[HN Gopher] Have you noticed how much shit the internet has beco...
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Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)
Author : sen_armstrong
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-06-09 19:20 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.sage.moe)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.sage.moe)
| jknoepfler wrote:
| As someone who came of age in the era the OC waxes nostalgic
| about, I can't find a lot to recommend about this post, nor do I
| think it's accurate. From where I sit, the internet today is
| richer, more diverse, and more accessible than it was in the
| 90's, the 00's, or the 10's.
|
| Consider that one of the top links on HN is the OpenMW project.
| What a great project. If I want to go deep on that, there's a
| forum with a wiki, a discord and an IRC and a public gitlab.
|
| I don't want to go deep on that. But there are literally hundreds
| of thousands of communities into which I could dive deep, some of
| which I do. I've been involved in home hydroponics groups, poker
| forums, online chess study groups, an Everquest emulation
| community, community-run RTS and fighting game tournaments.
|
| I've dug into sites hosting side-by-side translations of the Tao
| Te Ching, Soto Zen communities, forums for recovering from
| addiction.
|
| I've found music and books and events that I never otherwise
| would have found.
|
| I've learned to read rudimentary Japanese using web apps. I've
| vastly improved my classical guitar form using YouTube channels.
|
| ... and on and on and on. I'm on this wonderful internet every
| day for much of my day, co-creating communities with other
| people.
|
| There are deep, rich, giving communities everywhere on the
| internet today, not gated behind walled gardens. I wouldn't
| describe these as "shit" (or the homophobic slur the author seems
| think constitutes peak internet diction).
|
| I'm glad these communities also existed in the 90's. Personally I
| grew up into things like the Quake 2 modding community and MUDs.
| Great stuff. I'm glad the internet has continued to grow and
| thrive and has evolved into what it is today.
|
| edit: correction, by "more accessible" I meant "discoverable." I
| genuinely don't know whether or not the internet is more or less
| supportive of visually impaired users, for example (I can imagine
| it being far worse).
| archsurface wrote:
| Well "hacker news" is basically a VC promo - does anyone care?
| f_allwein wrote:
| "It is said that what is called "the spirit of an age" is
| something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually
| dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this
| reason, although one would like to change today's world back to
| the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done.
| Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation."
|
| Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai via
| goodreads
| H8crilA wrote:
| This goes well with "Technology is an independent variable" by
| Stanislaw Lem. Yet so many think they can control it.
| coldtea wrote:
| He was very right. And if he's around in 2023, things are
| immensely worse than 2007 too.
| AnEro wrote:
| It is interesting to see that every time there has been another
| layer of commercialization on the internet everyone thinks it was
| better before.
|
| Linking a 4chan archive on here is a uuhh bold move, I think its
| a fun snapshot of the time but still
| Hjkgt009 wrote:
| I read mostly 2 web sites that look the same: HN and /pol/.
|
| Orange, text based, almost anonymous.
| ignatiusj wrote:
| [dead]
| AnEro wrote:
| /pol/ ????????
|
| oh honey no
| GingerMidas wrote:
| [dead]
| tenpies wrote:
| But to my knowledge, no one has ever been able to triforce on
| HN. It's like a perpetual summer.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I was about to correct you and ask if you meant Eternal
| September, but that's at least two Eternal Septembers older
| than the one you're talking about.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| ^
|
| ^ ^
|
| Easy, see?
| fsflover wrote:
| See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230078.
| bamfly wrote:
| '07 was the height of Google's cat-and-mouse game with
| webspammers. It'd degrade to near-uselessness for a month or two,
| suddenly get a ton better, repeat. This went on though the whole
| of the middle years of the '00s.
|
| '08 or '09 is when they seemed to surrender that fight, and just
| give up on indexing the _entire_ Web. Major sites got a huge
| boost, and a great deal of the Web seemed to just drop off the
| index entirely. Google 's never been _really_ good since.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Coincides with the iPhone, then the beginning of Android, and
| the rise of mobile overtaking desktop.
| bamfly wrote:
| Also IIRC right around the same time they totally abandoned
| "don't be evil" and started doing ads inline with search
| results, basing much of their future revenue on tricking
| unwary users.
|
| [EDIT] They might also have switched from their text-only ads
| to being a more ordinary, crappy web advertiser not long
| after, which started to partially align their interests with
| webspammers, which may explain why they didn't mind yielding
| the whole middle (if that makes sense) of the search-result
| space to them.
| sigg3 wrote:
| > > Geocitites
|
| > Oh yes, the 90's was so much better...
|
| Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search
| results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some
| creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience.
|
| I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses
| Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall.
| You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting
| offers, it was up to you.
|
| Now you have the illusion of autonomy in a carefully crafted
| walled garden of ads. Or rather: freedom is more easily found
| offline.
| bagels wrote:
| You don't remember intrusive popup ads that took over the whole
| screen?
| blantonl wrote:
| How about the _pop-under ads_ that sat back there behind your
| browser just waiting to shock you with something stupid when
| you closed your browser window. Good times.
| highwaylights wrote:
| Yes, and I miss them every day.
|
| The ads were sleazy and brazen and right in your face trying
| to dragnet as many people as possible into buying something
| 99.999% had no interest in. Not like now, where massive
| dossiers are built on you automatically and you're tracked
| all over the internet by ad companies regardless of the steps
| you take as an individual to convince yourself you have
| privacy (like VPN/Private Relay/Incognito/Tor).
| drdaeman wrote:
| > where massive dossiers are built on you automatically and
| you're tracked all over the internet by ad companies
|
| ...that still utterly fail to provide relevant ads. This is
| my pet peeve - I periodically disable adblocker and -
| suprise, no surprise - 100% of ads I see are irrelevant to
| me. I can even see how they're trying to target me, but
| they're totally missing what I really want or interested
| in. "Personalized" news feeds are sensationalist click-bait
| crapfests with accidentally useful local news (just by the
| virtue of local news being more relevant, in general). Book
| recommendations only work in "more from the same author
| I've read and liked" category. Summing it up, those massive
| dossiers aren't seem to be worth shit.
|
| Either the industry needs to drastically ramp up their
| models' complexity (and maybe something will start to
| happen - although I wonder about the economy of this) or
| maybe someday they will have to admit all those profile
| data hoards were the new tulips.
|
| The Internets of old at least hadn't pretended that ads
| were "useful" or "relevant". There typically was no
| positive quality to them, except for honest "this shit
| brings site owner (or host) some money".
| rumey wrote:
| > Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search
| results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some
| creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience.
|
| What? Do you remember webrings? How absolutely riddled with
| shit-tier spam they were? Geocities drove those.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Weird. I remember them being groups of sites sharing similar
| subject matter that would all link to each other, so when you
| found one, you found them all. You may have experienced that
| differently.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| IIRC, webrings tended to be stuck at the bottom of the page.
| They didn't pop up or over the content.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| I really like the street versus mall analogy. It used to be way
| more organic, and now its heavily curated to suit a specific
| purpose (consumer capitalism). Even if many things have
| improved, it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.
| blackhaz wrote:
| Just recently my wife came back home telling me about some
| tablet computer she has never ever seen before. I think she has
| googled for it on _her_ phone. What do you know - my Facebook
| showed a few ads of that device - on that day. I 've never
| heard about it before. I never searched for it and I never
| searched for a tablet even - I don't use them. Is this now the
| new normality - palantiring through databases? Is it OK for
| Google to leak data to Facebook?
| nmilo wrote:
| I've always read comments like this and just assume it's
| confirmation bias on two levels:
|
| 1. Out of the 1000s of ads you see every day, at least one of
| them might coincidentally relate to something you talked
| about. You don't notice all the ads that are wildly
| irrelevant.
|
| 2. Even if you personally didn't have a hyper-relevant ad
| experience, out of the 1000s of HN readers that might comment
| a reply, one of them surely did. You just might be the one
| lucky guy that got your hyper-relevant ad of the day.
| plagiarist wrote:
| IDK, I think it is plausible they might be joining by IP or
| deeper connections. I've seen some ads that aren't relevant
| to me but are for something my partner was looking at on a
| different device.
| drdaeman wrote:
| It's probably simpler than this - advertiser just runs a
| campaign with some broad criteria (like income estimate
| based on IP-geolocated ZIP code) that both people in the
| same household fit. No surprise the same ad that one
| person had seen (and remembered) will be eventually shown
| to the other.
| njharman wrote:
| There's household device linking. One reason, streaming
| services/smart tvs want you to link phone/stream from
| phone. And all those services that want your phone number
| to verify/provide "2 factor". Yeah, they're totally not
| doing that to link phone and sell for future targeted ads.
|
| There's many other ways devices can be linked, addresses of
| bills for instance.
| [deleted]
| adamrezich wrote:
| years ago I moved back to my hometown in South Dakota after
| a few years in Washington. my mom asked me to pick up some
| groceries for her and gave me her credit card to pay for
| it. I bought the groceries and, additionally, the first Red
| Bull I'd had in at least a year, using her credit card.
| within an hour, I got a notification from that one Google
| app thing where you answer survey questions for Play Store
| credit (not sure if it still exists), asking what my
| opinion of Red Bull was.
|
| to reiterate:
|
| - I had just moved halfway across the country
|
| - this was the first Red Bull I had purchased in at least a
| year
|
| - I made the purchase using a credit card other than my
| own, which was in no way connected to any bank account that
| was connected to me
|
| - there should have been nothing connecting me to my
| purchase
|
| I uninstalled the app immediately after that. sure, maybe
| it was some strange coincidence, but there's been far too
| many strange coincidences like that to make me anywhere
| near comfortable with this shit.
|
| another time, years ago, I was talking to someone about how
| I needed to get a new pair of cheap earbuds, and within a
| couple hours an Amazon ad for this specific thing appeared
| in my Twitter timeline.
|
| additionally, I just got married a couple weeks ago, and my
| wife and I immediately started seeing ads for sexual
| stamina tablets in our social media feeds--thanks, evil
| advertising apparatus, I thought I was doing okay :/
| [deleted]
| margalabargala wrote:
| There is a much less malicious explanation here.
|
| If that tablet company had very recently begun an internet
| marketing campaign, across multiple ad networks, target
| approximately your demographic, then it's wholly reasonable
| that you and your wife would independently see ads for it.
| sircastor wrote:
| An analogy to what you're suggesting is that this person
| and their wife each drove past the same bill board at
| different times.
|
| I think the thing that most people would really find tragic
| and scary is that we're all far more predictable and
| homogenous than we'd like to believe.
| majormajor wrote:
| You and your wife's phones are almost certainly tied together
| in multiple databases that adtech companies (especially the
| quieter tiers _below_ Google /FB themselves) maintain and
| sell. And then you get re-targeted for ads you or her see, or
| ads based on things you or her see (retargeting was a really
| big thing back when I was in the industry, since behavioral
| prediction wasn't quite living up to the hype - so just re-
| show stuff you already think is relevant! I'm sure you've
| seen stuff like "here's thirty other lightbulbs" after you
| buy one lightbulb on Amazon in the past decade.)
|
| Here's how it worked ~12 years ago: At some point you almost
| certainly have used the same home internet connection. A
| cookie associated with some account(s) of hers gets
| associated with that IP. Same for some account(s) of yours.
| Find IPs that over small time frames only have a handful of
| distinct users to filter out coffeeshops and such. Bam,
| likely family or roommate connection. Some sticky
| "supercookie" stuff or similar gets set so this can be both
| resurrected even when cookies expire (through like Etag cache
| headers or whatever) and then there's a lot of behind-the-
| scenes ad network offline-cookie-syncing.
|
| One of the companies in that web partners offers ads on FB,
| another runs ads on Google, she searches and click something
| on your wife's phone (at this point regardless of network),
| it gets tied to you too.
|
| It _could_ be more innocuous but tracking same-household,
| cross-device for retargeting... all that is _really old hat_
| at this point.
|
| I intentionally moved my career pretty far from ad-tech in
| the past decade, but from what I've heard in adjacent convos
| and such is that the newer developments include some of the
| newer platforms like smart TVs into all that old cross-device
| fun, too. Both as data source and ad display destination. A
| lot of TVs phone home about what you watch, even - like
| https://clinch.co/clinch-partners-with-samsung-ads/ There's a
| million ad-tech companies out there, they aren't all just
| writing real-time-bidding algorithms for traditional display
| ads.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > I'm not going to say technology was better
|
| The Internet was better but the technology was worse.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search
| results
|
| No but altavista and metacrawler did.
|
| Then there came google, heavily subsidised by vc money. Deep
| pockets. Then that turned out to be unsustainable and so they
| began controlling search results and showing excessive ads.
|
| If we want an ad free internet we need to pay for services or
| have government provided alternatives.
|
| There's no in between i am afraid. Servers and engineers cost
| money.
|
| I wouldnt mind spending 10PS a month for a proper search engine
| service with a means to stay connected with friends. That would
| also reduce bot generated content.
| plagiarist wrote:
| If you paid for that it would be less than a decade before
| that company was also doing the same bullshit and also
| collecting a subscription. Look at what is happening to
| streaming. "Oh, $10/mo for basically all the content, that's
| a no-brainer." Now it's returning to the cable television
| experience with ads every 10 minutes.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Very true. And when that happens i will gladly switch.
| lkrubner wrote:
| But people didn't rely on search, as much, back then. I
| belonged to a few forums, and I'd visit one or two portals,
| almost every day as my starting point on the Web, and from
| there people would be recommending things, and I'd follow
| that. All through the 90s and into the early 00s, it was
| sites such as Everything and Digg and Slashdot that drove all
| traffic. Search-as-in-Altavista was ineffective, so people
| didn't rely on it. We all relied on certain forums, and those
| drove traffic in a more organic way. Of stuff we have
| nowadays, Reddit almost recreates that old world, but Reddit
| now operates in a context where online traffic has
| concentrated into 2 sites: Google and Facebook. There is no
| way to escape the current context, that traffic is now
| massively concentrated. There was a certain freedom to the
| 90s, in that no site could reliably capture even 1% of the
| Web traffic, a situation that we idealistically thought would
| last forever.
| pessimizer wrote:
| And there was literally _more_ on the internet. I could search
| for a book, and get a ton of information on it from a ton of
| different perspectives. Now I get results page after results
| page of links to the same copy over and over again, and tons of
| people trying to sell me something or to trick me into
| downloading a trojan. At some point, all the search engines
| decided that they didn 't even need more than five or six pages
| of results (that they silently repeat.) I mean, they gave you
| the Wikipedia entry and a link to the Goodreads page as the
| first two results after their ads - what else could you
| possibly want to read? Are you a terrorist or something?
|
| The only countervailing events were Google's book scanning
| project, the founding of archive.org, and the growth of
| Wikipedia. Google Books is a shadow what it was, was under
| attack, and was largely an AI project. Archive.org is in
| danger, and had to limit access to 95% of its content; I can't
| download a book from the 40s that has been out of print since
| then, and where everybody who was involved with it is dead.
| Wikipedia is falling apart under the influence of paid editors
| and people attacking other people through edits to their
| biographies.
|
| It's getting to the point where it might be better not to be on
| the web. I don't like it. Even this web 2.0 _commenting on
| everything_ seems like a pointless outlet for frustrations. And
| all it does is make various files on you, in dozens or hundreds
| of hands, grow slowly.
|
| edit: I don't want to diminish how awesome it is to have a good
| proportion of 17th-19th century nonfiction online. It's nuts.
| karaterobot wrote:
| The purpose of posting this may be to reiterate that old canard
| about "twenty years ago, people were saying what we're saying
| now, therefore it isn't true." If not, I apologize for assuming
| so. In any case, my reading is, it was true in 2007, and it is
| much worse now. The predictions about centralization were
| incorrect only in the names of some of the players, and in not
| having the benefit of knowing about the role of mobile devices in
| consolidating and controlling attention.
| basch wrote:
| If anything, it shows that the blogspam repost problem still
| hasnt been solved. Still no browser extension that finds the
| original and replaces all rehosts with it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Still no browser extension that finds the original and
| replaces all rehosts with it.
|
| You'd think that'd be a job for search engines, but they
| don't seem to care about the product.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Relatedly, some old quote from the Romans or Greeks is often
| brought up where someone laments youth behavior as lazy and
| immoral, and it's referenced as proof that old(er) people
| always say that so it doesn't mean anything.
|
| However, isn't it possible that they were on a downward
| trajectory, and we are too? And that at other points in time,
| not referenced, old(er) people may have felt differently?
| invalidOrTaken wrote:
| worth noting that the Roman and Greek empires did, in fact,
| fall
| petsfed wrote:
| Considering that the old quote is Cicero criticizing pre-
| dictator Julius Caesar for the way he wore his toga (and not,
| you know, all the things that Sulla might've put him on the
| Proscription Lists for), I'd argue its more that old people
| consistently criticize the wrong thing about young people,
| focusing on the superficial, rather than the substantive.
|
| EDIT because I forgot to add:
|
| This missing the mark is rarely because there's something
| intrinsic about old people and other people's haircuts. Its
| more that we are generally raised to respect (as authorities)
| our elders, and sort of subconsciously expect that people
| younger than us will in turn grant us the same respect. So
| the criticism basically comes down "they're not giving me
| what's _due_ to me ".
|
| Meanwhile, if the criticism leveled against Caesar came down
| to "he's waaaaay too ambitious, and has already shown a
| propensity for ignoring social mores to get what he wants",
| then Cicero's criticism might feel more prescient, and less
| like an old man shouting at a cloud.
|
| All of that said, its actually really hard in the moment to
| identify what will be dangerous to society before it comes
| up. So maybe Cicero had a feeling in his gut, but all he
| could come up with is "he's kind of sloppy with his toga"
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Kind of like radio (hello, ClearChannel) or TV.
|
| There are still a few holdouts from corporatism. On radio,
| there's KKUP (online at https://kkup.org/) which has no ads and
| does _all kinds_ of weird shit.
|
| We need the equivalent of the 88 MHz - 92 MHz band on FM that's
| reserved for non-profit stations, and you _know_ that in a
| strange city you can dial around and find something there.
| Equivalent things do exist on the Web, but it needs to be easier
| to find them.
|
| Yes, you do get religious stations and NPR, but there are also
| college radio stations and oddballs like KKUP.
| mberning wrote:
| Google and search in general is definitely worse than 10 years
| ago. It seems like I can't find anything useful now. Years ago a
| few searches could turn up very arcane and niche data. Nowadays
| it's like it never even existed.
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