000 members, ultimately what you care about is the one you go
| to every week/month and in which you see real people and talk
| real talk. We are not talking here about an industrial endeavor
| where if not enough users partake then production crawls to a
| halt worldwide, we are talking about buying a crappy computer,
| coding a few pages in simple HTML and buying a funky domain name
| for pennies. It will always be cheap and simple to host your own
| stuff, you don't need self hosting to become the next big thing
| to enjoy your life.
| [deleted]
| emptybottle wrote:
| After layering abstractions on top of abstractions, and
| centralizing onto a few providers it makes sense to simplify and
| diversify again.
|
| I miss things being presented via their own unique web sites as
| opposed to "pages" within the current top social network.
| Animats wrote:
| What's pushing people back towards having their own web sites is
| the increasing obnoxiousness of the dominant players. It's just
| too much hassle to deal with Google and their semi-random
| censorship, Medium and their paywall, Twitter and their demands
| that people sign in, and Facebook looking as ad-heavy as Myspace
| in its declining years. It's quite cheap to bring up a basic web
| site, a blog, or a forum on shared hosting.
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| empressplay wrote:
| I get the nostalgia but not the sentiment. You can still set up a
| website, you can still post content on it, you can still link to
| that content on social media to get viewers, if you attach Google
| Analytics to your site, that traffic then improves your search
| rankings which brings you more traffic.
|
| Hundreds of people a day read my rantings (and I probably owe
| most of them an apology for that) but the point is you can still
| make a 'personal' website and grow an audience even now, you
| don't need an 'alternative' web to do that, you just need to put
| in the effort.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| it would be nice if it were true but it s probably wishful
| thinking
|
| The only "nice" trend that is happening is that PC and laptop
| sales are slightly up. That and higher reliable network speeds
| might facilitate bringing back 'the old internet'. But as long as
| the web is still made for smartphones it will remain bland and
| boring.
| stakkur wrote:
| I remember the glory days of UNIX/Usenet/etc. in the 80s at
| college too. I had an email address at Compuserve in the mid-80s,
| though I mainly used it for talking to other Compuserve members
| (when we weren't using 'CB channels', for those that remember). I
| remember all the various things like Usenet before the 'Internet'
| too; I don't recall anybody in my group ever calling it the
| Internet until after the WWW came along.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > I don't recall anybody in my group ever calling it the
| Internet until after the WWW came along.
|
| Really? I do. I spent the early years of the web trying to get
| all the new people who had suddenly joined the net to
| understand that the web and the internet were two very
| different things. I gave up after a while.
| stakkur wrote:
| Everybody was 'new' to the web. I've noticed the same
| confusion, and finally gave up trying to explain. Today, it
| seems people say 'Internet' for everything and 'web' has
| become passe.
| blihp wrote:
| Typically when people were using Usenet and email, they weren't
| on the Internet proper but rather connecting to a node (often
| via a terminal emulator over dialup) that often itself got
| batch updates via dialup using UUCP etc. Even when people
| started using their dialup services (AOL, Compuserve etc) as
| web gateways they often weren't technically on the Internet but
| rather just the WWW subset of it. When people started dialing
| in to ISPs and getting cable/DSL modems _then_ they were on the
| Internet as they technically had access to all of its
| facilities and could connect to any other node on it. So there
| was a legitimate reason for not calling most of the earlier
| commercial /hobbyist services the Internet as they were just
| giving you glimpses at parts of it often without technically
| being on it.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Hug of Death.
| zwieback wrote:
| I don't think the old internet ever went away, instead the
| commercial internet exploded, in some ways good in some ways bad.
|
| If you want to create and showcase your own stuff you have a ton
| more options than you used to, it could be nostalgic HTML pages
| with blinking colors or some slick thing on a prefab site
| builder, up to you.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I don't think the old internet ever went away,
|
| Most of it did. It was dropped from search engine indexes and
| died from starvation.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| In general I've begun to think of the whole small internet
| movement as a countrerculture phenomenon. It's got a lot of
| touching stones with the bohemians, the beats, the hippies,
| etc. What they've all got in common is a search for
| independence, authenticity and community.
|
| I do think the retro-aesthetic is more of a statement than
| anything else. It's like the long hair of a hippie. Like
| there's no reason a hippie couldn't have a crew cut and think
| like a hippie and live like a hippie. Yet almost none of them
| did. For the same reason almost no small website has a
| bootstrap template.
| jjulius wrote:
| Eh, I'm with you on your general sentiment, and I definitely
| think websites can still embody the "old web" spirit while
| using HTML/CSS to stand out in a way that's different from
| "old web" aesthetics.
|
| The problem with the Bootstrap example is that Bootstrap is
| _exactly_ the kind of overly-bloated, JS-heavy (depending on
| use) Web 2.0 tool that the "old web" spirit is firmly
| against. A hippie can live like a hippie and still have a
| crew cut, but using Bootstrap on an "old web" website would
| be like a hippie heading to a board meeting wearing a polo
| and khakis bought brand new at Banana Republic as they yell,
| "Fuck the man!" from their sports car.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| There is js-heavy pages in the independent web space as
| well. There are certainly some that wouldn't touch it with
| a 60 ft pole, but it's a very heterogenous group, and I
| wouldn't put it past someone to do it ironically, as an art
| project (like that random startup generator[1]). Which is
| really my point. The common denominator is independence,
| authenticity, community, not some particular aesthetic.
|
| [1] http://tiffzhang.com/startup/
| [deleted]
| hashin wrote:
| I have maintained my blog (http://www.hashin.me) for the last 8
| years without ever trying to monetize it (I am 28 now). I have
| written hundreds of articles there, about a lot of topics that
| have caught my attention. I have perhaps written hundreds of
| thousands of words on the internet and never earned a rupee
| (dollar) from them in all these years. But that's what made me
| who I am. I would still keep doing that. What I make at work and
| at business is the product of the great education that internet
| gave me. I live a life where I am always online, but the ads
| simply fail to influence my decisions. And I spend most of my
| time on places like HN, which is representative of the good ole
| internet. As someone has already mentioned in this thread, the
| internet hasn't changed much. It is us; but if we know what we
| are doing, we can definitely choose the reality we are living in.
|
| My two cents.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Thanks! I'm probably not going to be a regular reader but sites
| like what yours seems to be brings me happiness.
|
| It is the kind of content I enjoy finding in a search or with
| marginalia explore.
|
| Edit: I too have one of these sites were I write about things
| that interest me, technical and political. I also have no ads
| but I enjoy the writing (and don't write when I don't enjoy it,
| since luckily it doesn't matter) and I enjoy it when people get
| something useful out of it.
| foxfired wrote:
| The problem is that there is no real definition of the old
| Internet. All we know is what it isn't. It isn't facebook, it
| isn't twitter, it isn't tiktok. Also, it isn't decentralized in
| the new sense of the word.
|
| The old Internet is not a page with flashing colors and dancing
| babies, you can still create those today. It isn't geocities, or
| its newer counterpart neocities either.
|
| The old internet is people making their own website. It's old
| because people surfing on the web today think that having a
| website is a business decision. Before it was just cool to own
| one.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| I started an open, special-interest community based around a
| mailing list (SMTP) around ~30 years ago, pre-Web 2.0, in a time
| when a lot of folks were glad to just be able to send email on
| the Internet, let alone browse it with some fancy browser thingy.
|
| Its still running and still functioning as a social network.
|
| The Internet is only as strong as its protocols, which is to say
| it is extremely strong because there are more than one protocol
| to use for the purposes of communication.
|
| The crazy thing is, the cyclomatic complexity of dealing with
| communication over email versus through some web-based interface,
| is pretty much not comparable. Email is much easier to use - if
| you treat email with the respect it deserves. But I think so many
| generations of Internet users were taught to use email
| derisively, or non-productively, so it 'feels' like a downgrade
| to go back to text-based email. Top-quoting vs. bottom-quoting,
| rich text versus plain, X-headers versus custom .sigs, there is a
| huge list of things that can go wrong with email-based social
| networking, but ultimately the proof is in the pudding: we're
| still running. We still have occasional flame wars and the odd
| exodus of favourite members, but we also have regular returns of
| long-lost members who make their way back to the mailing list
| after a few years of hell on the other networks.
|
| So, for 30 years, we've been doing the social networking thing
| just fine.. Functionally, we have the same degree of internal
| communication in our group as any Facebook groups - only, we're
| 100% in control of our own data and no third party can (easily)
| shut down the discourse. I consider this one of the factors for
| why we've survived 30 years as a group without implosion - there
| is no control point besides the mailserver itself, and that is
| protected by an admin whose understanding of human interaction
| precludes interfering when things get toasty ... so when people
| leave, they leave. We don't care, its not part of our business
| model to capture eyeballs, etc.
|
| That said, we are pretty small and don't get many new members
| popping in, although we welcome it. Perhaps thats a blessing,
| maybe its a curse. We'll see in another 30 years, I'm guessing
| ...
| samwillis wrote:
| Site seems to be down. Archived: https://archive.is/zIBTV
| [deleted]
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "The Internet itself seems to many to have degenerated into a
| giant advertising tool. And, a high percentage of websites load
| as slowly as a sick turtle awaking from a long slumber."
|
| Is there a connection between these two statements?
| ThalesX wrote:
| Maybe he is alluding to the fact that adding megabytes of shit
| JavaScript to profile and serve ads is what is making the pages
| load so slow.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The only thing we kept from the old internet was the page
| load times.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well he's not wrong.
| Jorengarenar wrote:
| Although it's not the whole picture
| onion2k wrote:
| _as late as 2015, 2.1 million people were somehow still using its
| dial-up service_
|
| That number is how many AOL Dial Up customers there were in 2015.
| It's from this article - https://www.cnet.com/news/more-
| than-2-million-people-still-p...
|
| Paying for the service is not the same as using the service.
| There are many reasons to pay for a redundant dial-up connection
| in case of an outage with your main internet provider. There are
| probably lots of people who had a dial-up account but forgot to
| close it. Some people probably did still use it, but for things
| they don't need broadband for (email, IRC, etc).
|
| You can't use the existence of a handful of dial-up connections
| to claim we should be building web software for people on dial-
| up. That just shows you haven't thought about things enough.
| chrischapman wrote:
| > And, a high percentage of websites load as slowly as a sick
| turtle awaking from a long slumber.
|
| I love that the full page makes just 2 requests (1 html file and
| one favicon). 20KB transferred. 1 second to load. No JavaScript,
| no cookies, no dependencies at all. This, to me, is the essence
| of 'respect your visitor'. Kudos.
| madrox wrote:
| When Walmart started taking over consumer goods, everyone thought
| small business was dead. All that was really died was the general
| store, and we saw a rise in boutique storefronts. Depending on
| their niche, people craved more than the lowest common
| denominator that Walmart provided, and these small businesses
| filled a need. I've long held that social media is following a
| similar trend. Much like Shopify, the next wave of businesses
| will enable companies to run communities that feel, as the
| article puts it, "smol." Discord is a great example of this.
| savanaly wrote:
| Yep, humanity and its demands are multifaceted. We want good
| stuff cheap and affordable as the rise of Walmart and Amazon
| goes to show. But we also want to feel unique and support
| recognizably human businesses. I don't see any reason why they
| both shouldn't exist.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I don't think this is correct. For somewhere in the range of 3
| decades, companies like Walmart have _decimated_ small
| businesses. "Boutique storefronts" have not replaced the
| stores that Walmart et al. helped to shutter all through the
| late 80s until today. They exist (mostly in large cities), but
| the reality is that small business, compared to the way it was
| in, say, 1974, _did die_.
|
| It might be true that things like Shopify help to resucitate
| it, but I'm skeptical. I also don't care about things "feeling"
| small when they actually vast: this is nothing more than a
| marketing (de|il)lusion, and does nothing to promote the kind
| of diversified, distributed form of a resilient, vibrant,
| equitable and opportunity-filled economy.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Yea I agree - Walmart and Amazon and all the giant corps have
| destroyed small businesses. We may be exposed to it less
| becuase like you said - the audience here lives in large
| cities where the population is diverse and wealthy enough for
| them to survive.
|
| We have seen tons of boutique online vendors pop-up however.
| I wonder how the total diversity compares?
|
| A new age "general store" that was a group of small online
| vendors getting together (shared ownership) might be an
| interesting way to resurge local business - imagine like a
| co-op but for small businesses all under shared physical
| locations. Products and vendors could even rotate out
| depending on the season and local population.
| kzrdude wrote:
| small shops are dead in small towns though. Only big cities can
| support the diversity now. And online giants have decimated the
| book shops, even more so, just because online book sales are so
| efficient.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > All that was really died was the general store, and we saw a
| rise in boutique storefronts.
|
| Ouch, head outside a major metro area sometime. There's small
| towns all over the country with a Walmart on one side of town
| and a Dollar General on the other with nothing but shuttered
| buildings in between save for the occasional fast food joint.
|
| Walmart destroyed businesses in small towns. They bought up
| cheap land on the outskirts of town and leveraged their huge
| infrastructure to undercut all local retailers. The local
| retailers would be paying Main Street rents with little to no
| economies of scale. There's just no competing with Walmart in
| many small towns.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Just as radio stations, newspapers, and television networks
| were the communications gatekeepers of earlier generations, we
| now have Internet gatekeepers keeping us in line, on line--
| preventing our voices from being heard by too widely
|
| I am about the same age as the author of this piece. I think they
| are making a fundamental error with his comparison.
|
| "Back in the day", radio stations, newspapers and television
| networks were the _only_ actual public media (we could include
| zines perhaps, but they rarely had the printing capacity to reach
| a large audience). Their status was conferred by their capital
| requirements, legal status and in some cases, physical
| properties.
|
| Today's internet gatekeepers only have the role they do because
| of network effects, and because people implicitly grant them that
| role. None of them have licenses from any government to do what
| they do (business license, sure; not a license to serve specific
| kinds of content the way that TV stations do).
|
| The only thing preventing my voice from being heard more widely
| is that most people are watching/listening/reading in places I
| don't have the desire or capacity to conquer. But there are no
| hypothetical barriers to me becoming a wildly adored prophet, I
| just have to do the work.
|
| I think it is both dangerous and misleading to make this
| comparison, but more significantly, it is also _misdirecting_. It
| leads us away from what we would need to do if we actually want
| to build alternatives, and instead draws comparison with utterly
| different media and legal frameworks.
| lancesells wrote:
| > The only thing preventing my voice from being heard more
| widely is that most people are watching/listening/reading in
| places I don't have the desire or capacity to conquer. But
| there are no hypothetical barriers to me becoming a wildly
| adored prophet, I just have to do the work.
|
| I agree with this comment so much. I have zero desire to
| participate in most social media and I think it's giving them
| too much power to suggest they are limiting your speech, etc.
| The media has done a truly horrendous job by using tweets and
| social media as news. As if 100 people chiming in with an
| opinion on something has much relevance in a world of billions.
|
| I prefer my own space online and don't need it to scale, or be
| seen by thousands, or even be liked. Hell, I don't even run
| analytics on my site so I might be the sole visitor and I'm
| fine with that.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I think it is a fair comparison they just did not state it
| fairly well.
|
| Back in the day you could create your own radio station too or
| make your own TV content and do it relatively affordably. But
| reaching a massive audience was multiple times more difficult
| and required help of one of the gatekeepers.
|
| With the internet you can be heard more widely and cheaper yet
| (comparatively) but again if you want to really reliably reach
| a giant audience you again need the permission of the
| gatekeepers.
|
| If modern politics have proven anything it is that you are not
| gonna become a wildly adored prophet without using a lot of
| different mega huge social media platforms no matter how hard
| you try.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > again if you want to really reliably reach a giant audience
| you again need the permission of the gatekeepers.
|
| This is not true.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I suspect it is far more so than you're giving credit.
|
| An entity which raises the ire of Facebook, Google (Web
| search, YouTube, and/or the Android marketplace), Apple
| (iOS marketplace), Amazon (AWS, publishing, retail),
| Cloudflare, other major hosting and service providers,
| etc., will have a hard time or high costs reaching an
| extensive audience.
|
| Gatekeeping isn't specific to a single role or function,
| it's a property which emerges through cost structures,
| network effects, access to capital or talent, regulatory
| and political sway or vulnerability, and numerous other
| factors.
|
| In an age of print, presses, paper, and distribution were
| limiting factors. Where these were controlled, fixed costs
| of production (writers, illustrators, editors) were
| amortised over the large number of copies which could be
| produced of a single issue or publication, and advertising
| attracted on that basis. Today, technical expertise in
| building infrastructure and support systems similarly is
| difficult to attain, but amortises technical staff and paid
| content (if any) across not and audience of merely
| thousands or millions, but of billions in the case of
| Google and Facebook.
|
| It's possible for the equivalent of a zine to be produced
| and served to a much smaller audience (though one which
| would have made publishers of the 1860s, or 1960s,
| salivate), and at comparatively high per-member cost,
| though the _absolute_ costs could still be low in most
| cases.
|
| (Static sites and intelligent caching strategies can still
| make very-large-scale services on a shoestring budget
| viable.)
|
| Discovery, promotion, engagement, and visitor insights /
| metrics are other areas in which today's media monopolies
| also acquire gatekeeper status.
| grodes wrote:
| horrible bg color and content width annoying to read
| daltont wrote:
| Stumbled upon this site recently, https://funwhileitlasted.net/.
| It made me nostalgic for the days where there were sites
| dedicated to one fairly narrow subject. I this case it was
| defunct sports leagues and teams.
| kradroy wrote:
| Today's internet is largely dominated by topics and people who
| maximize for marginal superficial engagement. You probably won't
| ever have the experience of a MajorBBS sysop breaking into your
| session when you're in the middle of mass downloading their
| mounted CD content (because the disc in the drive 2 feet away
| from them hasn't stopped spinning for hours), trying to exploit a
| bug in a door game, or bruteforcing their membership payment
| system. That's the meaningfully deep intimacy that's missing
| today.
| superkuh wrote:
| This is part of why I've loved running my .com webserver from
| my home desktop for the last 20+ years. I can see the blinking
| (and hear, and feel the vibration of) what's going on and
| insert in custom messages to the directory listing or other
| pages to talk to visitors. They can talk back by appending
| "/@say/Their message here." to any URL.
|
| I do miss the old days when you could run an open netcat on a
| popular port and every now and then get actual messages from
| people exploring the internet (burried under automated scanner
| attempts to collect banner version strings of course).
| rambambram wrote:
| Your comment method is so nice. Is there a reason you don't
| use a textarea for visitors to enter the text? Is your
| current method better against spambots?
| superkuh wrote:
| It is a bit atypical because I wanted a purely static
| comment system for my static site. Using nginx to just log
| certain matching URL types to a custom log file was way
| safer and easier to maintain than anything written in a
| dynamic language accepting arbitrary internet input. I
| eventually adapted this approach to receiving webmentions
| as well and in that context I provide textarea input for
| webmention response URLs.
|
| My method is not better against spam bots but it does
| suffer from a different type of them. For example, if a
| spider follows a link it sees of an existing comment,
| "...com/something.jpg/@say/..." then my system will
| interpret that as a comment. So... spam bots don't see it,
| but normal spiders can cause spam.
| [deleted]
| vmception wrote:
| Why is it always these brutalist websites that are nostalgic
| about this?
|
| Like its either someone that was actually around then or a Gen Z
| strange reimagining of it, both are strange imo
| letsburnthis wrote:
| Have the definitions of web 1.0 and 2.0 authoritatively been
| decided? The general idea I've seen has been that web 1.0 was
| decentralized and web 2.0 is centralized, but it seems kind of
| odd to separate the generations of something as impactful as the
| internet the same way you would separate generations of the
| iphone. It almost seems like it would make more sense to define
| generations at the same scale as the internet itself which is
| communication.
|
| (full disclosure zero research has gone into this, I didn't live
| through web 1.0, and I know nothing about how the web works).
|
| In my head, web 1.0 was the automation of one-way communication.
| You could request a site and the equivalent of a newspaper was
| sent to you; and anyone else who requested the same site was sent
| the same newspaper. If you wanted to order something you had to
| call the phone-number listed on that website, same as if you had
| seen an ad in a newspaper. Two-way communication existed but it
| was the equivalent of a really fast mail and was for the most
| part was between people over the internet rather than with the
| internet.
|
| Web 2.0, suddenly if you requested a site you get a different
| version with different ads than someone else making the same
| request; without a person choosing for you to see those different
| ads. You can place an order and human doesn't get involved until
| that item needs to be picked off the shelf to be transported in
| meat space. Now the internet is 2-way communication, you make a
| request and it responds to you in seemingly unique ways. The
| internet itself is replacing some of the human effort that goes
| into communication. Before it was just transporting human
| information, now it's responding.
|
| So what's left now that the internet has conquered communicating
| in two-directions through space? Time. If you want information
| (ideas, values, whatever) to transmit through time you create
| institutions. Something that is resilient so that it survives
| mostly intact and that is enforced to ensure compliance. Web 3.0
| seems to fit that. Immutable (if desired), enforcement is
| achieved from the immutable code itself, and it runs on belief
| (the more people that are part of it the stronger its self-
| sustaining characteristics). It might also explain why all the
| big blockchain uses have been activities traditionally controlled
| by institutions (money, property, contracts).
| dogline wrote:
| How I've seen it:
|
| Web 1.0: Let's serve web pages
|
| Web 2.0: Let's serve REST APIs, and have Javascript to all the
| formatting
|
| Web 3.0: Let's get rid of DNS and have GUIDs/Crypto/something
| erulabs wrote:
| I've always thought of it as being about the technology:
|
| Web0: universities and TCP
|
| Web1: data centers and HTTP
|
| Web2: cloud and JavaScript
|
| Web3: blockchain and JavaScript
|
| There really isn't a name for home hosting. That has never
| really been the status quo. At any rate, home hosting needs
| some augmented infrastructure (like backups, DDNS, etc). So
| possibly:
|
| Web4: homes and CDNs
| largely_sitting wrote:
| Corporate interest in the internet is going to shrink when people
| stop wanting data silos, and instead want open data storage with
| some programmable layer on top and nothing else. Corporate
| interest is high now only because of the exploitable future, but
| when it's found that the future is a bunch of open generic data
| tables and virtual machine on top, it's going to have a hard time
| competing with that. If Facebook, Google, and Amazon were all
| forced to use an open data storage system to house all their user
| data or become obsolete they would quickly become obsolete
| because advertisers would access it directly instead of paying
| them.
| gompertz wrote:
| I don't see any comments on the pink background.. Which pretty
| much burned into my retinas while reading. HN looked blueish to
| my eyes when I came back to it! Unsure if this was a high-level
| intentional play by the author!
| taurusnoises wrote:
| It'd be amazing if some HNers who vibe with this article would
| teach online courses that teach people who have no idea how to
| "decentralized" their web life by running servers and their own
| sites (not nec on the blockchain). There's a lot of us out there
| who need the very basics, and would love to participate!
| metabagel wrote:
| Is there a search engine which will only return pages that don't
| have advertisements on them? I feel like that would be a way to
| find a lot of independent content.
| karaterobot wrote:
| A four-fold increase in Gemini usage doesn't tell me much. Even a
| 100x increase wouldn't be surprising or meaningful for something
| that started at zero usage just 13 months ago. We're talking
| about a total of 2000 capsules, which is cool, but just not
| enough of a signal to make predictions off of. I already knew
| there were at least 2000 highly technical people in the world
| willing to experiment with a new protocol: if Gemini crosses over
| to moderately technical, moderately motivated people, that will
| be more interesting.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| "Back in the early 1990's, the spirit of the Internet was the
| pursuit of knowledge, exploration, innovation, fun, and
| community."
|
| Yes! I couldn't have put it better. Great article.
| achillean wrote:
| Gopher use is slowly increasing over time :)
|
| https://imgur.com/gallery/mKvUyJL
| pvpatel1001 wrote:
| trial
| holoduke wrote:
| I think it's more rotten than ever. Almost every video or article
| I see is possessed by the evil SEO devil. Sometimes I think I
| finally found a norm al one to only find out later that I was too
| dumb to recognise some new tricks.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| I don't know about web3, but somehow github is quite similar to
| what we had in the olden days; just search for 'awesome any-
| topic' in github search, and you will get a curated list of
| interesting links on nearly any-topic. Also github pages lets you
| do your own homepage in a git repository, so it's a bit like
| geocities ;-) I mean our benevolent owners at microsoft give us a
| free space for self expression, which isn't a facebook/google
| style walled garden and targeted add pusher, or medium like
| subscription extractor. It's even better than geocities, they
| don't put up any adds at all!
|
| You even have the 'The definitive list of lists (of lists)'
| https://github.com/jnv/lists - looks like the same old culture
| that moved over to a new home in the sun. (now this spaceship is
| very fragile, and might disappear upon any minor change of the
| EULA on github, matters as usual ;-)
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