[HN Gopher] What I want from the internet
___________________________________________________________________
What I want from the internet
Author : chrbutler
Score : 82 points
Date : 2023-05-07 15:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.chrbutler.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.chrbutler.com)
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Where is the RSS feed on your site? I tried /feed and /RSS and
| .RSS none of which work. There is also no visible link that I was
| able to see.
|
| Assuming I'm correct in my assumption that there is none, I find
| the lamenting the loss of "the structure that a personal website,
| can-to-can structure, an _RSS feed_ , and a browser provide"
| (emphasis mine) deeply ironic.
|
| And no, email newsletters are not a valid replacement, no matter
| how much you benefit from pushing them.
|
| Maybe you should contribute to the internet you want to see?
| rektide wrote:
| By far the best article about where we are today that I've seen!
|
| The idea of the internet as a body that has gone comatose, that
| isn't really reacting or changing, is a good metaphor for me,
| matches my feelings. There's still so much potential, but we
| aren't in an interactive phase; we are continuing along only with
| the inertia we had.
|
| But we could collectively wake up at any point, could restart
| creating interwoven connected experiences of our own.
| l7l wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! Having the same feeling for a while now.
| throwuwu wrote:
| Just put down your phone. Or better yet, just use the smolnet
| sites that already exist. If you pine for the days of a small,
| nerdy and exclusive internet then just go there it's just a few
| clicks away.
| chrbutler wrote:
| you had me at smolnet. sincere lol over here.
| pixl97 wrote:
| At least until you piss some kiddy off and the entire subnet
| you're on is receiving a TB/s of packets till the point your
| ISP drops you or you have to hide behind cloudflare.
| pxoe wrote:
| it's rambly, but it's still not clear 'what is it that they want
| from the internet'. "you could find a point in there somewhere,
| but really, you had to"
| intrasight wrote:
| I like to consider what will the Internet be in ten years. Who
| will control it? How will we interact with it? Will there be any
| humans present? Frankly, I am not too optimistic that it'll be
| the Internet that we want.
| pixl97 wrote:
| People say its "dead internet theory", but I think Thoughty2
| correctly calls it "dead internet prophecy"
| chrbutler wrote:
| I've seen reports lately that bot traffic is accounting for
| nearly half of all internet traffic, which is truly wild.
|
| https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/bad-bot-traffic-r...
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| And depending on what group you listen to most of the
| internet traffic is for pornography, or possibly bittorrent.
| intrasight wrote:
| I would assume today that the vast majority of Internet
| traffic is movie streaming for non-pirate sources. But I
| could be wrong.
| camgunz wrote:
| I mostly buy Eternal September, or as rephrased by David Foster
| Wallace:
|
| "[The internet] is the way it is simply because people tend to be
| extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests
| and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble
| interests."
|
| Like, the internet is banal because we're (the rich world) all on
| it. It's not a weird little niche anymore. So it's now subject to
| all the (rich) world's problems. Racism is a problem on Twitter
| not because of content moderation difficulties or the lack of
| sufficient compute power to run sufficiently intelligent AI, but
| because it's a problem off Twitter too. Getting nickel and dimed,
| scammed, deluged by ads, or tricked by dark patterns is a problem
| on major platforms because it's a problem in meatspace too. We
| all know this, because our main fear with AI (the latest and
| greatest tech) is that it will soon also have all of these
| problems, and just amplify them even more than the internet did.
| It totally will!
|
| But FWIW I think cool things are happening. Wireguard and
| Tailscale are cool. I hate to admit it, but some Blockchain stuff
| is cool. MLS is cool. ActivityPub is (maybe) cool. You just gotta
| get out of the browser.
| danrl wrote:
| Gemini:// is a protocol that currently feels a lot like the
| geocities-era web. It is not yet September there. You'll find
| how to get in if you try hard enough.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You list social issues and then list a collection of privacy-
| oriented technology as if it's a solution.
|
| Those two domains are orthogonal. Perfect privacy won't make
| racism or banality go away. It may make it harder to be
| targeted by ad farms, but it will make it easier for scammers
| and other bottom feeders to infiltrate and exploit online
| communities for personal and sometimes political ends.
|
| Instead of being flooded by spray-and-pray spam, users in
| online spaces will be targeted by more sophisticated attacks
| based on estimates of psychology and interests derived from
| their public posting profile.
|
| The DFW quote sums it up nicely. There is no technological fix
| for a lowest common denominator culture which rewards predatory
| greed over sincere mutuality.
| afefers wrote:
| What is MLS?
| camgunz wrote:
| Messaging Layer Security:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messaging_Layer_Security --
| basically TLS for messaging apps
| JohnFen wrote:
| > You just gotta get out of the browser.
|
| I agree with this. The internet is a great tool. The web is
| extremely problematic and growing less useful over time.
|
| Too many people think that the internet and the web are the
| same thing.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Firewalls pretty much have made the internet and web the same
| thing, as discussed on HN in many threads. About the only
| services on the internet that are not wholesale blocked are
| DNS and HTTPS. The internet's usefulness as a tool has been
| greatly compromised because of this.
| camgunz wrote:
| This is a gift. Technology to keep corporations out of your
| space is usually a lot more expensive and a lot less
| reliable.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > About the only services on the internet that are not
| wholesale blocked are DNS and HTTPS.
|
| Really? I'm so happy and fortunate that hasn't been true
| for me. If the only thing I could reach was the web, well
| over half of the usefulness of the internet would
| evaporate.
| chrbutler wrote:
| Yes, I struggle with that all the time - and not getting
| bogged down into yet another explainer that they are not the
| same thing!
| cultureswitch wrote:
| That quote really nails the problem.
| jasode wrote:
| _> It is hard, though, to build and maintain the structures of
| the old, "smaller" internet. You can, today, still go back to the
| can-to-can structure that a personal website, an RSS feed, and a
| browser provide. _
|
| I think the author ignores another reason that people (especially
| us techies) don't like to admit: _The majority of people don 't
| care about following a list of personal websites._ Instead,
| websurfers just get whatever snippets of information they want
| (e.g. food recipe, medical trivia) from whatever website happens
| to have it and then move on.
|
| The disinterest in personal websites comes from both the
| websurfers and many content authors themselves.
|
| Some examples from the content creators...
|
| Clay Shirky's essay _" A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"_ happens
| to be on the HN front page right now. But he doesn't maintain his
| personal website anymore. He gave reasons for it[1] and even said
| he regrets letting it rot. But even today, his personal website
| remains empty and previous links all return 404 errors. But he
| does stay active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cshirky
|
| John Carmack's old personal website "altdevblogaday.com" is gone
| now.[2] But he does stay active on Twitter:
| https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack
|
| Those 2 guys are obviously internet-savvy and need no lectures on
| personal websites -- and yet they chose to abandon them.
|
| As to examples for websurfers, if you ask normal people if they
| sometimes search the internet for a cooking recipe, they'll say
| "yes". But if then followup with "Can you name a cooking website
| you got a recipe from?", most will say "no". The average
| websurfer cared more about the recipe and not the particular
| website. Sure, some will make a mental note of the domain url and
| maybe even bookmark it but many won't.
|
| The lack of interest for following "little websites" continues to
| be reinforced with tools like ChatGPT. Most people would rather
| get some synthesized information instead of visiting a bunch of
| different websites they don't care about.
|
| I think this past comment about RSS not being relevant to regular
| people is uncomfortable for some to read:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060707
|
| I bought this internet yellow pages book in 1995 when the
| consumer-accessible internet was new:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Internet+Yellow+Pages+1s...
|
| That book represents a different time when indie websites were a
| _purposeful destination_ to visit. I notice that a lot of people
| don 't bother doing that anymore. Me included.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31041194
|
| [2] requires Wayback Machine:
| http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programm...
| chrbutler wrote:
| Great points. I think you're absolutely right - social media in
| particular has given most people good reason to (a) not
| maintain a personal website and (b) not follow other personal
| websites. Ultimately, I'm not sure that's a good thing, but
| that isn't to say that it doesn't present some signficant
| benefits, like the ability to follow topics, follow a much
| greater number of people, increase the speed of conversation,
| etc. Thanks for reading!
| ghaff wrote:
| I've certainly gone through phases of posting content of
| various types on various sites over time. I'll probably get
| back to posting on my own sites a bit more as one of my main
| channels went away. But it is easy to let dropping some
| comments on social media take the place of writing even a short
| blog post--and that's even assuming you have a blog all set up
| and everything.
|
| >But he does stay active on Twitter:
| https://twitter.com/cshirky
|
| Sort of. He hasn't posted anything since last year. [ADDED: I'm
| wrong. Pinned tweet threw me off.]
| jasode wrote:
| _> Sort of. He hasn't posted anything since last year._
|
| He posted this one April 23 (about 15 days ago):
| https://twitter.com/cshirky/status/1650298747237064704
|
| I think the default Twitter webpage view is confusing because
| the pinned older tweets (Dec 31 2022) are shown before the
| most recent tweets.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. That's what threw me off. You see a pinned tweet and
| assume it's the most recent at a quick glance.
| uneekname wrote:
| You keep mentioning "websurfers," "the majority of people," the
| comment you linked describes "real people." Indeed, most people
| on the internet are not going to start their own blogs tomorrow
| and fill out their RSS readers with dozens of hand-picked
| blogs.
|
| The content creators you list may have changed how they publish
| their content to reach a different/larger audience, and that's
| totally fine. It's a good thing that there are different groups
| of people who spend time in different corners of the internet.
| If you want to make a big splash, of course you won't (just)
| use the tools of the small internet.
|
| There may be some people who want the "small internet" to make
| some sort of grand comeback. But I think most of the people
| interested in it are looking to build out a more intimate
| community of people who want to do the same. And that dream is
| already being realized for many. With an internet this large,
| even this niche can be a large group of people.
| chrbutler wrote:
| Yes, I love that - and it was a point I landed on, too. That
| any meaningful sub-group on the internet is going to be
| really really big because the whole of the internet, as far
| as people go, is really really really big.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I'm pretty darn sure I'm not the only independent content creator
| being largely ignored, attacked for "self promotion" if they post
| their own work while no one else ever posts it etc and then
| listening to people whine about the internet and how they wish
| this, that or the other while you roll your eyes and think to
| yourself again "This is the internet you helped create. If you
| don't like it, make other choices."
| BKirkpatrick wrote:
| So much this. I created a website that matches people for voice
| calls based on their opinions, kind of like discord meets
| omegle meets twitter (https://frenemy.live), if you're
| interested would love to have you join
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| The problem isn't self-promotion per se, the problem is the
| sheer amount of self-promotion that occurs when it is allowed.
| If any is permitted, then often all is permitted, and a forum
| becomes inundated with people vying for attention. Classic
| tragedy of the commons.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > and a forum becomes inundated with people vying for
| attention
|
| You mean spam. Any system in which does not quickly and
| harshly punish spam will quickly be crushed under its weight
| ruining the perceived value that attracted users to the
| service in the first place.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| You are missing the point. Entirely.
|
| If you know of an independent creator and they do something
| you like, _share it._
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| Entirely you say? I was addressing this portion of your
| comment:
|
| > _I 'm pretty darn sure I'm not the only independent
| content creator being largely ignored, attacked for "self
| promotion"_
|
| I agree whole-heartedly with your _share it_ sentiment, but
| if that was your original point, it was unfortunately
| obscured.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| It's a no win situation. People ignore independent
| creatives while consuming more established and popular
| media. Share your own work, people attack you. Meanwhile
| if you don't share your work, no one sees it.
|
| Then you read articles whining about how hard it is to
| find interesting content and escape the prison of social
| media.
|
| It's not because independent creators don't exist. But
| there are a lot of barriers to getting traction at all.
|
| And if you try to even comment on the topic in a
| discussion of this sort, odds are good people will act
| like it is a nefarious plot to self promote. It's
| maddening.
| qup wrote:
| Why do you keep using the term "whining" to reference the
| article?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I've been on HN a lot of years. Lots of people here have
| money and as a group most of them consistently object to
| essentially any means to monetize content, pay content
| creators, etc while denying that this amounts to
| expecting slave labor from writers and also decrying the
| tragic lack of good quality writing.
|
| I used to try to consistently point out such patterns
| while being personally attacked, told to stop whining,
| stop expecting to make money from writing as it's simply
| not realistic and "get a real job."
|
| People here want a quality experience online. And they
| want it for free (including ad-free).
|
| Often while they, themselves, make good money for writing
| the code that runs the internet. Somehow, _that 's
| different._
| chrbutler wrote:
| I would _love_ to see a viable micropayment model (a la
| Jaron Lanier 's years of suggestions) that takes the baby
| steps we've already made (e.g. Patreon, Substack) and
| accelerates us to a place where all value is compensated.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Micropayments of just a few cents is basically how many
| _ads_ work. I 've already stated that HN hates ads.
|
| You can currently pay as little as a dollar via PayPal
| and it's like 67 cents for the recipient (or was last I
| checked). Lots of people just feel that's not micro
| enough and not frictionless enough.
| qup wrote:
| Well let me respond, since maybe I'm one of those guys.
|
| You've fundamentally misunderstood what I want. If a
| "writer" wrote it as part of their job, I don't want to
| read it. I mean, I might, but that's not what I would be
| "whining" about here.
|
| I've kept blogs most of my life. I'm after similar
| content to what I would post.
|
| I don't care to read whatever you want to get paid to
| write. No offense, I'm sure it's great and worth all the
| money.
|
| The quality experience is enjoying other people's
| gardens, and the point of having the garden is to share
| it with other people, not to have a ticket booth or a
| billboard. At least, that's the case at my blog. Which
| I've never shared here, and nobody else ever has either.
| Which I find totally fine.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| You seem to be assuming some things different from my
| reality.
|
| I make very little money from blogging. I took ads off
| years ago. It's not some kind of paid gig shilling for
| some product or whatever.
|
| I have a Patreon that makes too little and I take tips. I
| try to write what I think is meaningful.
|
| My writing has repeatedly made the front page of HN,
| often without making a dime.
|
| I've stopped posting it here. I'm tired of feeling kicked
| in the teeth for "self promoting".
|
| Journalism is in trouble. This undermines political
| freedom. Etc. And yet people just expect high traffic to
| pay the bills, which it can if your monetization strategy
| is ads, but the HN crowd is fond of ad blockers and
| vocally critical of ads.
|
| Anyway, I don't care to argue it. You asked a question. I
| replies. This conversation is most likely a waste of
| time.
|
| Adieu.
| chrbutler wrote:
| Hah, I have had the same thought a few times. I didn't
| think I was whining!
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| > _It 's a no win situation_
|
| Exactly! That's what I meant by tragedy of the commons.
| It sucks for everybody, consumers and creators alike, and
| there is no satisfactory solution. I empathize, I am an
| independent creator myself, and I know the pain. For what
| it's worth, it helped me to change my mindset from sprint
| to marathon, and accept that success, if any, would be
| slow.
|
| I also feel that the modern web's lust for stats is doing
| more harm than good. If one's follower count isn't
| growing, the dopamine dries up. Falling listener stats?
| Enjoy that depression! Better to ignore the stats and use
| "is this still worthwhile" as one's compass when
| possible.
| chrbutler wrote:
| Exactly! Not sure if you made it to the end, but that's
| essentially the parting message.
| lioeters wrote:
| What I think can improve the situation is "curation",
| particularly manual, effort-intensive, thoughtful and reasonably
| timely curation by a person or people with good taste. That's
| asking a lot, with many subjective variables, but it's what keeps
| bringing me back to Hacker News, the consistently high signal-to-
| noise ratio.
| uneekname wrote:
| Hi Christopher, I really liked this article.
|
| > It is hard, though, to build and maintain the structures of the
| old, "smaller" internet.
|
| I agree. Even just setting up an RSS reader and finding a little
| community of blogs to follow can take a lot of work. Interact
| with those blogs, whether that's by submitting comments to
| individual posts, posting responses on your own blog, or doing
| something fancier with IndieWeb protocols [0], takes time and
| know-how. Hacker News, subreddits, etc. can remove some of that
| friction, at the cost of less personalization and more spam.
|
| There are so so many cool ideas in the small internet. Project
| Gemini [1] comes to mind, as do linkrolls and the Marginalia
| search engine [2]. There have been a lot of folks finding
| meaningful communities in the fediverse recently too. I think the
| small internet both benefits and suffers from this fractal of
| different tools and communities: among so much diversity, it's
| simultaneously difficult and rewarding to find your place. I hope
| that over time, we'll be able to reduce the difficulty and
| increase the reward by building better tools for discovering and
| participating in these communities.
|
| Anyways, even if we're hard to find sometimes, there are a lot of
| us who feel at-home reading our RSS readers, posting to a blog
| from time-to-time, and maybe even making new tools to make these
| activities easier. I feel certain that over time, we'll be better
| connected in ways that make us happy.
|
| [0] https://indieweb.org/
|
| [1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
|
| [2] https://search.marginalia.nu/
| chrbutler wrote:
| Yes to all of this. And thanks for the links! I hadn't heard of
| Gemini before. I'll check them out asap.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, no mention of the Fediverse was baffling...
| paulcole wrote:
| [flagged]
| chrbutler wrote:
| That's fair! Would love to hear (sincerely) how you would
| answer this question.
| paulcole wrote:
| Personally, I prefer the internet of today to the internet of
| the past. There's so much more to do and I just don't have
| any nostalgia for 1997-2002 (the first 5 years I used the
| internet) or any other time period in the past. The internet
| has gotten consistently better and more useful over time.
|
| The one thing I would like (but will never get) is the way to
| pay directly for more things rather than pay indirectly with
| ads.
| chrbutler wrote:
| I think that's a totally valid perspective - and I agree to
| some extent. There are absolutely things about the internet
| that are better today than the way they used to be.
|
| As for the micropayments thing - I couldn't agree more.
| Jaron Lanier has had a lot to say about that, and I remain
| hopeful that someday we can find a functional model other
| than advertising.
| CyberKimura wrote:
| What does his race have to do with it?
| paulcole wrote:
| [flagged]
| micropresident wrote:
| This can be addressed. Protocols not platforms(tm). However,
| these protocols need to have spam mitigation mechanisms built it.
| We need "RPoW" tokens deployed ubiquitously.
| chrbutler wrote:
| I need that on a t-shirt.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > And the internet used to be more work to experience. Today,
| it's more work to avoid.
|
| Since the author likes analogies, I'll add mine: the internet now
| has become roads, bridges, towns. The internet used to be
| forests, rivers to ford, camps.
|
| There used to be an exploration-aspect to the internet, not sure
| what you would find if you took this trail or that one. Now we
| all seem to travel the few, well-worn roads to the same handful
| of destinations.
|
| I do like the internet-as-reference-book internet where I can
| quickly solve a programming problem that is stymieing me. I would
| keep Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Stack Overflow.
|
| Outside that though I do prefer roads less taken.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| These days, the internet is more a city from a cyberpunk movie
| where everything is covered with ads, everywhere. So much that
| some of use filtering glasses to hide ads from us. Tracking
| devices are everywhere and your every move is recorded and
| stored in a database of a company that produces very realistic
| sounding androids.
|
| Oh yeah, and anyone with enough holodeck processing power can
| make an artificial video of you saying and doing anything they
| want.
| chrbutler wrote:
| I like that analogy!
| fsflover wrote:
| > The internet used to be forests, rivers to ford, camps.
|
| https://wiby.me
| gspencley wrote:
| That's a good analogy.
|
| I like technology and modern cities in the abstract. They
| provide people with easy access to certain things that were
| historically scarce. Some of those things are life saving, like
| cutting edge medicine.
|
| But I can't live in a city. I hate the noise, the crowds, the
| people, the crime, the pollution and the vast majority of the
| time I'm not in any sort of immediate need for what they
| provide. Fine for the odd Saturday adventure one or twice a
| year. Any more than that and no thanks. I always come away
| feeling stressed out, anxious, tired and worse off for the
| experience.
|
| Ironically, online shopping and remote work is what has made
| living in a city unnecessary.
| htag wrote:
| I'm also fond of the internet-as-public-square paradigm. All
| news worthy events are posted in it. There's sections of the
| square dedicated to classifieds and vendors. There's a spot
| with chess sets.
|
| Yes, there's also some people on soap boxes yelling into the
| crowd. I can usually ignore them just fine.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I describe it as, the internet of books and text became the
| internet of videos and music. Not better or worse just
| different.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I describe it as, the internet of books and text became the
| internet of videos and music._
|
| Except that the internet never was books, and was only text
| due to technological limitations.
|
| When we started networking all the computers together, we
| (myself included) had this vision of an information utopia
| where everyone would be able to access all of the information
| previously locked up in books, magazines, and newspapers.
|
| But that never really happened. Instead, people started
| making new content -- the faster, cheaper, and lower quality,
| the better.
|
| The old content remained locked up in libraries. Some of it
| managed to move behind paywalls, but the vast majority of the
| information -- and lessons -- learned in the last 500 years
| has been forgotten because it's not free and easy to access.
|
| We had this naive vision that with everyone online, people
| would rally around the best of what humanity had to offer,
| and we'd all be exposed to the planet's best art, literature,
| music, and knowledge. Instead, we got mostly the exact
| opposite of what we set out to build.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > had this vision of an information utopia where everyone
|
| When it comes to new technology and the impact it will have
| people are almost always wrong. The printing press not only
| made better books, it created oceans of shitty ones.
|
| We didn't have
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law at the
| time to warn us.
| chrbutler wrote:
| 100%
| ghaff wrote:
| >the vast majority of the information -- and lessons --
| learned in the last 500 years has been forgotten because
| it's not free and easy to access.
|
| I guess I don't really agree with that. Yes, a lot of very
| detailed information (and primary sources) about things is
| in research libraries, at least some of which are not open
| to the general public. But that doesn't mean all that
| information is lost. A lot of historical information is
| accessible to the (admittedly relatively small percentage
| of) people willing to put the effort into digging it up.
| bombcar wrote:
| It went from an Internet of amateurs (those with an actual
| love for what they are talking about) to professionals (which
| are very slick, but the money is always there).
|
| You can still find great content in videos and music from
| amateurs, but the professionals "outshout" most of them; and
| the best amateurs end up getting sucked into being
| professionals. Once your livelihood is on the line, things
| change.
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| I recently googled something like "modal fabric weave diagram".
|
| On my phone I was given five places to buy modal clothing and a
| message that "x other similar results have been omitted".
|
| I persisted, I rephrased. I was asked if I was a robot, I
| clicked on CAPTCHAs, and now Google is willing to give me some
| results that are relevant to textile design but I still haven't
| been able to find out what weave patterns are common in modern
| modal fabrics.
|
| On my work computer Google knows I'm an engineer so it gives me
| papers on visco-elastic properties of the fabric but it's not
| actually processing my query well and giving me weaves, it's
| just saying "I guess you're fancy and technical, huh?"
|
| In 1997 there would have been a text/image website with forty
| diagrams of various weave patterns and it would have come up in
| the top twenty results.
|
| I would like a little more 1997 in my internet, please.
| kanzure wrote:
| It would be a lot better if you could just search an index of
| all the words on the web, and then we can refine our queries
| against the results to narrow things down even more. As it is
| right now, search just doesn't work anymore.
| Minor49er wrote:
| You might have better luck using a search engine like
| Fireball
|
| https://fireball.com/
| pixl97 wrote:
| In 1997 there wouldn't have been 50,000 spam responses in the
| query.
|
| In 1997 there would have been some place that made it, or
| someone interested in it that would have made the site for
| their own interests in spreading the information.
|
| Today there are countless entities looking to scrape a penny
| from your view in any way possible, and will create an ocean
| of spam in order to capture that revenue.
|
| At least with search engines we cannot go back. That internet
| is dead. Any new system you create to bring back the old
| internet will attract the previous group because your system
| would be valuable, and like parasites, they will steal value
| from your system.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > In 1997 there wouldn't have been 50,000 spam responses in
| the query.
|
| If what the GP wants exists, and none of the given options
| are any bit similar to it, why do you think the amount of
| spam is relevant?
|
| If Google couldn't find a real thing between a mountain of
| invented low quality content, you would have a point. But
| Google keeps pushing unrelated results instead.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Define "real thing". Again in the past it's really easy,
| people didn't put much "fake" content up. Now there is
| mountain of documents that have 'content' that matches
| your request... How much energy are you going to put in
| to determine if its low or high quality content? I did
| the search that OP did and I got tangentially related
| documents, but not the exact think that OP was likely
| looking for. And this defines the problem, there is far
| more noise than signal, and the ancient internet did not
| look like that at all.
| moffkalast wrote:
| In that sense, HN at least feels like a village up in the
| mountains. With lots of trails leading into less travelled
| forests around it...
| chrbutler wrote:
| I like that, and you're right. I find that discussions in the
| comment of HN articles almost always tell me something I
| don't know. Sometimes it feels like secret knowledge :)
| [deleted]
| visarga wrote:
| > I would keep Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Stack Overflow.
|
| I'd be very sad to lose YouTube. It's the jewel of the
| internet.
| bsder wrote:
| Except that it's not. YouTube is a giant hole of suck that
| brings everybody else down to their level.
|
| YouTube being subsidized has driven any competitor out of the
| space. Since YouTube has a monopoly, your content will get
| copied and posted over there _even if you don 't give
| permission_. Since YouTube is backed by Google, they are
| larger than lawsuits which could bring them to heel.
|
| If you wanted YouTube to improve, split it out from Google
| again.
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