[HN Gopher] You have reached the end of the internet (2006)
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You have reached the end of the internet (2006)
Author : raytopia
Score : 189 points
Date : 2025-12-20 17:10 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hmpg.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (hmpg.net)
| jacewhitmer wrote:
| Reminded me of this commercial
|
| https://youtu.be/_uXtWIg_A7M?si=h0FSN79T5SDoUuGm
| benwerd wrote:
| I mean, _finally_.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| It was fun while it lasted.
|
| For me the high point was Fark or maybe Homestar and the low
| point was obviosuly Facebook... or maybe the end of Democracy.
| Loughla wrote:
| Fark and cracked in about 2007 were peak post development,
| profit motivated Internet. Homestar runner and albino black
| sheep (shout out to flashback for many fun dmt experiences) in
| about 2004 was peak fun Internet.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Interesting how internet boosters in the late 90s/early 2000s
| told us the internet would revitalize democracy by making it so
| anyone could publish. I'm not aware of a single cynic who
| successfully predicted how things actually ended up turning
| out. Nor have I seen much of an attempt to revisit those early
| predictions.
| neonroku wrote:
| Earth by David Brin and Ender's Game made some predictions in
| this area
| subdavis wrote:
| I vaguely remember "The Nets" in Enders game but not how
| they functioned. What about Card's portrayal did you find
| prescient?
| eucyclos wrote:
| Card's idea that everyone could publish and excellent
| voices would be amplified was correct in premise, though
| it's conclusion was completely off. Classic XKCD parodied
| it brilliantly IMHO: https://xkcd.com/635/
| eimrine wrote:
| RMS has seen our troubles with non-free software as early as
| in 80s. What he has not predict that the software has find
| even more cruel way of shipping - disservices which do not
| even allow the freedom 0.
|
| BTW the statement about democracy is not a lie - everyone
| knows some big and small revolutions happened after someone's
| post in social networks. Also such things as anonymous news
| sources, torrents and bitcoin has democraticized a whole lot
| of things in our lives.
| exq wrote:
| "AI will democratize education and information access as
| everyone will have their own personal tutor and librarian!"
|
| History repeats
| dokyun wrote:
| You should play Metal Gear Solid 2, or at least watch the
| last codec call[1]. See how much you can apply what it talks
| about to the current year. This game came out a month after
| 9/11.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA
| numpad0 wrote:
| It did, then piracy happened, couple revolutions in Middle
| East followed, and the crackdown on English-speaking social
| media began.
| garyrob wrote:
| > I'm not aware of a single cynic who successfully predicted
| how things actually ended up turning out.
|
| Let's change that here and now! :)
|
| I was one of the optimists in the very early 2000s when I
| attended a talk by Columbia professor Eli Noam. In 2002, he
| wrote an article in the Financial Times called "Why the
| internet is bad for democracy" which essentially predicted
| the world is we know it.
|
| I immediately saw that he was right, at least with regard to
| the fact that it COULD turn out as it has, in fact, turned
| out. He fundamentally changed my view, way back then. In 2005
| a version was published in a more academic context: "Why the
| Internet is bad for democracy." Communications of the ACM
| 48(10): 57-58 (2005).
|
| Here's the FT version: https://www.citicolumbia.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/01/Why-...
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| That was startlingly accurate! Thanks for sharing.
|
| Any idea if he's published anything recently? A quick
| Google seems to show a textbook a few years back and then
| not much recently.
| abruzzi wrote:
| The high point was the original useless pages (especially the
| uselessness of pi.) Its been downhill since then.
| taylorsatula wrote:
| A good friend of mine, god honest truth, met his now-wife on
| Fark less than three years ago. Sure is somethin.
| verisimi wrote:
| Do you realise we have never had 'democracy' - we have
| 'representative democracy', a totally different thing.
| Thousands, perhaps millions of people, vote once every 4-5
| years for one person to represent them on thousands of
| governmental decisions. That person is under no constraints to
| do what they said to gain your vote either - they can do the
| exact opposite with no repercussion.
|
| Voting as we have it, is a highly abstract, meta "democracy",
| with 'the will of the people' effecting a meaningless level of
| force on the tiller. As per the design.
| saghm wrote:
| At least in the US, each person has a lot more than one
| representative they vote for, with multiple levels of
| government with different intended scopes. As much as that
| doesn't completely eliminate the problems you describe, I'd
| argue that that focus on only the first election listed in
| the ballot at the expense of the others is one of the (many)
| causes of how we ended in the state we are today. It's a lot
| easier for someone to be elected to represent you while
| ignoring your interests if you don't even know or care about
| the fact that they're running. If people cared more about
| local elections (and even federal elections other than for
| president), there would be at least _some_ increase in
| pressure for legislative bodies to respond to the will of the
| people. Without that, the issue isn 't even that they're
| going the opposite of what the people who voted for them
| want, but the the number of people who voted for them (or
| even for the candidates they're running against) aren't
| anywhere close to representative proportion of the
| population. We don't really know if representative democracy
| would approximate actual democracy because the people they're
| representing aren't the full population, but the small
| segment of politically active ones.
| eucyclos wrote:
| I still don't understand what happened to stumbledupon. That
| was INTERNET! for me.
| saghm wrote:
| A new Strongbad email was published within the last month, to
| the surprise of probably everyone left who remembers Homestar
| Runner. The fun stuff is still out there; it's just not the
| only stuff there (and never was), and there's probably a lot
| more of that non-fun stuff too.
| flippyhead wrote:
| https://zombo.com !!
| ginko wrote:
| Oh but reaching zombo.com is only the beginning. You can do
| anything on zombo.com!
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| I used to work on a CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework)
| integration for an in-house multimedia platform that was kind
| of like a game engine with distributed real-time rendering. We
| used https://html5zombo.com routinely to smoke-test: the
| animation and audio together made it easy to tell when machines
| were getting out of sync, or when we weren't pushing frames
| fast enough, or when the audio was broken (as pulseaudio and
| CEF version updates would often do). Good times.
| YokoZar wrote:
| The Internet is a mere 23 PiB according to the graphic. These
| days you can fit that on just a few racks.
| theblazehen wrote:
| Can even get it in a single rack if you use SSDs
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| A few ounces is all we need!
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/weight-of-the-internet/
| opengrass wrote:
| This is up since at least February 2006.
| netsharc wrote:
| In 6 weeks that'll be 20 years ago.. how did 20 years disappear
| like that?
| jrjrjfhgggg wrote:
| It became part of the hologram that is the universe and
| time....
| Sophira wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the page itself has existed before then, just
| at a different location. For example, here's a page from 2000
| that's in the Internet Archive that looks kind of similar:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20000115232652/http://www.shibum...
| bensons1 wrote:
| I remember back in the days the HTTP proxy of Sun Microsystems
| used to have a similar page when something went wrong. Always
| tried to find it again, but failed.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| https://thispageintentionallyleftblank.org/
| medwards666 wrote:
| Geez ... that's a heckuvalotta pron consumption ...
| wizardforhire wrote:
| I was hoping for more... maybe some ending cuts scenes, some
| recaps of adventures, maybe some cameos from developers... this
| just seems lazy and like my time/life was a wasted effort...
| YokoZar wrote:
| The developers never thought you'd make it this far.
| boncester wrote:
| omg I haven't seen this in years! :D
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| you came back? keep planting trees!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Reminds me of this classic bit:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| What year do we predict internet.zip would be downloadable in say
| one day.
| amarant wrote:
| October 30th, 1969. After that it started to grow
| uncontrollably and quickly became unwieldy
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| Ha ha. I meant the particular snapshotted internet.zip with
| alleged file size on that site.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| It occurs to me that downloading e.g. llama.cpp kind of is like
| downloading the whole internet? Or a very lossy-compressed
| version of it.
| tehjoker wrote:
| With a 100 Gbps connection, it would take 21.3 days, so it
| needs to get about 21x better than that.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Me finishing browsing the final page of the WWW in 1993. "Well,
| that was fun. Back to IRC."
| nativeit wrote:
| I remember when "browsing the WWW" literally involved scrolling
| through a categorized list of pages via a portal in Netscape.
| At the time, the only place I knew to get online was a single
| PC in the library at UNC Charlotte, where my mother worked.
| There was a sign next to it explaining what the World Wide Web
| was. I taught myself to play the guitar using ASCII tabs on the
| OnLine Guitar Archive.
| krackers wrote:
| I remember this used to be www.wwwdotcom.com but it seems the
| internet lasted longer than that page did.
| NateEag wrote:
| My minimalist version has a better domain name:
|
| http://endinter.net/
| tsumnia wrote:
| Now that we've reached the end of the Internet, enjoy
| instructions on how to get OFF the Internet.
|
| https://doctorsensei.com/how-to-get-off-the-internet.html
| ofalkaed wrote:
| I remember when this was new and it was still possible to
| conceive of the internet as finite. Simpler times. Is it possible
| to view the internet as finite these days? Is it actually
| possible to turn out the lights (touch grass) these days?
| Tanoc wrote:
| The thing that finally let it sink in that things were growing
| at an inconceivable rate was when I realized my chances of
| mistyping a URL and being lead to a blank page was in the
| thousandths of a percent. Between giant companies buying up
| typos to prevent phishing attacks and holding companies domain
| squatting almost every single combination of words and phrases
| now has a viable URL. Even my former go to example for a
| useless URL that went unused for the seventeen years I knew it,
| "skeeble", actually goes to a Chinese domain squat now.
| eucyclos wrote:
| Dead Internet Theory seems the new iteration... not finite in
| extent but in novelty maybe, a small mirror maze with infinite
| reflections on a very small set of themes.
| seydor wrote:
| more or less correct. after that, it's all rehashes of the same
| material as memes and social nonsense. It's all services, no
| content
| dlm24 wrote:
| Why was it the end of the internet?
| zelias wrote:
| Hmmm this isn't https://endoftheinter.net
| bunnybomb2 wrote:
| Theres no way this is seriously the end of the internet? Is this
| confirmed?
| mlpro wrote:
| I don't understand.
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(page generated 2025-12-21 23:02 UTC)