I Miss the Old Internet (2019)(sffworld.com)
sffworld.com
I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/i-miss-the-old-internet.57195/
434 comments
I almost never watch videos, unless it's the necessary medium for the context (i.e. music teaching or movie analysis), because I _need_ text to learn.
But.
Two weeks ago there was a small video on Discord that crashed the client when you played it. Here's a 8m30s long video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBNQ6tiNcI
tl;dw: they used ffmpeg to stitch 2 videos with a different aspect ratio together, so it crashes chromium. That's the whole explanation, and this guy spends SIX MINUTES of blowing hot air before getting to the point. It's absolutely infuriating, I genuinely felt robbed of my time.
But.
Two weeks ago there was a small video on Discord that crashed the client when you played it. Here's a 8m30s long video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBNQ6tiNcI
tl;dw: they used ffmpeg to stitch 2 videos with a different aspect ratio together, so it crashes chromium. That's the whole explanation, and this guy spends SIX MINUTES of blowing hot air before getting to the point. It's absolutely infuriating, I genuinely felt robbed of my time.
I learned recently that you can make tea from roasted buckwheat. I googled it, and found a seven minute video of a man making tea with his daughters. And I don't mean an artful exposition or something, just full-on Youtube "yo what's up welcome back to the channel so since last time we've been really loving BUCKWHEAT TEA here's how to make it don't forget to LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE" drivel around pouring water on buckwheat.
A weird thing I learned while working on my own YouTube channel is that saying "Like and subscribe" actually does work. As in, you get more likes and subscribers by saying it compared to not saying it. It's like people need to be reminded that they can or should click those buttons.
I could never bring myself to say it at the start of a YouTube video but I added it at the end and saw improvements in the analytics from videos that had the reminder versus not.
I could never bring myself to say it at the start of a YouTube video but I added it at the end and saw improvements in the analytics from videos that had the reminder versus not.
Do you get more people to do it by saying like and smash that subscribe button vs just saying like and subscribe?
I never experimented with it that much. My only test was asking people to like and subscribe versus not.
My intuition would be that you should use the phrasing that is authentic to your channel and voice. Most of my content was reading quotes from government reports, academic research, and news reports and then explaining what I thought about it in a calm monotone. (My vocal inspiration was Sam Harris). At the end of my videos I said "If you enjoyed this video please let me know by clicking the 'Like' button. If you'd like to see more content in a similar style, please subscribe." Which I felt represented the tone and pace of my videos.
On the other hand, if your channel is faster paced, more energetic, focused on being funny etc, then you probably should come up with a wacky or creative way to say "like and subscribe." I don't think anyone is going to subscribe just for how clever your saying is, but it will be more consistent with the tone of the channel. I think the main benefit of saying "Like and subscribe" is just to remind people to do that. Some people will be watching your video and enjoying it but just need an extra push to think "Oh yeah, I should subscribe, I do like these videos."
My intuition would be that you should use the phrasing that is authentic to your channel and voice. Most of my content was reading quotes from government reports, academic research, and news reports and then explaining what I thought about it in a calm monotone. (My vocal inspiration was Sam Harris). At the end of my videos I said "If you enjoyed this video please let me know by clicking the 'Like' button. If you'd like to see more content in a similar style, please subscribe." Which I felt represented the tone and pace of my videos.
On the other hand, if your channel is faster paced, more energetic, focused on being funny etc, then you probably should come up with a wacky or creative way to say "like and subscribe." I don't think anyone is going to subscribe just for how clever your saying is, but it will be more consistent with the tone of the channel. I think the main benefit of saying "Like and subscribe" is just to remind people to do that. Some people will be watching your video and enjoying it but just need an extra push to think "Oh yeah, I should subscribe, I do like these videos."
You should check out sponsor block
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
Why are you not skipping the bullshit? I feed most of my youtube addiction through mpv and have configured several key combinations which allow me to quickly bisect the video. These videos are always full of comments like "why did I have to spend 20 minutes on this", while they never take more than 15 to 20 seconds from me.
By the way, with a proper youtube-dl config in place you don't even have to open the browser:
By the way, with a proper youtube-dl config in place you don't even have to open the browser:
$ mpv 'never gonna give you up'
You’re missing something important: You have built the intuition necessary to pick up on pacing cues so that you can skip ahead and quickly get a sense of where they put the info.
Not everyone understands those cues, and of the ones that understand them not everyone can process them as quickly.
Not everyone understands those cues, and of the ones that understand them not everyone can process them as quickly.
> Why are you not skipping the bullshit
Honestly? Because I was expecting to hear something interesting at any moment. When I saw the length, I expected to see a technical explanation, a step-by-step how-to, a live example with the ffmpeg CLI. Anything remotely interesting.
What I absolutely did not expect was a 6 minutes long "introduction" out of a 8:30 minutes video. All of that to finally say "it's 2 videos stitched together, like and subscribe"
Honestly? Because I was expecting to hear something interesting at any moment. When I saw the length, I expected to see a technical explanation, a step-by-step how-to, a live example with the ffmpeg CLI. Anything remotely interesting.
What I absolutely did not expect was a 6 minutes long "introduction" out of a 8:30 minutes video. All of that to finally say "it's 2 videos stitched together, like and subscribe"
> out of a 8:30 minutes video
A friend of mine who has an youtube channel once explained to me that he had to add more content to one of his videos which otherwise would end up being too short, since there's a minimum length before youtube can monetize the video. IIRC, the minimum length was something like 8 minutes.
A friend of mine who has an youtube channel once explained to me that he had to add more content to one of his videos which otherwise would end up being too short, since there's a minimum length before youtube can monetize the video. IIRC, the minimum length was something like 8 minutes.
And here we have yet another example of the GooTube monopoly making the internet shittier.
Skip forward rapidly until something interesting is being said.
When it is, skip back a bit to find the start of that segment.
As with others, I make heavy use of mpv to (mostly listen to, occasionally actually watch) video, on YT and elsewhere. It's exceedingly good at pulling media references out of random URLs, though not bulletproof.
Earlier today I had to scan through the downloaded HTML to find, and fix, the audio URL for a This American Life episode covering Reality Winner. Then I rapidly scanned through the downloaded audio looking for the start of the segment I was interested in --- 37 minutes into a 1 hour programme.
Much as you don't have to read an entire book to find the chapter or passage of interest (I'm mostly referring to non-fiction here), you don't need to placidly sit through full audio or video sessions either.
You can, of course, also repeat sections of particular interest.
When it is, skip back a bit to find the start of that segment.
As with others, I make heavy use of mpv to (mostly listen to, occasionally actually watch) video, on YT and elsewhere. It's exceedingly good at pulling media references out of random URLs, though not bulletproof.
Earlier today I had to scan through the downloaded HTML to find, and fix, the audio URL for a This American Life episode covering Reality Winner. Then I rapidly scanned through the downloaded audio looking for the start of the segment I was interested in --- 37 minutes into a 1 hour programme.
Much as you don't have to read an entire book to find the chapter or passage of interest (I'm mostly referring to non-fiction here), you don't need to placidly sit through full audio or video sessions either.
You can, of course, also repeat sections of particular interest.
Is there enough of a market for extremely short YouTube videos so that people could make a living just making “It’s 2 videos stitched together”?
Honestly, my heart wants it to be true.
Honestly, my heart wants it to be true.
Short videos get killed by the YouTube algorithm since it’s difficult to show ads.
Right! Exactly!
That’s why I’m curious if it’s possible for creators to make 1-2 sentence videos that are profitable enough for the platform those videos are on that they can pay the creators well.
That’s why I’m curious if it’s possible for creators to make 1-2 sentence videos that are profitable enough for the platform those videos are on that they can pay the creators well.
I think that's where TikTok and other emerging video platforms might have an edge.
Imgur includes a fair bit of video with roughly a 60s cap.
Monetisation seems mostly to be based around branding / influencing.
Imgur includes a fair bit of video with roughly a 60s cap.
Monetisation seems mostly to be based around branding / influencing.
They do youtube shorts for 1 minute videos
Pretty soon the industry will be reduced to bunches of three preteen content creators in a trenchcoat.
Yeah, TikTok.
Hahaha, I knew this comment was coming.
Fun fact: TikTok is experimenting with longer videos. I think they’re up to 3min already.
Eventually all these things converge on an identical feature set, I guess.
I never understood why. Look at Snapchat: when it was just 1:1 messages that disappeared people got that. People liked it, used it, tried to get their friends on it, and so-on.
Now it’s instagram, so why not just use instagram?
By moving away from their market differentiator they made themselves replaceable.
Now it’s instagram, so why not just use instagram?
By moving away from their market differentiator they made themselves replaceable.
I recently learned pressing the number keys on youtube.com jumps to 0/10/20/...% of the runtime.
what are those proper youtube-dl config?
Can you elaborate on the key combinations thing? Is it just for jumping around in the video or is there more to it than that?
I also prefer text to videos, but there are many times when you need to churn through six lousy vids to get the one thing you need.
I use Movist Pro (Mac-only) for videos that work with youtube-dl. Once you set it up it's like magic. I can set keys for any speed or jump size I desire.
I have gotten pretty good at watching fast and jumping around to see if this vid is worth a look, or will cover the information I need. When I'm away from my computer and have to wade through vids on another machine it's like torture.
By the way, the modern internet is way better than the 1995- 2005 version. Everything you could want is there, you just have to learn how to get past the fluff and BS. I have fond memories of 1997 internet because for the first time I could access so much information from home, but I would never go back.
I use Movist Pro (Mac-only) for videos that work with youtube-dl. Once you set it up it's like magic. I can set keys for any speed or jump size I desire.
I have gotten pretty good at watching fast and jumping around to see if this vid is worth a look, or will cover the information I need. When I'm away from my computer and have to wade through vids on another machine it's like torture.
By the way, the modern internet is way better than the 1995- 2005 version. Everything you could want is there, you just have to learn how to get past the fluff and BS. I have fond memories of 1997 internet because for the first time I could access so much information from home, but I would never go back.
I don't know if it's what OP meant, but I'm imaging starting at the 50% mark, then jumping forward or back 25%, then jumping forward or back 12.5% etc, until you've zeroed in on the nugget of content in the sea of noise.
Might make a good browser plugin. Binary search, but for video. Tweaking the exact ratios might be an interesting problem. I'm thinking (no evidence!) that 30% for a forward jump and 15% for a backward jump might work better. Large jumps forward until you hit something interesting, then small jumps back to find the start.
Might make a good browser plugin. Binary search, but for video. Tweaking the exact ratios might be an interesting problem. I'm thinking (no evidence!) that 30% for a forward jump and 15% for a backward jump might work better. Large jumps forward until you hit something interesting, then small jumps back to find the start.
An old memory just popped up
> The Wadsworth Constant is the idea (and 2011 meme) that one can safely skip past the first 30 percent of any YouTube video without missing any important content.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/the-wadsworth-const...
The funniest part of that meme is that YouTube implemented a (now obviously removed) "wadsworth" query parameter that skipped the first 30% of a video.
The funniest part of that meme is that YouTube implemented a (now obviously removed) "wadsworth" query parameter that skipped the first 30% of a video.
I wonder if after the current Tik-Tok/YouTube Shorts/other version of video settles down we’ll start to see videos that don’t need to be long utilize this format and that will get pushed into search results.
Linking that video you're playing their game, adding pointless rambling is a way to increase video length for more ads.
> they used ffmpeg to stitch 2 videos with a different aspect ratio together, so it crashes chromium.
Do you have link to that video? It sounds more (read: at all) interesting than the one you linked.
Do you have link to that video? It sounds more (read: at all) interesting than the one you linked.
Sure, here it is: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/380564412135768064/84...
Thanks!
As someone who cannot process video, agreed this is genuinely insulting. To me, the majority of knowledge distillation is quickly becoming like cheap snacking - you get a bit, it leaves you wanting, but is ultimately bad for you.
There are tools to download the automatic captions of youtube videos as text. I do this with a lot of videos.
That's useful, but ultimately you can't search captions in Google/DuckDuckGo if you're trying to find out if the video even has the info you're looking for.
Plus it sucks trying to copy code to reuse
Plus it sucks trying to copy code to reuse
Sounds useful.
Which such tools do you recommend?
Which such tools do you recommend?
I don’t understand. Has someone made it so you don’t have access to books anymore? The videos are additive.
For some reason, search engines are now promoting video results over text results, at least for “how to” type searches.
Spam that right arrow on your keyboard to skip through and find the relevant part. I refuse to listen to all the filler drivel that’s designed purely to pad it out behind 10min for the increased algorithm love. Then we’re supposed to sit through sponsor ads when we already pay for YouTube premium. I’m all for patreon and supporting creators but it’s gotten ridiculous. Multiple “sponsor” sections in a single video and endless meta crap irrelevant to the actual video. Don’t forget to like this comment, subscribe, hit that bell, join our amazing discord community, follow is on Twitter for updates, comment below for a chance to win our giveaway… etc.
Sometimes a quick glance at the comments will have someone timestamping the useful parts.
And - hey! If the only solution was in a video snap off a quick blog post! You can even link the video and maybe it’ll help someone in the future.
Modern web has become less and less “write” and more “read” and that contributes to the downfall imo.
And - hey! If the only solution was in a video snap off a quick blog post! You can even link the video and maybe it’ll help someone in the future.
Modern web has become less and less “write” and more “read” and that contributes to the downfall imo.
Honestly I think the downfall began with lack of no-script support. JavaScript is a great addition to add interactivity, but it is an obvious win for commercial interests.
It would be nice if instead of websites being forced to display cookie banners, what if they were forced to support plain HTML/CSS only mode? Not only would it increase privacy and prevent things like Canvas fingerprinting (oh wait, that’s what commercial interests use), it would also put content first.
JavaScript began as a way to add dynamism to HTML which CSS now can handle by itself.
What we need is a web framework that provides good fallback modes.
My challenge to folks: try to use HTML/CSS only to create interesting and dynamic websites which focus on content-first. And give that content good printer-friendly support :)
And for monetization, sell a product on there of some kind. Provide something useful. Don’t hide behind a barrage of ads. There’s always another way!
It would be nice if instead of websites being forced to display cookie banners, what if they were forced to support plain HTML/CSS only mode? Not only would it increase privacy and prevent things like Canvas fingerprinting (oh wait, that’s what commercial interests use), it would also put content first.
JavaScript began as a way to add dynamism to HTML which CSS now can handle by itself.
What we need is a web framework that provides good fallback modes.
My challenge to folks: try to use HTML/CSS only to create interesting and dynamic websites which focus on content-first. And give that content good printer-friendly support :)
And for monetization, sell a product on there of some kind. Provide something useful. Don’t hide behind a barrage of ads. There’s always another way!
Or even if there is a text article, it's obscured by cookie consent forms, ads, "subscribe to my newsletter" popups, padded intros and outros, and most likely scraped instructions from elsewhere. It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky with random search results.
> Or even if there is a text article, it's obscured by cookie consent forms, ads, "subscribe to my newsletter" popups, padded intros and outros, and most likely scraped instructions from elsewhere.
The worst are the ones that obviously scrape content from StackOverflow and then reword it.
> It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky with random search results.
This indeed, and DuckDuckGo automates it further with their bang shortcuts like !w for Wikipedia, or !reddit, !ebay, etc.
But even though DuckDuckGo has mostly shaped up to be a good alternative to Google (I rarely use !g anymore), it's vulnerable to SEO tricks in its own right. Searching specific sites helps a lot, but it shouldn't have to be that way.
The worst are the ones that obviously scrape content from StackOverflow and then reword it.
> It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky with random search results.
This indeed, and DuckDuckGo automates it further with their bang shortcuts like !w for Wikipedia, or !reddit, !ebay, etc.
But even though DuckDuckGo has mostly shaped up to be a good alternative to Google (I rarely use !g anymore), it's vulnerable to SEO tricks in its own right. Searching specific sites helps a lot, but it shouldn't have to be that way.
Regarding the word from the sponsor, I can't recommend the SponsorBlock extension enough.
Worse still, a lot of those videos are simply a content-creator (as opposed to an expert in the subject matter) teaching you how to do something that they learned how to do from another video (possibly by an expert).
Trying to learn how to do household stuff on YouTube is full of comically bad or dangerous advice with millions of views. Thankfully this Old House has uploaded their back catalog and the comment sections of videos usually has rational insight from people claiming to be tradesmen.
To be fair, the reference documentation for 90s GUI programs was also excessively tedious in how it documented every single element and never quite explained how to actually do what you wanted. As prose, it was rather lacking.
Videos containing the same information still somehow manage to be worse, though, no argument about that.
Videos containing the same information still somehow manage to be worse, though, no argument about that.
Unix man pages are the pinnacle of documentation, and you'll never convince me otherwise.
No, not really. (This is the only way an informative answer to this comment can begin.)
If you’re talking about original man pages from volume 1 of the Unix manual (as found on e.g. http://man.cat-v.org/unix_v7), then yes, they indeed make superb reference documentation. However, even their authors recognized that reference documentation alone is not enough, and thus included a collection of (much less streamlined) papers on various parts of the system in volume 2 as a sort of extended introduction and rationale. Reading man pages, even ones as good as the v7 ones, when you want to achieve a specific goal but are not familiar with the system in general, is an absolutely miserable experience. (I imagine it was worse at the time, when OSes were much more diverse.) Man pages are not the be-all and end-all of documentation for the same reason that even the best-written JavaDoc/Doxygen/... reference without standalone prose isn’t.
So, my first caveat is that reference ≠ (comprehensive) introduction, you need both. My second caveat is reference ≠ specification ≠ introduction, thus you actually need all three. When people started to create reimplementations of Unix utilities, it turned out that they were massively underspecified by the man pages. The precise specification is more or less what POSIX is, and it’s significantly less readable than the original man pages even if you also format it as man pages and take out all the extensions. It’s not that original Unix userland lacked specification documents, it’s that their role was served by the source code of the libraries and utilities themselves (for all the copyright problems that it eventually caused). The kernel too, presumably, but people famously thought that wasn’t enough, and thus Lions’s commentary was born.
I mentioned above that the papers from volume 2 also served as a rationale and an annotated bibliography, which is also a good document to have, but probably not as essential as the previous three. I’m also not saying that they all be separate documents: Unix merged the introduction and rationale but separated both from the reference; except for the tutorial, Python manages to merge the introduction and reference for its standard library surprisingly well, but lacks a good specification; the TeXbook tries to be everything at once but is in my opinion not that good at any particular task. What I am saying is that they are all different facets that have to be present in the writing.
My third and final caveat is... Not really a caveat for your statement, but still a problem if you’re a documentation writer: The concise style and general structure of the Unix man pages only works well as long as the individual pieces are simple enough and there is not a lot of them. You can’t write man pages for complex programs; or rather you can, but the format starts to show its limits, as aptly demonstrated by bash(1). It’s probably not a coincidence that Stallman wanted to replace the Spartan man page by the hyperlinked info node. You can say that one oughtn’t make things that are that complex, and I agree, but that’s not the point of view of the documentation writer.
If you’re talking about original man pages from volume 1 of the Unix manual (as found on e.g. http://man.cat-v.org/unix_v7), then yes, they indeed make superb reference documentation. However, even their authors recognized that reference documentation alone is not enough, and thus included a collection of (much less streamlined) papers on various parts of the system in volume 2 as a sort of extended introduction and rationale. Reading man pages, even ones as good as the v7 ones, when you want to achieve a specific goal but are not familiar with the system in general, is an absolutely miserable experience. (I imagine it was worse at the time, when OSes were much more diverse.) Man pages are not the be-all and end-all of documentation for the same reason that even the best-written JavaDoc/Doxygen/... reference without standalone prose isn’t.
So, my first caveat is that reference ≠ (comprehensive) introduction, you need both. My second caveat is reference ≠ specification ≠ introduction, thus you actually need all three. When people started to create reimplementations of Unix utilities, it turned out that they were massively underspecified by the man pages. The precise specification is more or less what POSIX is, and it’s significantly less readable than the original man pages even if you also format it as man pages and take out all the extensions. It’s not that original Unix userland lacked specification documents, it’s that their role was served by the source code of the libraries and utilities themselves (for all the copyright problems that it eventually caused). The kernel too, presumably, but people famously thought that wasn’t enough, and thus Lions’s commentary was born.
I mentioned above that the papers from volume 2 also served as a rationale and an annotated bibliography, which is also a good document to have, but probably not as essential as the previous three. I’m also not saying that they all be separate documents: Unix merged the introduction and rationale but separated both from the reference; except for the tutorial, Python manages to merge the introduction and reference for its standard library surprisingly well, but lacks a good specification; the TeXbook tries to be everything at once but is in my opinion not that good at any particular task. What I am saying is that they are all different facets that have to be present in the writing.
My third and final caveat is... Not really a caveat for your statement, but still a problem if you’re a documentation writer: The concise style and general structure of the Unix man pages only works well as long as the individual pieces are simple enough and there is not a lot of them. You can’t write man pages for complex programs; or rather you can, but the format starts to show its limits, as aptly demonstrated by bash(1). It’s probably not a coincidence that Stallman wanted to replace the Spartan man page by the hyperlinked info node. You can say that one oughtn’t make things that are that complex, and I agree, but that’s not the point of view of the documentation writer.
(Fumbled the URL, shoud be http://man.cat-v.org/unix_7th)
My issue is that I don’t find it convenient to watch a video at all. For answering simple questions, there are many drawbacks to the format compared to text. I can usually extract necessary information from text in seconds. I might have to turn on a video and wait several minutes to hear the relevant information or spend minutes searching through it. Info in videos is not searchable by keywords or easily copy/pastable, and I may be in an environment where I don’t want to turn the sound up.
Say "thank you Google" for this one. This is how they decided to monetize the internet.
"They" is a bit unfair here.
The sequence seems to have been something like: (1) Advertisers: "We'll pay you $2 for a video ad, $1 for an image ad, and $0.20 for a text ad." (2) Google: "We should find a way to create more video ad space."
The sequence seems to have been something like: (1) Advertisers: "We'll pay you $2 for a video ad, $1 for an image ad, and $0.20 for a text ad." (2) Google: "We should find a way to create more video ad space."
Google changed YouTube monitisation so that videos had to be over a certain length to make money. Short to the point videos mean that the creator gets zip, so padding with unnecessary crap is the way to big bucks.
So it's totally, 100% Google's fault that there is a majority of pointlessly long videos on YouTube
So it's totally, 100% Google's fault that there is a majority of pointlessly long videos on YouTube
> "They" is []a bit[] unfair here.
Was going to disagree that it's unfair, but I suppose it arguably is exactly one bit (or ~0.3 orders of magnitude) unfair, since the parties at fault are Google and advertisers jointly, and the parent mentions one out of the two. Not sure how to rigorize that measurement, though.
Was going to disagree that it's unfair, but I suppose it arguably is exactly one bit (or ~0.3 orders of magnitude) unfair, since the parties at fault are Google and advertisers jointly, and the parent mentions one out of the two. Not sure how to rigorize that measurement, though.
It's also opportunistic fact marketers.
Even more annoying: it's now considered necessary to have a bunch of videos about any major new product or project. Video production is either very expensive, very time consuming, or both, so it's a new "tax" that you have to pay to look serious.
Watching the videos at 2-2.5x helps a lot. YT supports 2x natively and there is an extension that lets you go even faster.
Sadly, YouTube doesn't offer speeds like 1.1x, 1.2x, I often find some YouTubers talking just slow enough to stress me out but too fast for 1.25x speed. It's worse when 2 people are having a conversation and one of them is 1.5x faster than the other, so any fix for the slow person would break the fast person.
So you say, but a lot of times the videos are a Godsend. I will never go back to written recipes (at least for an unfamiliar dish), for instance — why struggle to figure out how much a “dash” is supposed to be or get confused over how exactly to do something when I can just watch it performed?
Or text that is preceded by pages of phony life-stories.
Some days I think about making a service that cuts to the chase.
For example: Put in the URL for that vid (or share-sheet it to the app), and it instantly returns “Click on menu > Item, then select size”
For example: Put in the URL for that vid (or share-sheet it to the app), and it instantly returns “Click on menu > Item, then select size”
And sometimes when I’m really grumpy I think about just going around and manually doing it by adding comments.
> whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things
You can usually pull the transcript/subtitles, without watching the video.
You can usually pull the transcript/subtitles, without watching the video.
That’s where the money is. I fuckin’ hate it.
I agree with this to some degree, I generally digest things better in text. At the same time video can be many times better at teaching skills. Mushroom foraging for example; I have read many books on the subject, but youtube has exponentially improved my skills to a level that just wasn't feasible to reach with books. Home improvement is another example. If you own an older home and come across the DIY jobs that the boomer generation pulled off - you start thanking FSM for how to videos...
That comes from changing economics. Youtube pays, blogs with ads do not
That is really annoying with software.
Videos were super useful for fixing my toilet.
Videos were super useful for fixing my toilet.
It's 8 minutes now.
Below are some relevant articles I keep going back to that highlight the same phenomenon on the 'decay' of web as a platform (by decay I mean extreme commercialization, excessive bloat, endless tracking and whatnot) made by the linked forum post's author:
* https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/
* https://danluu.com/web-bloat/
* https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/the-world-wide-web-is-d...
Can't help but agree with most of their assertions.
Also, I just noticed that the author of this forum post uses 'internet' in place of what I feel should be 'web/world wide web' (just some pedantry from me tbh).
* https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/
* https://danluu.com/web-bloat/
* https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/the-world-wide-web-is-d...
Can't help but agree with most of their assertions.
Also, I just noticed that the author of this forum post uses 'internet' in place of what I feel should be 'web/world wide web' (just some pedantry from me tbh).
“Internet” here is appropriate too. Although he’s reminiscing about mid ‘90s websites, most of that was still an extension of the amateur, interest-driven culture (and counter culture) that was prevalent across Usenet, gopher, and ftp sites prior to the web’s domination and conflation with “Internet”
I remember the backlash against unique designs where everyone said they just wanted plain sites, with the information in focus. Now when big parts of internet basically have become standardized and sterile everyone wants these unique designs back.
It's not the same thing.
What everyone misses are the personal, hobbyist, non-commercial websites. This was replaced by things like Facebook, Wikia, Pinterest, Twitter, Medium, which are both constrained and ad-ridden. A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr.
The "every site looking the same" thing is fine, however, and still preferred for commercial sites, government, newspapers, startups, other utilities. In fact most of those could still look more of the same, because visitors rarely care about the differentiation for marketing purposes. You could get away with removing all parallax effects from those sites and nobody would miss them. Same for advertisements: nobody cares for the forced variety of colourful banners in web advertisement.
What everyone misses are the personal, hobbyist, non-commercial websites. This was replaced by things like Facebook, Wikia, Pinterest, Twitter, Medium, which are both constrained and ad-ridden. A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr.
The "every site looking the same" thing is fine, however, and still preferred for commercial sites, government, newspapers, startups, other utilities. In fact most of those could still look more of the same, because visitors rarely care about the differentiation for marketing purposes. You could get away with removing all parallax effects from those sites and nobody would miss them. Same for advertisements: nobody cares for the forced variety of colourful banners in web advertisement.
The sad part is that those websites do exist, but are nigh impossible to stumble upon except in association with a particular context.
For example, small communities around specific interests, and personal sites of authors of specific works.
We really just need a concentrated effort to catalogue and curate them under a single banner. These efforts also do exist, but haven't yet reached critical mass. Probably because policing content is a full-time job.
For example, small communities around specific interests, and personal sites of authors of specific works.
We really just need a concentrated effort to catalogue and curate them under a single banner. These efforts also do exist, but haven't yet reached critical mass. Probably because policing content is a full-time job.
> A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr.
It will be a sad sad day when/if Tumblr gets shut down. I really appreciate the fact that users can customize their own pages in many more ways than just changing their profile picture and header image, it gives it a lot more personality than you can get on Instagram/Tumblr/Facebook.
It also has a timelessness that you don't really get on other sites, at least not to the same degree. Posts have timestamps, but on the dashboard they're only visible if you look for them. So most people don't notice if the post they just reblogged was originally posted yesterday -- or seven years ago. This also gets rid of much of the repost issues you see on Reddit and similar sites, since the original post can remain relevant for much longer.
It will be a sad sad day when/if Tumblr gets shut down. I really appreciate the fact that users can customize their own pages in many more ways than just changing their profile picture and header image, it gives it a lot more personality than you can get on Instagram/Tumblr/Facebook.
It also has a timelessness that you don't really get on other sites, at least not to the same degree. Posts have timestamps, but on the dashboard they're only visible if you look for them. So most people don't notice if the post they just reblogged was originally posted yesterday -- or seven years ago. This also gets rid of much of the repost issues you see on Reddit and similar sites, since the original post can remain relevant for much longer.
Tumblr really got it right, IMO.
- It has all the tools for newbies (WYSIWYG)
- It has tools for advanced users (HTML editors)
- It has a marketplace for templates for those in-between
- It has the "good" social features (follow, republish)
- It doesn't use too many dark patterns
- It's not a walled garden that blocks or pollutes Google search results, like Facebook or Pinterest
- It has no "algorithm" encouraging people to consume the same bullshit as in Twitter/FB/Youtube
- It encourages people browsing specific blogs instead of doing pointless doom-scrolling
It's not about the design, it's about the commercialization.
Thing is commercialization made it easier for people to express themselves and actually start using that resource.
Commercialization made it form "only nerds sit in there" to "everyone is on the internet and it is cool", if there would be no commercialization, internet for masses would still be a silly toy.
Just like going to the Mars - it is just a "hobby" for NASA, most of people on Earth are not giving a damn that they just landed another rover. There is no practical way to make money on space travel currently. Find a way to earn money on sending rockets to Mars or Moon, everyone is going to jump into it.
Companies on its own without hype would not go to the internet or digitalize their processes. There is still loads of companies that are not digital. There are loads of stories of how companies started switching to digital last year because of recent events...
Commercialization made it form "only nerds sit in there" to "everyone is on the internet and it is cool", if there would be no commercialization, internet for masses would still be a silly toy.
Just like going to the Mars - it is just a "hobby" for NASA, most of people on Earth are not giving a damn that they just landed another rover. There is no practical way to make money on space travel currently. Find a way to earn money on sending rockets to Mars or Moon, everyone is going to jump into it.
Companies on its own without hype would not go to the internet or digitalize their processes. There is still loads of companies that are not digital. There are loads of stories of how companies started switching to digital last year because of recent events...
> if there would be no commercialization, internet for masses would still be a silly toy.
Sure, but part of the fun of the old internet was that it was a silly toy that people didn't take too seriously, at least most of the time, there were definitely still some flamewars stemming from people taking things way too seriously.
Sure, but part of the fun of the old internet was that it was a silly toy that people didn't take too seriously, at least most of the time, there were definitely still some flamewars stemming from people taking things way too seriously.
Then maybe it's commercialization I dislike. I loved the silly toy internet. It was a place to get away from the real world. Now it's just a part of the real world.
A lot of things turn lame once real names and money are involved. And that's the fate of most things once they get big enough. It makes sense, but it's still sad.
A lot of things turn lame once real names and money are involved. And that's the fate of most things once they get big enough. It makes sense, but it's still sad.
I don't think it is sad because it provides so much more value to the whole world.
Keeping it as a toy for selected ones would be really selfish.
There is still a lot of place for "not real world" in here.
Keeping it as a toy for selected ones would be really selfish.
There is still a lot of place for "not real world" in here.
> Thing is commercialization made it easier for people to express themselves and actually start using that resource.
Yes, it certainly did make it easier for people to leave turds in the communal pool.
Yes, it certainly did make it easier for people to leave turds in the communal pool.
I agree wholeheartedly, it's the evaporation of genuineness. You know behind most stuff you see now, there's a monetization attempt eyeing at the corner, and since people think web is for mass scale of low hanging fruits .. that's what we get.
When we said we wanted plain sites, we meant like this https://lite.cnn.com/en or https://news.ycombinator.com/
We did not mean standardize to big picture smiling people, carousels to more pictures and with just one sentence.
We did not mean standardize to big picture smiling people, carousels to more pictures and with just one sentence.
In 20 years somebody will write an article about missing this ‘old’ internet from 2021.
I wonder what they will miss.
I wonder what they will miss.
Memes, Discord, the “old” Twitter, and either having ad supported sites (as opposed to everything being paid) or having premium sites (as opposed to everything being as supported.
Memes won’t go away. Nor will ads.
Memes will be killed by some entrepreneuring copyright troll at some point.
In many jurisdictions, memes would either break the copyright laws or at least be in the grey zone. It's only a matter of time before someone exploits this. After one case, the platforms will ban them to avoid the risk of getting sued themselves. The same will probably happen for gaming videos.
In many jurisdictions, memes would either break the copyright laws or at least be in the grey zone. It's only a matter of time before someone exploits this. After one case, the platforms will ban them to avoid the risk of getting sued themselves. The same will probably happen for gaming videos.
Really. All right, I'm looking forward to the author of dickbutt stepping up and claiming what's theirs.
The author of the dickbutt (if he/she can be found) might easily sell the rights to their creation to a copyright troll for one million dollars after which my scenario could take place.
You see, if they had the rights, we'd know who it is. You reserve your rights through registration. If we don't know, then there's no way to prove you have the rights.
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they will miss not having to use a browsing agent that logs everything you do to your identity/passport and sends it out to the government to keep you in check
Less-invasive advertisements.
Web pages under 100MB
I like your optimism in thinking it will take full two decades for people to miss sub-100MB pages. :)
Anonymity.
They might, but the piece will be less credible.
Or - Fagoomazon might censor it.
Or - Fagoomazon might censor it.
> I wonder what they will miss.
Being able to log in without providing you national ID number. And being able to run a public-facing server without a permit.
Being able to log in without providing you national ID number. And being able to run a public-facing server without a permit.
In India they already miss this.
Unregulated encryption will be out in the next decade, it's too powerful for us plebes to have. Things will be safer when only the paragons of infosec like big corporations and banks get to use it freely.
I don’t see that anyone could have predicted the change of the past 20 years so it’s silly to think we can even guess at the next 20
"I miss old ATX."
"I miss old [X]."
There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always missed. You can't go back without a time-machine.
"I miss old [X]."
There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always missed. You can't go back without a time-machine.
>There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always missed. You can't go back without a time-machine.
the point of reminiscing is to steer the current time towards the good points of the past, while trying to navigate around the difficulties experienced previously.
the point of reminiscing is to steer the current time towards the good points of the past, while trying to navigate around the difficulties experienced previously.
I feel like a lot of those nostalgic posts are made by people who were simply happier when they were younger. And they conflate this general decline in happiness with a perceived decline in quality (of anything, be it the internet, television, music, etc). But in most cases it's just that things change and they no longer fit their desired qualities - they haven't become worse per se.
For a lot of people who are young today the internet the way it's right now (with TikToks, Instagram, Twitter discussions, rants and memes) will be the one, true internet. And in 10-20 years they will say it has changed and how they miss it. This is a cycle as old as time.
For a lot of people who are young today the internet the way it's right now (with TikToks, Instagram, Twitter discussions, rants and memes) will be the one, true internet. And in 10-20 years they will say it has changed and how they miss it. This is a cycle as old as time.
That's absolutely the case. It's also them encountering the first X, and then the millionth X. And a bunch of other biases also come into play, like survivorship bias. The good old refrigerator that's chugging along just fine for the twentieth year. It's not like today's shitty refrigerators can ever last this long. What's unseen though is the huge pile of discarded refrigerators on the landfill.
The fridge I grew-up with lasted 30 years.
It does seem like an industry-wide conspiracy to make "durable" consumer goods last only as long as their warranties. And also, to make money on replacement parts and complete replacements. The "Just go buy another one"-mentality makes me cringe.
It does seem like an industry-wide conspiracy to make "durable" consumer goods last only as long as their warranties. And also, to make money on replacement parts and complete replacements. The "Just go buy another one"-mentality makes me cringe.
It seems like consumers prefer fancy features than durability
Ugh, not lowest TCO. D: And those mostly pointless features are so fleeting. Just do them in software and modular assemblies. Also, right-to-repair and design for maintainability.
There doesn't need to be mutual exclusion. Views change with a person's life-stage priorities. And, it's easy to lionize the terrible when infant minds see only the best in everything.
Things in certain places, like America, are getting demonstrably shittier over time: the USPS used to work, there weren't mass shootings nearly every day, parks had water fountains, people debated, corporations didn't takeover public spaces as much, real wages were higher, the US made things, there weren't as many prisoners, healthcare costs were lower, and there weren't millions of visibly-homeless people from an unjust economic system.
Things in certain places, like America, are getting demonstrably shittier over time: the USPS used to work, there weren't mass shootings nearly every day, parks had water fountains, people debated, corporations didn't takeover public spaces as much, real wages were higher, the US made things, there weren't as many prisoners, healthcare costs were lower, and there weren't millions of visibly-homeless people from an unjust economic system.
I guess I can see how a lot of the stuff on the internet now makes me really happy too. It’s just that it came with the loss of a lot of other things.
I am pretty sure people were missing old ATX the day Heartworn Highways was released
Yes, but still, thats almost always the case on any new information conduit. Early adopters use it as a novel means of expressing what was not possible with the old means. After adoption, it becomes a commodity, and the pendulum swings again.
I understand a platform cannot be compared to the internet, but I believe the comparison still holds true. Will early snapchat users remember and miss their early experiences 10 years from now?
Positively (ideally) the internet is not a platform, and it can transport anything, not damping future and novel means of expression.
EDIT: But, lets not forget (since I easily went for rational dismissal) Missing something is completely subjective feeling, a valid assertion, and nothing we discuss would have made the author not miss it.
Let's reflect on how difficult it is to fight the endless resources poured on making us engage (and our natural tendency to accept commodities because they are either easy or addicting). I miss napster, I align conceptually with peer to peer interchange, but still, I use spotify. Movies, I still prefer playing directly from bittorrent (even when I know that sequential downloading is harming the swarm).
Ultimately, I just want the network to be neutral and for protocols to never be banned. A neutral network needs not to be subsidized by corporations.
I understand a platform cannot be compared to the internet, but I believe the comparison still holds true. Will early snapchat users remember and miss their early experiences 10 years from now?
Positively (ideally) the internet is not a platform, and it can transport anything, not damping future and novel means of expression.
EDIT: But, lets not forget (since I easily went for rational dismissal) Missing something is completely subjective feeling, a valid assertion, and nothing we discuss would have made the author not miss it.
Let's reflect on how difficult it is to fight the endless resources poured on making us engage (and our natural tendency to accept commodities because they are either easy or addicting). I miss napster, I align conceptually with peer to peer interchange, but still, I use spotify. Movies, I still prefer playing directly from bittorrent (even when I know that sequential downloading is harming the swarm).
Ultimately, I just want the network to be neutral and for protocols to never be banned. A neutral network needs not to be subsidized by corporations.
Strange, as this author misses the internet that they remember from the mid-90s and I miss the internet from the days before people like the author even knew what it was.
I never got to use the internet before the mid-90s; what do you miss about it?
I miss a high bar for entry that meant most of the people online were at a relatively small collection of universities, tech companies, or government and public service agencies. It was elitist for sure, but sometimes that is not a bad thing and the level of conversation was something we will never see again.
I miss being able to read everything interesting on Usenet over a long lunch sitting in front of a vt220.
It was slow, but you didn't mind because it was all text based. The protocols were open and barely compressed so it was easy to explore and play around with things. A few hours in a wiring closet with a punch-down tool, a crimper, and spools of cable could be used to create magic.
There was no money to be made so no one took it too seriously. There were vast spaces to explore; we didn't know as much as we do now about what is and is not possible (and what can or cannot be solved with technical solutions to what turn out to be meatspace problems) so every crazy idea held a kernel of possibility.
I miss being able to read everything interesting on Usenet over a long lunch sitting in front of a vt220.
It was slow, but you didn't mind because it was all text based. The protocols were open and barely compressed so it was easy to explore and play around with things. A few hours in a wiring closet with a punch-down tool, a crimper, and spools of cable could be used to create magic.
There was no money to be made so no one took it too seriously. There were vast spaces to explore; we didn't know as much as we do now about what is and is not possible (and what can or cannot be solved with technical solutions to what turn out to be meatspace problems) so every crazy idea held a kernel of possibility.
That's fascinating! Thank you for sharing :) Feels completely otherworldly.
> All these wikis have the same layout and are just dull, devoid of emotion.
Probably he's talking about Wikia (or, by their new name, Fandom), which indeed is pretty much always the same layout as Wikipedia plus a literal shitload of ads.
What killed off the other sites? Mostly the fact that whenever emotions run high (and the more invested people are in a fandom, the worse it gets), you will have a bunch of scriptkiddies or actual capable hackers that will DDoS or hack your site off the Internet. I don't know many people who are willing to deal with this shit for a hobby project, so it is only logical that most of the creators have either left the fandom entirely or migrated their content off to some centralized platform.
Additionally, people on the consuming side were tired of content vanishing into nothingness when its creators died, lost interest or were unable to pay the hosting bills... which led them to seek out centralized platforms, as (as ugly and ad-ridden they may be) at least promised some form of reliability.
Probably he's talking about Wikia (or, by their new name, Fandom), which indeed is pretty much always the same layout as Wikipedia plus a literal shitload of ads.
What killed off the other sites? Mostly the fact that whenever emotions run high (and the more invested people are in a fandom, the worse it gets), you will have a bunch of scriptkiddies or actual capable hackers that will DDoS or hack your site off the Internet. I don't know many people who are willing to deal with this shit for a hobby project, so it is only logical that most of the creators have either left the fandom entirely or migrated their content off to some centralized platform.
Additionally, people on the consuming side were tired of content vanishing into nothingness when its creators died, lost interest or were unable to pay the hosting bills... which led them to seek out centralized platforms, as (as ugly and ad-ridden they may be) at least promised some form of reliability.
That is combination of great points.
Most of those niche stuff sits in Facebook groups, I bet there are quite a lot of naturist/whatver groups there (probably not posting photos but organizing events or discussing stuff), you have to follow right people on fb/tt/yt.
The creativity is there, for me author of that post misses forest for the trees. Web pages are just secondary artifacts. I don't want my favorite band members sitting in the evening messing with HTML I want them to make music.
Counter culture is about people and what they want to express, sometimes it might be important "how", but for a lot of hobbies "how" is not that much important as long as it is clear and easy to do.
This is why I don't miss "old internet", people are crafty and interesting anyway.
Most of those niche stuff sits in Facebook groups, I bet there are quite a lot of naturist/whatver groups there (probably not posting photos but organizing events or discussing stuff), you have to follow right people on fb/tt/yt.
The creativity is there, for me author of that post misses forest for the trees. Web pages are just secondary artifacts. I don't want my favorite band members sitting in the evening messing with HTML I want them to make music.
Counter culture is about people and what they want to express, sometimes it might be important "how", but for a lot of hobbies "how" is not that much important as long as it is clear and easy to do.
This is why I don't miss "old internet", people are crafty and interesting anyway.
> Counter culture is about people and what they want to express, sometimes it might be important "how", but for a lot of hobbies "how" is not that much important as long as it is clear and easy to do.
The danger is that a lot of counter-culture movements aren't exactly welcomed by the major providers. Anything involving sex or sexuality - no matter if nudists, swingers, poly-amory, LGBT, fetish beyond 50SOG-style or sex work - has massive risk of getting booted off the internet, as a result of legal requirements (FOSTA/SESTA, child protection laws), credit card regulations or Evangelical fundamentalist pressure.
Anything involving drugs faces similar risks (I'm actually surprised Erowid hasn't been shut down), as is anything going too far anti-capitalist (see e.g. Pirate Bay, SciHub, but also Occupy Wall Street or u/DeepF.ckingValue being dragged in front of Congress after the $GME shenanigans).
The danger is that a lot of counter-culture movements aren't exactly welcomed by the major providers. Anything involving sex or sexuality - no matter if nudists, swingers, poly-amory, LGBT, fetish beyond 50SOG-style or sex work - has massive risk of getting booted off the internet, as a result of legal requirements (FOSTA/SESTA, child protection laws), credit card regulations or Evangelical fundamentalist pressure.
Anything involving drugs faces similar risks (I'm actually surprised Erowid hasn't been shut down), as is anything going too far anti-capitalist (see e.g. Pirate Bay, SciHub, but also Occupy Wall Street or u/DeepF.ckingValue being dragged in front of Congress after the $GME shenanigans).
Is it a danger?
What is the upside of having nudist/sex-workers/poly amory group having millions of followers?
For all of those activities it is best to keep it in small trusted groups of people. If you are really dedicated to that stuff you will find your way. Then is it really a counter culture if it can have millions of followers?
What is the upside of having nudist/sex-workers/poly amory group having millions of followers?
For all of those activities it is best to keep it in small trusted groups of people. If you are really dedicated to that stuff you will find your way. Then is it really a counter culture if it can have millions of followers?
Relying on centralized entities is a danger for the movements themselves, as the nsfw community found out when Tumblr banned all of that virtually overnight. Or when PornHub banned everything not commercial (I do understand that this was due to revenge porn, which PH had ignored for years, but doesn't change the side effects!)
counterculture is ephemeral
Blame the gatekeepers and the users who made them, not the Web.
Only using FB or TW for content discovery is just the equivalent of starting a browsing session via Yahoo's catalogue — It's just that the ratio of lazy people using the Web has outgrown those who still take the effort of finding the nuggets. At the same time, it has become too easy to publish fluffy spur of the moment content and people craving for upvotes over meaningful discussion. I'm not against giving anyone a voice or leaving it only to the tech-savvy, but I can't say that zero-effort publishing has contributed to the perceived quality and original idea of the Web.
Do I miss the old Web? Yes, but only as much as I miss analogue photography. It's nice to get into that reminiscent mood while flicking through old screenshots made up of spacer gifs, but as I watch the world go by on four screens at a time while ordering groceries on the fifth and paying with my fingerprint, it's kinda nice to see how far we've come.
Only using FB or TW for content discovery is just the equivalent of starting a browsing session via Yahoo's catalogue — It's just that the ratio of lazy people using the Web has outgrown those who still take the effort of finding the nuggets. At the same time, it has become too easy to publish fluffy spur of the moment content and people craving for upvotes over meaningful discussion. I'm not against giving anyone a voice or leaving it only to the tech-savvy, but I can't say that zero-effort publishing has contributed to the perceived quality and original idea of the Web.
Do I miss the old Web? Yes, but only as much as I miss analogue photography. It's nice to get into that reminiscent mood while flicking through old screenshots made up of spacer gifs, but as I watch the world go by on four screens at a time while ordering groceries on the fifth and paying with my fingerprint, it's kinda nice to see how far we've come.
I actually enjoy today's Internet much more. I'll lay out the reasons:
1) Easy access to many high quality contents. For example HN is a good platform for accessing new knowledge. Note that I say "access", not "learn". Reading HN sometimes give people the false impression that they are learning new knowledge, which usually is not the case. I treat HN as a platform to get a peek at certain new knowledge, but reading books, watching videos and most importantly implementing it by myself, IMO, is the only true way to learn.
2) Fast enough to view high quality videos without any delay. Again this is related to learning new things. It is also important for me because it's one of the few ways that I entertain myself.
3) This might be arguable, but getting knowing a lot of different people from different places is a lot fun. People who comes from different culture usually have different standard of "good", "bad" and other moral judgment and it's fun to read all of those. This was doable 20 years ago but far fewer people were online at the time.
4) It's a lot cheaper. 20 years ago only a company can afford something faster than 1M (back then I had a 56K Modem I think but can't be sure) in my country and it was very expensive even for the modems. Nowadays pretty much everyone has access to some high speed internet. Even if they cannot afford a computer (which is actually a rare case), they have Internet access through mobile phones.
1) Easy access to many high quality contents. For example HN is a good platform for accessing new knowledge. Note that I say "access", not "learn". Reading HN sometimes give people the false impression that they are learning new knowledge, which usually is not the case. I treat HN as a platform to get a peek at certain new knowledge, but reading books, watching videos and most importantly implementing it by myself, IMO, is the only true way to learn.
2) Fast enough to view high quality videos without any delay. Again this is related to learning new things. It is also important for me because it's one of the few ways that I entertain myself.
3) This might be arguable, but getting knowing a lot of different people from different places is a lot fun. People who comes from different culture usually have different standard of "good", "bad" and other moral judgment and it's fun to read all of those. This was doable 20 years ago but far fewer people were online at the time.
4) It's a lot cheaper. 20 years ago only a company can afford something faster than 1M (back then I had a 56K Modem I think but can't be sure) in my country and it was very expensive even for the modems. Nowadays pretty much everyone has access to some high speed internet. Even if they cannot afford a computer (which is actually a rare case), they have Internet access through mobile phones.
That's fair, but the technological improvements in the network layer that made it faster, more accessible and cheaper are not directly related with the complaints by the author.
We can have one thing without losing the other.
We can have one thing without losing the other.
I agree with you. Too much bloat somehow.
> Easy access to many high quality contents.
On the contrary, I would argue that the content quality is drastically lower because of optimisation for revenue and much less purer motivations.
The video quality is really much much better though. Original video scene is great as the business side of the things is a solved problem. Yet again, it suffers from optimisation for advertisers as less and less things are kosher.
Oh and the movie scene is terrible IMHO as a whole, despite having some amazing movies. Netflix is also optimising and the most optimum content for the business of Netflix is often not that optimum for many people. Not many tall poppies came out of it.
It's funny how a pop singer made a song about our optimised happy lives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um7pMggPnug
On the contrary, I would argue that the content quality is drastically lower because of optimisation for revenue and much less purer motivations.
The video quality is really much much better though. Original video scene is great as the business side of the things is a solved problem. Yet again, it suffers from optimisation for advertisers as less and less things are kosher.
Oh and the movie scene is terrible IMHO as a whole, despite having some amazing movies. Netflix is also optimising and the most optimum content for the business of Netflix is often not that optimum for many people. Not many tall poppies came out of it.
It's funny how a pop singer made a song about our optimised happy lives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um7pMggPnug
> On the contrary, I would argue that the content quality is drastically lower because of optimisation for revenue and much less purer motivations.
I think the signal to noise ratio has decreased, but that doesn't mean there's less signal; there's just a lot more noise.
I think the signal to noise ratio has decreased, but that doesn't mean there's less signal; there's just a lot more noise.
That's only relevant if the noise gets filtered out. I think there's a lot of evidence that our most prevalent platforms filter content for how much attention it can hold: which is to say, for revenue or less pure motivations. This is probably considered "quality" content, by some incredibly cynical metric of quality, and maybe the adoption of that cynical approach is the underlying change that has occurred on the internet in the last twenty years.
the Internet is now being used by 4 billions people, so it basically mimics humanity
Back in the 80s and 90s you were cherry picking the elite and the intellectuals, the internet of back then was never going to be representative sample of humanity
Back in the 80s and 90s you were cherry picking the elite and the intellectuals, the internet of back then was never going to be representative sample of humanity
I don’t know about the content argument. Yes it’s true that there is a lot of low quality content out there. And that low quality content drowns out the good stuff. But there are some absolute gems out there - things that didn’t exist 20+ years ago. Khan academy for example is a treasure of amazing free content.
The past internet I remember was one of absolute noise search results and big invisible blobs of SEO text. To find something, you had to know already where to look.
Go back past the search engines, and most knowledge simply wasn't on the internet yet.
Go back past the search engines, and most knowledge simply wasn't on the internet yet.
Completely disagree, there is probably 100x more content now compared to 10-15 years ago, sure garbage also increased but excellent content is there and internet of today is better overall.
I think, the old internet did not have much original content and we consumed what was available pre-internet but without the scarcity. The original ones were created by privileged people in relatively tiny community.
The current internet content is made for the internet. A lot of great things were made of course but I think the optimisation is diluting it into mediocracy. Every single day it gets more and more optimised for revenue or influence through time dominance. If you pay for it, it is designed to keep you pay for it(not necessarily pay for it and consume it but keep paying. Games are mostly freemium where you pay if you want to enjoy, movie subscription services will pile sh*t in font of you to give you the impression of endless content, optimize scenarios for retention etc.). If it is free, it is designed to pay by proxy(purchase something or give political power to an interest group).
The current internet content is made for the internet. A lot of great things were made of course but I think the optimisation is diluting it into mediocracy. Every single day it gets more and more optimised for revenue or influence through time dominance. If you pay for it, it is designed to keep you pay for it(not necessarily pay for it and consume it but keep paying. Games are mostly freemium where you pay if you want to enjoy, movie subscription services will pile sh*t in font of you to give you the impression of endless content, optimize scenarios for retention etc.). If it is free, it is designed to pay by proxy(purchase something or give political power to an interest group).
I still believe it's relatively easy to find high quality material, even for amateurs. For example, I can watch live train yard cams nowadays on Youtube (Virtual Railfan on Youtube), and watch people who know what they are doing do live coding. I'm definitely losing myself in a multitude of options but I won't balme it on the accessibility of modern Internet.
20 years ago there were definitely less garbage on the Internet, and less gems as well.
But I definitely agree with the movie part. We still get a few good ones here and there but it's kind of rare nowadays :(
20 years ago there were definitely less garbage on the Internet, and less gems as well.
But I definitely agree with the movie part. We still get a few good ones here and there but it's kind of rare nowadays :(
I disagree with point 3)
People used to have big desire to meet each other and exchange information. Internet evolution has throttled that desire greatly, we don't have one to one or group conversations any more, not nearly as much as we used to, social media & mainstream access are the culprits.
People used to have big desire to meet each other and exchange information. Internet evolution has throttled that desire greatly, we don't have one to one or group conversations any more, not nearly as much as we used to, social media & mainstream access are the culprits.
I do believe you're conflating high-bandwidth content with high-quality content.
Counterpoint. It is disappointing to me that most of the "web sites" people interact with now transfer more data on a single page load than an entire operating system and applications from 25 years ago, when you could get "on the internet" with a PC running Windows 3.11 and Trumpet winsock, or Slackware. And, yeah, a lot of that is because of much higher quality media, but a lot of it is advertising and tracking, too. If we did NOT have high bandwidth now, the internet would simply be unusable. And for what? I'm not any better informed these days. Slashdot was the HN of the day, and it's about the same vibe. Videos and podcasts are jokes, taking 100x longer to make the point than simple text. Social media brought everyone to the publishing "party," and that's worked out just as well as you'd think. In fact, I can't think of any way that the internet is fundamentally improved over the past 25 years. In additional fact, I think a lot of what's developed in that time is harming society.
A lot more people and more voices adds abut
But the quality of even photos have been downgraded since phones.
But the quality of even photos have been downgraded since phones.
HN used to be better imho
Regarding speaking with lots of cultures, I feel the current platforms have bring out the worst in people. Society has been completely divided in many places and well developed democracies undermined by the current incentives to promote and widely disseminate information which provokes strong reactions. This has been largely made possible by centralisation and consolidation of the internet.
The early internet did #3 much better than today. I'm still a member of a ~50 member forum that's been going for 20 years, and the ability to discuss nuanced topics is much better than it is here, even if the average quality of the persons themselves are much better here.
A key reason this is because of "weirdness budgets". If I independently arrive at a solution and try to communicate that to you, the more work it takes to verify(so I can easily tell you some prime factors, but not say uhh.. UFOs exist) the result and the more different it is from your prior, the less likely it is to succeed.
This is magnified by the n ( n - 1) / 2 cost of communications, where n is the number of people. We all have different norms, and it's nearly impossible to work out where another persons norm is within a single comment, so mostly people surpass your weirdness budget and you ignore them.
This means that we can only meaningfully talk about things that the general public are on the same phase of. This is just another way to state the Overton window. But now that we understand what creates the Overton window, we can attempt to evaluate what we can do to mitigate it.
Now when we evaluate Facebook, reddit, YouTube comments, HN, message boards, BBS, and 1720 Venice coffee shops we can see them for what they are. The more you bump into the same people, the more nuance you can find. Nuance is where the insights really come from. No one can work it out themselves.
Another depressing reality is that when you do find a tight-nit community that is able to create these insights, all you have done is segmented yourself from the general public's Overton window. Now your just another weird LISPer, and the Java programmers that have libraries and drivers behind their projects will run circles around you even though you are correct. Correctness isn't enough.
A key reason this is because of "weirdness budgets". If I independently arrive at a solution and try to communicate that to you, the more work it takes to verify(so I can easily tell you some prime factors, but not say uhh.. UFOs exist) the result and the more different it is from your prior, the less likely it is to succeed.
This is magnified by the n ( n - 1) / 2 cost of communications, where n is the number of people. We all have different norms, and it's nearly impossible to work out where another persons norm is within a single comment, so mostly people surpass your weirdness budget and you ignore them.
This means that we can only meaningfully talk about things that the general public are on the same phase of. This is just another way to state the Overton window. But now that we understand what creates the Overton window, we can attempt to evaluate what we can do to mitigate it.
Now when we evaluate Facebook, reddit, YouTube comments, HN, message boards, BBS, and 1720 Venice coffee shops we can see them for what they are. The more you bump into the same people, the more nuance you can find. Nuance is where the insights really come from. No one can work it out themselves.
Another depressing reality is that when you do find a tight-nit community that is able to create these insights, all you have done is segmented yourself from the general public's Overton window. Now your just another weird LISPer, and the Java programmers that have libraries and drivers behind their projects will run circles around you even though you are correct. Correctness isn't enough.
Admittedly, I miss the “old internet” too, however I have hope we can build it again.
As I see it, there are two main issues to solve:
1) It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision?
2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry. Parallel to this shift, people have moved to podcasts, news articles and videos for their daily content. The group of people that consume text is no longer the majority. In many ways, each new social media platform is attempting to recapture an aspect of community/shared experience that has been achieved before. The good platforms extend this reach, the bad suffocate it. A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech.
As I see it, there are two main issues to solve:
1) It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision?
2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry. Parallel to this shift, people have moved to podcasts, news articles and videos for their daily content. The group of people that consume text is no longer the majority. In many ways, each new social media platform is attempting to recapture an aspect of community/shared experience that has been achieved before. The good platforms extend this reach, the bad suffocate it. A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech.
Regarding 1. When you say "no longer trivial", I would point out that if it isn't now, then it surely never was?
Not using a framework (by which I assume you mean the likes of wordpress or squarespace) is still as much possible today as it ever was. And, the knowledge on how to do so is ever more accessible.
I can see your point that when provided with easy ways to do things, you are limited to design decisions and choices of those frameworks. However, I think the progress of open source has lowered the bar significantly for creating a completely custom platform.
Not using a framework (by which I assume you mean the likes of wordpress or squarespace) is still as much possible today as it ever was. And, the knowledge on how to do so is ever more accessible.
I can see your point that when provided with easy ways to do things, you are limited to design decisions and choices of those frameworks. However, I think the progress of open source has lowered the bar significantly for creating a completely custom platform.
I had a friend with zero programming experience who put up a simple webpage for her small business in 1995 with just a text editor and some photos.
Yes, it was much simpler. And it was encouraged, because most ISPs offered free web page hosting - including a free URL, and email - with an access account.
Wordpress is a nightmare in comparison. And a fully engineered blog stack is far beyond the reach of most users.
You could argue that the modern equivalent is a Facebook page, but of course web pages were fully public. You were in a public space, under your own name, limited only by your willingness to learn some very basic HTML.
It's a completely different experience to being in a privatised space with its own content management tools, which you only have very limited user level access to.
Yes, it was much simpler. And it was encouraged, because most ISPs offered free web page hosting - including a free URL, and email - with an access account.
Wordpress is a nightmare in comparison. And a fully engineered blog stack is far beyond the reach of most users.
You could argue that the modern equivalent is a Facebook page, but of course web pages were fully public. You were in a public space, under your own name, limited only by your willingness to learn some very basic HTML.
It's a completely different experience to being in a privatised space with its own content management tools, which you only have very limited user level access to.
Isn't the anecdote only valid if your friend would somehow be unable to do the same if it were today?
I do get the sentiment that is expressed, but I also think it is wrong. The possibility to create, and the resources with which to do so is astronomically better than it was growing up. Imagine having access to YouTube and the thousands of excellent tutors. Just because convenience can lead to mediocrity, doesn't excuse it.
I do get the sentiment that is expressed, but I also think it is wrong. The possibility to create, and the resources with which to do so is astronomically better than it was growing up. Imagine having access to YouTube and the thousands of excellent tutors. Just because convenience can lead to mediocrity, doesn't excuse it.
I agree entirely with your second point. I feel like a lot of the creative energy that had gone into the old web now goes into YouTube and TikTok, for better or worse.
> It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision?
1. Sign up to $5/mo virtual hosting service and choose a domain name.
2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress".
3. Open Wordpress.
4. Write and publish whatever you want, structured however you want.
This is much-much easier than working with Frontpage or Dreamweaver was in the olden days. Connecting to a server via FTP alone was a huge hurdle. Now it's all WYSIWYG in a browser.
Obstacles to self-hosted personal websites are smaller than ever before, but the corpo web has turned everyone from homeowners into hotel guests who have to follow their house rules. It's a cultural problem, not a technical one.
1. Sign up to $5/mo virtual hosting service and choose a domain name.
2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress".
3. Open Wordpress.
4. Write and publish whatever you want, structured however you want.
This is much-much easier than working with Frontpage or Dreamweaver was in the olden days. Connecting to a server via FTP alone was a huge hurdle. Now it's all WYSIWYG in a browser.
Obstacles to self-hosted personal websites are smaller than ever before, but the corpo web has turned everyone from homeowners into hotel guests who have to follow their house rules. It's a cultural problem, not a technical one.
> 1. Sign up to $5/mo
You already lost most people here.
> virtual hosting service and choose a domain name.
Actually, people don't even have to have a domain name for their webpage. But ignoring that - how will people know that this is what they need to do? "I want to create a homepage, I don't know what 'virtual hosting' is. I don't know why I need to be looking for 'services'."
> 2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress".
In their what now click what now?
How are you so sure this is always possible?
Also, what about search engines (cough-Google-cough) under-ranking individual pages in favor of larger, corporate-favored sites?
You already lost most people here.
> virtual hosting service and choose a domain name.
Actually, people don't even have to have a domain name for their webpage. But ignoring that - how will people know that this is what they need to do? "I want to create a homepage, I don't know what 'virtual hosting' is. I don't know why I need to be looking for 'services'."
> 2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress".
In their what now click what now?
How are you so sure this is always possible?
Also, what about search engines (cough-Google-cough) under-ranking individual pages in favor of larger, corporate-favored sites?
> how will people know that this is what they need to do?
Why has the tech community at large completely failed to educate people on the basics of something used by billions of people daily and affecting increasingly-important parts of their lives?
Is it because we keep infantilizing them the way you seem to be doing, pretending they are too stupid to learn anything new? Or is it because in an effort to simplify, everyone simplifies to a different way, resulting in even more complexity? Or is it because tech really doesn't care and sucks at explaining anything?
A bit of all three (and probably more) if you ask me
Why has the tech community at large completely failed to educate people on the basics of something used by billions of people daily and affecting increasingly-important parts of their lives?
Is it because we keep infantilizing them the way you seem to be doing, pretending they are too stupid to learn anything new? Or is it because in an effort to simplify, everyone simplifies to a different way, resulting in even more complexity? Or is it because tech really doesn't care and sucks at explaining anything?
A bit of all three (and probably more) if you ask me
I love how everything about your list is harder and less flexible for non-technical people than what existed in the 90s... while also glossing over non-dev-focused solutions. It's like the famous HN Dropbox dismissal [1].
Buying virtual hosting, domain names and using a control panel to install Wordpress is already harder, pricier and less anonymous than most users had to endure in the 90s. Also, Wordpress doesn't allow you to easily edit the templates the same way Dreamweaver and Frontpage allowed. Those tools were useable by anyone with knowledge about Word. But to customise Wordpress you need deep HTML knowledge and time. Most Wordpress templates are way more bloated than some bespoke HTML made with Dreamweaver.
You could have said Tumblr, or, if you wanna go commercial, Wix or Squarespace, but self-hosted Wordpress is like the worst of both worlds put together...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Buying virtual hosting, domain names and using a control panel to install Wordpress is already harder, pricier and less anonymous than most users had to endure in the 90s. Also, Wordpress doesn't allow you to easily edit the templates the same way Dreamweaver and Frontpage allowed. Those tools were useable by anyone with knowledge about Word. But to customise Wordpress you need deep HTML knowledge and time. Most Wordpress templates are way more bloated than some bespoke HTML made with Dreamweaver.
You could have said Tumblr, or, if you wanna go commercial, Wix or Squarespace, but self-hosted Wordpress is like the worst of both worlds put together...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
You don't need that many steps.
Wix/SquareSpace, and I am sure a dozen other options will make this 1 step for you if you are willing to pay a small premium.
Wix/SquareSpace, and I am sure a dozen other options will make this 1 step for you if you are willing to pay a small premium.
> 1) It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision?
In the olden days, you were either affiliated with a university or you signed up to Geocities. Nowadays, you can go to WordPress and add your fill of content pages: it's not just a blog. I'm pretty sure the modern web is a win for ease of access to genuine user-controlled pages. Probably you had more control over the skin of a GeoCities site than a free WordPress page, but I'm not sure to what extent or how important that is.
I think the issue here is more that people don't just want to make content - they want to have readers. You're more likely to get and know about your readers if you post on Facebook or Twitter than if you post on WordPress.
> 2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry.
I think this is important. The modern web doesn't provide discoverability to independent content produced in good faith. Either you have to agree to donate it to Facebook or you need to do a lot of work drumming it up. Google become popular because it cared more about the content than the primitive SEO, and the web was small enough you could plausibly use dmoz.org to browse the internet. Now, advanced SEO is better than any search engine algorithm and there's too much godawful content to be excited to read content without some kind of active recommendation.
> A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech.
I recall another article posted here a few weeks ago, where the author argued that centralisation dominates over decentralisation. But the argument in this place (at least till I went to bed) was that because there was technical decentralisation, there was no centralisation.
I don't know which view represents the mainstream view of technical people today, just which view seemed to have the most advocates while I was reading the thread.
What I do know is that it seems hopeless to me to hope that our best and brightest will help decentralise the internet again. I think the Gemini project has it right when they do whatever they can. I wish it were more prosocial though; it mostly consists of isolated gemlogs without the opportunity to reply. (I mean, you can reply, but all you're doing is posting a new page. If the person to whom you are replying doesn't know you from a loaf of bread, it's more practical to just go wash the dishes. If someone wants to correct me, by all means: I'm all ears.)
Btw, I don't want to imply that the Gemini folk aren't the best and brightest: Just that the path to a decentralised internet is the same as the path to free software - wearing the straitjacket and doing the work. And even then, it's easily lost. How much centralised, non-free software do we all use even if we've never installed it!
I think the main problem to solve is interaction without inauthentic action (spam). Centralised systems allow one person to cut off the spammer once, and that stops them from affecting everyone. If you imagine a decentralised gem/weblogging network with a reply facility, then if you write a logpost (on a log hosted on your own computer) and send a trackback to mine (on a log hosted on my own computer), then I probably consider that interesting. But if now a spammer writes a logpost and sends a trackback to yours, you need a way to cancel that. And once you've cancelled them, they can still post to mine! Each spammer will annoy each logposter as many times as they can get around the spam protection: it's an exponential problem. With a centralised system, once you've cancelled them, they are much more likely to encounter difficulty trying to trackback to my log: it's a linear problem - or even less.
The other issues are probably surmountable - it shouldn't be impossible to create a decentralised network of posts and replies and threads that can be viewed together. It probably starts with something more like RSS than Usenet.
In the olden days, you were either affiliated with a university or you signed up to Geocities. Nowadays, you can go to WordPress and add your fill of content pages: it's not just a blog. I'm pretty sure the modern web is a win for ease of access to genuine user-controlled pages. Probably you had more control over the skin of a GeoCities site than a free WordPress page, but I'm not sure to what extent or how important that is.
I think the issue here is more that people don't just want to make content - they want to have readers. You're more likely to get and know about your readers if you post on Facebook or Twitter than if you post on WordPress.
> 2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry.
I think this is important. The modern web doesn't provide discoverability to independent content produced in good faith. Either you have to agree to donate it to Facebook or you need to do a lot of work drumming it up. Google become popular because it cared more about the content than the primitive SEO, and the web was small enough you could plausibly use dmoz.org to browse the internet. Now, advanced SEO is better than any search engine algorithm and there's too much godawful content to be excited to read content without some kind of active recommendation.
> A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech.
I recall another article posted here a few weeks ago, where the author argued that centralisation dominates over decentralisation. But the argument in this place (at least till I went to bed) was that because there was technical decentralisation, there was no centralisation.
I don't know which view represents the mainstream view of technical people today, just which view seemed to have the most advocates while I was reading the thread.
What I do know is that it seems hopeless to me to hope that our best and brightest will help decentralise the internet again. I think the Gemini project has it right when they do whatever they can. I wish it were more prosocial though; it mostly consists of isolated gemlogs without the opportunity to reply. (I mean, you can reply, but all you're doing is posting a new page. If the person to whom you are replying doesn't know you from a loaf of bread, it's more practical to just go wash the dishes. If someone wants to correct me, by all means: I'm all ears.)
Btw, I don't want to imply that the Gemini folk aren't the best and brightest: Just that the path to a decentralised internet is the same as the path to free software - wearing the straitjacket and doing the work. And even then, it's easily lost. How much centralised, non-free software do we all use even if we've never installed it!
I think the main problem to solve is interaction without inauthentic action (spam). Centralised systems allow one person to cut off the spammer once, and that stops them from affecting everyone. If you imagine a decentralised gem/weblogging network with a reply facility, then if you write a logpost (on a log hosted on your own computer) and send a trackback to mine (on a log hosted on my own computer), then I probably consider that interesting. But if now a spammer writes a logpost and sends a trackback to yours, you need a way to cancel that. And once you've cancelled them, they can still post to mine! Each spammer will annoy each logposter as many times as they can get around the spam protection: it's an exponential problem. With a centralised system, once you've cancelled them, they are much more likely to encounter difficulty trying to trackback to my log: it's a linear problem - or even less.
The other issues are probably surmountable - it shouldn't be impossible to create a decentralised network of posts and replies and threads that can be viewed together. It probably starts with something more like RSS than Usenet.
Most of this is because the people you are talking about don't actually use a computer to access the internet. They use a mobile computer. Mobile computers don't have the networking or energy storage (due to radio usage) capabilities to be able to participate in the internet as an equal. They almost all don't have a routable ipv4 and for those ones that do have ipv6, often it doesn't come with control over ports.
If these people were accessing the internet from a home computer they could just install a simple static webserver and put HTML files, jpegs, gifs, etc in a folder, forward ports on their router, and bam, they're on the web.
If these people were accessing the internet from a home computer they could just install a simple static webserver and put HTML files, jpegs, gifs, etc in a folder, forward ports on their router, and bam, they're on the web.
With the right blacklist, the old internet is still there.
It's considerably easier to maintain a whitelist of actual content, than attempt to maintain a blacklist of ever-expanding spam.
Please sign my guestbook...
F5
There's still ~75,000 results on google for that string. At least a few thousand are still /guestbook/ pages.
Thank your for this great content. It has really improved my insight.
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Edit: I guess this ironic post may be indistinguishable from actual spam
Buy Viagra ONLINE NOW !! Best viagra sildenafil pills medication 100% safe reliable online shop.
Edit: I guess this ironic post may be indistinguishable from actual spam
If your link wasn't directed to a video that is LOUD AS HELL then your comment would've been fine. Why not redirect to the regular Rickroll video instead of fucking with people's ears?
I miss guestbooks. It was great to see comments from visitors thanking the webmaster; it made it feel like each site had a small community around it. Nowadays such a concept is hidden behind CAPTCHAs or happens on external forums, so feels much more disconnected.
Also, hit counters were rad.
Also, hit counters were rad.
> Also, hit counters were rad.
https://stuff.mit.edu/doc/counter-howto.html still works! I still use it alongside an old php guestbook script on my personal homepage.
https://stuff.mit.edu/doc/counter-howto.html still works! I still use it alongside an old php guestbook script on my personal homepage.
Has anyone tried Gemini?
https://gemini.circumlunar.space
I looked around a few days ago and I find it really neat. Its minimalism makes it unsuitable for all the trash that has ruined the modern web as a simple information store. It uses the principle of least capability to create an environment where mere information takes center stage. Not even supporting images means memes can't even take hold, let alone real-time adtech.
The only flaw is that it's still a client/server protocol, which means closed silos and more passive forms of adtech could still invade.
(The modern web is however an acceptable thin client for single page apps that interact with services. I look at HTML5+CSS+JS as the new VT100, a terminal protocol for talking to remote machines.)
The other part of the modern Internet that reminds me of the old Internet is small independent podcasts. I listen to a number of these, and the high information content and lack of bullshit is reminiscent of the web before Facebook and adtech. There's also an implicit principle of least capability in podcasts. It's possible to insert ads, sure, but it's also possible to skip them and it's hard to make it impossible to do that. The medium is non-interactive and almost non-scriptable. There is an effort right now to walled garden podcasts, and I urge everyone who cares to resist it by using podcast apps and aggregators that are not pushing this.
https://gemini.circumlunar.space
I looked around a few days ago and I find it really neat. Its minimalism makes it unsuitable for all the trash that has ruined the modern web as a simple information store. It uses the principle of least capability to create an environment where mere information takes center stage. Not even supporting images means memes can't even take hold, let alone real-time adtech.
The only flaw is that it's still a client/server protocol, which means closed silos and more passive forms of adtech could still invade.
(The modern web is however an acceptable thin client for single page apps that interact with services. I look at HTML5+CSS+JS as the new VT100, a terminal protocol for talking to remote machines.)
The other part of the modern Internet that reminds me of the old Internet is small independent podcasts. I listen to a number of these, and the high information content and lack of bullshit is reminiscent of the web before Facebook and adtech. There's also an implicit principle of least capability in podcasts. It's possible to insert ads, sure, but it's also possible to skip them and it's hard to make it impossible to do that. The medium is non-interactive and almost non-scriptable. There is an effort right now to walled garden podcasts, and I urge everyone who cares to resist it by using podcast apps and aggregators that are not pushing this.
I got really into using gopher and Gemini a few years ago while playing on SDF, but I was never able to find anything that held my interest and I don't think I ended up setting up my own phlog. Maybe my dopamine circuits have been reamed out by years in the attention economy... Every once in a while I think about writing a gopher server that serves content out of a WordPress database...
It’s like nostalgia for old TV shows. You have found memories but then when you watch them again they were really crap. I also remember images rendering line by line, expensive phone bills, crashy browsers, popup storms, going through 15 pages of altavista results before finding something useful, etc
I'm not sure why you're downvoted, whatever there was, it was also abused or shit. Spam everywhere, banners as annoying as ever, the nice insights in forums buried between low-effort one-liners and the trendy extra spacious forum signatures, and you couldn't do much against the flashing banners because adblocking was hit or miss.
It's not like I don't empathize. But one needs to realize that this is a specific thing, it's a human experience, shared across time and culture.
Oh yeah and the popups and the pop-unders can rot in hell. I can't believe how long it took for developers to control the situation.
It's not like I don't empathize. But one needs to realize that this is a specific thing, it's a human experience, shared across time and culture.
Oh yeah and the popups and the pop-unders can rot in hell. I can't believe how long it took for developers to control the situation.
[deleted]
I just watched Inside [1], where Bo Burnham creates a wonderful, funny, sad and thought-provoking "Special" about our internet culture. Highly recommended.
This is one of my favourite songs now: [2]
It's a bit crazy when I think about how different our generations grow up and it makes me a bit sad that our children will have a completely different understanding of what the internet is. For me it was a place of wonder, freedom and self-expression. It's different today, but even I have problems explaining how it changed. But it definitely lost some if it's playfulness on the way.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14544192/
[2] https://youtu.be/k1BneeJTDcU
This is one of my favourite songs now: [2]
It's a bit crazy when I think about how different our generations grow up and it makes me a bit sad that our children will have a completely different understanding of what the internet is. For me it was a place of wonder, freedom and self-expression. It's different today, but even I have problems explaining how it changed. But it definitely lost some if it's playfulness on the way.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14544192/
[2] https://youtu.be/k1BneeJTDcU
If I had to distill four decades of "mass Internet" transformation into one phrase:
Independent creator culture (1980-2000), converted into mass consumer culture (2000-2010), and then back into taxed creator culture within walled ecosystems (2010-2020).
Independent creator culture (1980-2000), converted into mass consumer culture (2000-2010), and then back into taxed creator culture within walled ecosystems (2010-2020).
What happens next?
Predicting the future is a more lucrative talent than summarizing the past, and I'm not that rich. :)
If we ever get around to having a Basic Income, it may help this somewhat. Creators may feel less pushed to monetize the things they make.
This. Capitalism is pretty good at making a lot of what can be monetized at industrial scales, but without some form of complementing security, it also places distorting incentives to search every activity for ROI possibilities in one form or another.
That timeline you described doesn’t align with the events of eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Mass effect lags individual instance, and ranges are general.
F.ex. YouTube started in 2005, but from my memory the first years were primarily sharing copyrighted commercial material, before they cracked down on that and leaned into monetizing and taxing organic content
F.ex. YouTube started in 2005, but from my memory the first years were primarily sharing copyrighted commercial material, before they cracked down on that and leaned into monetizing and taxing organic content
I think all of that independent creator culture is still out there, there's just also the mass consumer culture and walled ecosystems on top. It's a relatively insignificant proportion of things now, but big networks seem to be what most people are looking for.
Not all. While commercialization of the creator culture undoubtedly has some benefits, it also kills some of its original "soul".
Someone making funny videos on the internet on their free time without any kind of expectation to make money out of it unavoidably produces different results than the same person making semi-professional videos on Youtube and making living out of it. If the latter is an option, why the hell would the said person do the former? But since the latter option exists, it drives all of the creations to more professional, less quirky direction. It's the same effect that causes all the Hollywood films to have pretty much the same story arc and all the big budget games to feel like copies of each other.
Someone making funny videos on the internet on their free time without any kind of expectation to make money out of it unavoidably produces different results than the same person making semi-professional videos on Youtube and making living out of it. If the latter is an option, why the hell would the said person do the former? But since the latter option exists, it drives all of the creations to more professional, less quirky direction. It's the same effect that causes all the Hollywood films to have pretty much the same story arc and all the big budget games to feel like copies of each other.
That's an effect, sure. But I think it's more corrosive on the platform side.
If I start a business that makes hosting and sharing videos easier, should I sell it to hobbyists who don't have money, or semi/pros who have lots of money? And how does that affect my feature pipeline and product evolution?
The end result being... hobbyists have minimal, difficult, and (relatively) expensive platforms to enable their work, and semi/pros have well featured and cheap (or free) platforms. And that perpetuates the bifurcation and destruction of pure hobbyists.
If I start a business that makes hosting and sharing videos easier, should I sell it to hobbyists who don't have money, or semi/pros who have lots of money? And how does that affect my feature pipeline and product evolution?
The end result being... hobbyists have minimal, difficult, and (relatively) expensive platforms to enable their work, and semi/pros have well featured and cheap (or free) platforms. And that perpetuates the bifurcation and destruction of pure hobbyists.
> I think all of that independent creator culture is still out there
It absolutely is. You don't even have to go completely old-school and DIY youtube. There is always a way you can surf the current internet weather conditions to achieve some hybrid stance.
For instance, maybe you put some videos on YouTube, but also have deeper posts for each of those on some personal blog that you host on a server in your garage.
With this approach, you can drive traffic from both directions - People who were browsing your blog and want to watch some embedded YT demo, and YouTubers desperate for hard, written technical documentation on how to do something will have link in the description below.
It absolutely is. You don't even have to go completely old-school and DIY youtube. There is always a way you can surf the current internet weather conditions to achieve some hybrid stance.
For instance, maybe you put some videos on YouTube, but also have deeper posts for each of those on some personal blog that you host on a server in your garage.
With this approach, you can drive traffic from both directions - People who were browsing your blog and want to watch some embedded YT demo, and YouTubers desperate for hard, written technical documentation on how to do something will have link in the description below.
The book "The Master Switch" explains how radio, film and cable TV went through the exact same phases. It's worth a read if you find this transformation interesting.
Maybe things felt better because the internet originally reflected a subset of our population. Before the advent of cheap smartphones and 24/7 connections with a cellular plan, being part of the early internet usually meant you had a well paid job and were educated.
The internet of today hasn't changed much and is still a reflection of it's population. And if we don't like what we see it's because it highlights the worst parts of society as well as the best.
I've been doing a lot of thinking on how the internet has changed humanity since it's inception and watching our gradual change into a more connected and collectivist mentality. I think right now we're all being confronted with the imperfect creatures we are and ultimately I think it's a good thing for how we'll progress from here.
The internet of today hasn't changed much and is still a reflection of it's population. And if we don't like what we see it's because it highlights the worst parts of society as well as the best.
I've been doing a lot of thinking on how the internet has changed humanity since it's inception and watching our gradual change into a more connected and collectivist mentality. I think right now we're all being confronted with the imperfect creatures we are and ultimately I think it's a good thing for how we'll progress from here.
In retrospect, the old internet had plenty of derisiveness, toward targets like religion or copyright. Many of the loudest voices switched to today's morality movement without skipping a beat.
That's because the social justice movement is a religion. No one calls it this but the tell tail sign is you can't debate this issues with facts.
Climate change has produced their own religious zealots.
Climate change has produced their own religious zealots.
It’s not true that “no one” calls it that. That’s, in fact, one of the most shopworn arguments against it and one I come across nearly every day.
But to be fair, while it was a cheap wild west pioneer experience for us, it's also because we were drawn to this in the first place. Once it become cheap and accessible enough for most people, it turned into the utilitarian network it is today.
I mean, there was frankly no other way forward. Our kids will either be drawn to the next frontier, or wont be bothered like MOST KIDS when we grew up :D
I mean, there was frankly no other way forward. Our kids will either be drawn to the next frontier, or wont be bothered like MOST KIDS when we grew up :D
+1 for "Welcome to the Internet". I was thinking exactly of that song when I read the post!
> it definitely lost some if it's playfulness on the way
Kids seem to be having fun on TikTok. The obvious issue is I wouldn't call it a place of freedom.
Kids seem to be having fun on TikTok. The obvious issue is I wouldn't call it a place of freedom.
the old internet still exists here and there.
Its still there, its just buried under all the other crap.
As more and more people generate content, more and more bullshit exists. Unfortunately, Google etc. - despite all their big announcements - can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit.
Where's the semantic web that was promised? I wonder if we're still paying for the mistakes that were made with the whole XML stuff ...?
As more and more people generate content, more and more bullshit exists. Unfortunately, Google etc. - despite all their big announcements - can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit.
Where's the semantic web that was promised? I wonder if we're still paying for the mistakes that were made with the whole XML stuff ...?
> Google etc... can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit.
It's worse than that. They are shoveling bullshit. They turned on the bullshit magnet and lit up the bullshit bat signal. They created a bullshit attention economy and sold bullshit tickets to bullshit artists. Literally everthing about Google and Facebook is creating one opportunity after another to jab you in the eyeballs with ads and/or trap you in a never-ending cycle of "engagement" that has few paths out. It's a trap to monetize every aspect of your interactions with the digital world, to monetize your very attention span. Once you are in, you are at the mercy of a metric assload of computation designed to trap your little rat ass so your eyeballs can be strapped open and ads sold to the highest bidder piped right into your brain. And there are basically zero financial incentives for them to stop or slow down.
It's worse than that. They are shoveling bullshit. They turned on the bullshit magnet and lit up the bullshit bat signal. They created a bullshit attention economy and sold bullshit tickets to bullshit artists. Literally everthing about Google and Facebook is creating one opportunity after another to jab you in the eyeballs with ads and/or trap you in a never-ending cycle of "engagement" that has few paths out. It's a trap to monetize every aspect of your interactions with the digital world, to monetize your very attention span. Once you are in, you are at the mercy of a metric assload of computation designed to trap your little rat ass so your eyeballs can be strapped open and ads sold to the highest bidder piped right into your brain. And there are basically zero financial incentives for them to stop or slow down.
The bullshit asymmetry therom predicted this. Filtering bullshit is so hard it's easier making money selling it yourself.
But this also means there is a need to filter bs that can be addressed.
Hence the problem. Spam for example has ruined email to the point that only a few large providers control the majority of email flows, if you make them mad, you cant send email. Same thing happening with content.
well put...
Yeah, bullshitting was always the easiest way to get people's attention. Specifically if the bullshitters believe their own bullshit, I mean, they're sooooo confident in what they're saying, the gotta be right, right?
Just seems like a human weakness, always believe the person that appears the most confident, no matter what they say. And a bullshitter will say anything that people like because they need positive feedback because they're so convinced that what they have to say is pure greatness, and they don't even realize that they just always say whatever gets the most applause. And man, these people are good in that specific respect (and literally nothing else). They perfected their bullshit to a degree that its really really hard to see through it, at least it will take time. And then the next bullshitter comes along and one's fooled again because fuck they're good.
And yeah now we got a system called social media putting those people on steroids. Its not like that didn't happen every time we invented a new way of communicating. But every fucking time we believe this time it's different and people are better now and all that shit won't happen.
And of course then you get in a competition between those bullshitters, so they have to turn the heat up more and more to beat their fellow bullshitters. And what gets the most heat? Well, hate and fear and division and polarization of course. And now we are where we are and have to deal with fucking QAnon bullshit.
Just seems like a human weakness, always believe the person that appears the most confident, no matter what they say. And a bullshitter will say anything that people like because they need positive feedback because they're so convinced that what they have to say is pure greatness, and they don't even realize that they just always say whatever gets the most applause. And man, these people are good in that specific respect (and literally nothing else). They perfected their bullshit to a degree that its really really hard to see through it, at least it will take time. And then the next bullshitter comes along and one's fooled again because fuck they're good.
And yeah now we got a system called social media putting those people on steroids. Its not like that didn't happen every time we invented a new way of communicating. But every fucking time we believe this time it's different and people are better now and all that shit won't happen.
And of course then you get in a competition between those bullshitters, so they have to turn the heat up more and more to beat their fellow bullshitters. And what gets the most heat? Well, hate and fear and division and polarization of course. And now we are where we are and have to deal with fucking QAnon bullshit.
Sheesh, and I thought I was jaded :)
You're right, it's just not that apocalyptic. I think we should be worried, yes, but this can be mitigated with stricter regulation and better public education. And of course engineers choosing to work for respectable companies instead of following the digits on their paychecks.
You're right, it's just not that apocalyptic. I think we should be worried, yes, but this can be mitigated with stricter regulation and better public education. And of course engineers choosing to work for respectable companies instead of following the digits on their paychecks.
I have been playing with the idea of making good old internet portal. A curated list of links to the good stuff. No FB, medium, Instagram or anything like that.
There's https://curlie.org , it even links to some old-style websites in its collection. I think there are some other sites with similar ideas too, where you can create groups and share bookmarks ( like https://groups.diigo.com )
I had the same idea, I think this is the ultimate solution. Would need to be easy to add links and allow moderators to approve submitted websites and provide a good search capability. Would only include quirky websites.
Wiby.me and oldinter.net are both good starting points
Portals are still sometimes made to make it easier to discover independent content, you aren't the only one concerned about this. However, the problem is that independent creators often stop paying for hosting or domain registration at some point, so any manually created directory eventually abounds with 404s.
What about a curated directory of archive links to decrease the rate of link rot?
I would suspect that even fans of independent content would be turned off by browsing through a large amount of Wayback Machine links, because Archive.org insert their own markup, and often the images in posts don't get archived.
People like using the Wayback Machine when they know that certain content used to exist, but not necessarily to discover new things unfamiliar to them.
People like using the Wayback Machine when they know that certain content used to exist, but not necessarily to discover new things unfamiliar to them.
IPFS mirroring would probably be ideal for simple websites like this.
So who takes on the full-time job of curation? Could probably get donations eventually, but the portal would have to sufficiently succeed first.
Yeah, that would be the hard part. But in the spirit of the old internet, make it first and then, if it becomes popular, deal with it.
Just have to read up on the history of Yahoo and watch that last season of Halt & Catch Fire. ;-)
Just have to read up on the history of Yahoo and watch that last season of Halt & Catch Fire. ;-)
Wiki? With a double approval before the edit happens?
Just bring back DMOZ, it was by no means perfect but was a great curated directory of the old internet despite SEOs always trying to spam it. Apparently Curlie is trying this but I haven't really looked much into it: https://curlie.org/en
Additional properties it should have:
* Basic HTML only, no Javascript
* No user interaction (comments, etc.)
* Gets updated occasionally but not all the time, perhaps a few times a year
* Basic HTML only, no Javascript
* No user interaction (comments, etc.)
* Gets updated occasionally but not all the time, perhaps a few times a year
Yeah, I was thinking static html pages generated once per day or once per week from a database, depending on how often the backend is updated.
The beauty of the old internet was that there was no need for filtering, because it was done by the users by choosing which platforms to participate. Instead of many fragmented, special interest platforms we now have a few generic mega-platforms like Facebook and Reddit, which naturally get filled with garbage. In the old web, a place for discussion would have been a small special interest discussion forum with perhaps around a hundred active participants and a few hundred less active ones. The outsiders (i.e. the people who would post garbage) did not participate in the discussion because there was some threshold of participation (finding the website, registering, etc.). Instead they would have their own forum somewhere else with similar dynamics.
I think it's very natural for people to divide into communities of tens or, at most, hundreds of people. The modern web platforms don't respect this at all.
I think it's very natural for people to divide into communities of tens or, at most, hundreds of people. The modern web platforms don't respect this at all.
This is a classic. It was put up 18 years ago, and still has plenty of relevance: https://www.internetisshit.org
This touches on something a bit different to the linked author which is people thinking the internet is something it is not. During my time at university I didn't initially use the library. Why would I? Everything is on the internet, isn't it? Not by a long shot. Once I went down the rabbit hole of scholarship I was amazed just how much information could not be found online. And this was just one tiny subject I was interested in. A real eye opener.
Million Short is a nice way to find some of these old websites. It lets you remove the first million search results from your query:
https://millionshort.com
The thing I really miss about the old Internet are forums. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and other social media sites lack a certain intimacy. Everyone is somewhat hostile by default and there is no incentive to contribute to the community. It's very different and a lot less fulfilling than the Internet forums circa ±2000-2005.
https://millionshort.com
The thing I really miss about the old Internet are forums. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and other social media sites lack a certain intimacy. Everyone is somewhat hostile by default and there is no incentive to contribute to the community. It's very different and a lot less fulfilling than the Internet forums circa ±2000-2005.
Which is another way of saying part of the problem is the search engines we use to discover the web. IMO, another piece is that Wordpress and similar engines homogenized design-- it's superior but always unsurprising.
That's the only problem. Google shows big player websites now because it has lost the ability to detect spam.
This sentiment of missing an older internet is one reason like like Hacker News. Slash dot was great in the day. Digg was so great in the day. Then the early days of Reddit were great. I’ve been her for over ten years and Hacker News is still good.
So thank you to the team that runs Hacker News and everyone who comments for making it a good place to come to.
So thank you to the team that runs Hacker News and everyone who comments for making it a good place to come to.
For me, HN suffers in the comparison to Slashdot, because HN is an example of the arguably overmoderated internet of today. Slashdot had a vibrant culture of troll posting. It wasn’t just dumb one-line slurs or whatever, which no one would want to see. Rather, it was often longform text crafted to a downright literary quality, to the point where many Slashdot regulars would choose to browse their discussion threads at -1 to see those posts. Some of those troll posts ("BSD is dying", etc.) became part of the subculture, it helped create a real feeling of community around shared cultural references.
Yes, on HN one can toggle "showdead", but that is rather hidden away in one's user preferences, so very few people do it. Anyone creating an original troll post might also get a chewing out from dang for trying. In my view, this makes HN more similar to Facebook or Reddit that have very heavy-handed moderation compared to Web 1.0.
Yes, on HN one can toggle "showdead", but that is rather hidden away in one's user preferences, so very few people do it. Anyone creating an original troll post might also get a chewing out from dang for trying. In my view, this makes HN more similar to Facebook or Reddit that have very heavy-handed moderation compared to Web 1.0.
On the contrary, I feel that "troll culture" is (along with commercialization) one of the things that has ruined the net. It's basically a form of bullying, and over the years, as bullies do, they've steadily escalated in their trolling.
Harmless pranks from the 4chan crowd morphed into harassment campaigns like Gamergate and Pizzagate, then to 1/6 [edit: the storming of the US Capitol].
Anyone disingenuously complaining that their "freedom of speech" is under attack because they or their hero got booted off Facebook, Twitter, or some small forum, needs to learn to distinguish between private website operators and the government.
Harmless pranks from the 4chan crowd morphed into harassment campaigns like Gamergate and Pizzagate, then to 1/6 [edit: the storming of the US Capitol].
Anyone disingenuously complaining that their "freedom of speech" is under attack because they or their hero got booted off Facebook, Twitter, or some small forum, needs to learn to distinguish between private website operators and the government.
> Anyone disingenuously complaining that their "freedom of speech" is under attack
"Freedom of speech" is a philosophical concept, not a legal principle. You seem to have it confused with the US-specific "First Amendment", which is the one that only applies to the government.
I personally see a big problem with social media banning trans-people (Facebook), or declaring that the whole LGBT crowd is inappropriate (Livejournal, Tumblr). I think it's a problem when scientists sharing Covid-19 information get banned for being ahead of the official CDC/FDA guidance (Twitter)
Maybe the solution isn't legal, but I still think it's bad that we have a massive media apparatus that can wipe out any voices it disagrees with, and which is fairly eager to use that against people like me.
"Freedom of speech" is a philosophical concept, not a legal principle. You seem to have it confused with the US-specific "First Amendment", which is the one that only applies to the government.
I personally see a big problem with social media banning trans-people (Facebook), or declaring that the whole LGBT crowd is inappropriate (Livejournal, Tumblr). I think it's a problem when scientists sharing Covid-19 information get banned for being ahead of the official CDC/FDA guidance (Twitter)
Maybe the solution isn't legal, but I still think it's bad that we have a massive media apparatus that can wipe out any voices it disagrees with, and which is fairly eager to use that against people like me.
Good points. Scale and centralization make the world of Facebook et. al. a much thornier problem. They've become Too Big To Fail™, with all that entails. Not to mention antitrust issues, but that's a digression in itself.
I see some hope in federated systems, and, for that matter, old-school forums that have survived. Usenet still sputters along, but it's not what it was before spammers ruined it.
I see some hope in federated systems, and, for that matter, old-school forums that have survived. Usenet still sputters along, but it's not what it was before spammers ruined it.
I'm sure I don't want to know, but what is 1/6?
Storming the US capitol on January 6th
Definitely agree, HN has been downvoting too much lately and it used to be the case that contrarian views were rarely downvoted, and it was reserved for rude comments or baseless allegations, personal attacks, etc. Today, HN sucks just like any other major discussion board. Conformism is real and downvotes are a tool used to silence and discredit real opinions and insights - although they might be uncomfortable and challenges your long held views - that's exactly the thing that I love about the old internet.
HN is held hostage by people with a particular ideology and conformity, not just political, but across the board.
HN is held hostage by people with a particular ideology and conformity, not just political, but across the board.
I agree. I think HN in the perfect combination of the old internet, with the text-only posts, and the web 2.0 way of doing likes and threaded conversations. And, of course, the moderation keeping it all in check. I'm grateful that I can come here every day.
Includes the very worst part of echo chambering though.
Don’t like someone OR their comment? Just do your part with three other people and it’ll be faded, once it’s faded other people will join in hiding the bad man who said the bad thing - and gone!
No more contrarian opinion, we protected other people! Everyone agrees now. How wonderful.
Don’t like someone OR their comment? Just do your part with three other people and it’ll be faded, once it’s faded other people will join in hiding the bad man who said the bad thing - and gone!
No more contrarian opinion, we protected other people! Everyone agrees now. How wonderful.
How ironic.
I agree, downvote-based discussions invariably lead to echo chambers / monocultures. See the dumpster fire that are reddit comments.
At least on old-time forums there was no such bullshit (except post count :)).
I agree, downvote-based discussions invariably lead to echo chambers / monocultures. See the dumpster fire that are reddit comments.
At least on old-time forums there was no such bullshit (except post count :)).
In my experience, your message would get buried or you would get bullied to the point where you leave the forum, nowadays it's done via downvotes. I don't see much of a difference, other than that the new way produces less noise.
You can’t crowdsource quality. Comment voting systems only tell you what is popular, not what is high quality. So many sites make this mistake, including HN.
You reminded me of a failed experiment I did a while back with music tags. I still purchase music monthly (Bandcamp when possible), and I always tag music. I have a bunch of multi-value tags including 'instruments' and 'moods'. It works really well with a huge collection. I can quickly find songs similar to the one I'm listening to, or generate playlists.
Anyway, a few years ago I thought I could speed up the tagging process by pulling tags from Last FM and filtering out the shite by only including tags that matched an instrument name or mood. Luckily I backed up before running the script on my whole collection. The data was absolute garbage.
Anyway, a few years ago I thought I could speed up the tagging process by pulling tags from Last FM and filtering out the shite by only including tags that matched an instrument name or mood. Luckily I backed up before running the script on my whole collection. The data was absolute garbage.
It reminded me of when I went through and ripped my CD collection. I'd estimate that almost a third of the album data was complete trash, and there were a shockingly bad number of spelling errors. I couldn't help but wonder if someone was deliberately poisoning data.
Slashdot tried to solve this problem by making mod points limited and requiring you to give a reason for moderating a comment. Then there was a metamoderation system where you decided if the moderation someone gave was fair or not. If someone consistently doesn't use the moderation system correctly (and the metamoderation system is successful in identifying this), they don't get mod points anymore.
It didn't work perfectly (obviously the site is still highly opinionated in favor of certain things, like Linux and free software), but it also wasn't the smooth-brained hivemind that Reddit comments sections are. I can't think of another site that's even tried to come up with a better moderation system than simple up/down votes. At best, there are some behind-the-scenes algorithms that decide how exactly to prioritize comments based on the voting, but that's derived from popularity as well. An immeasurable side effect of this is that many heterodox comments simply aren't posted at all since people know they're going to be downvoted to oblivion anyway.
It didn't work perfectly (obviously the site is still highly opinionated in favor of certain things, like Linux and free software), but it also wasn't the smooth-brained hivemind that Reddit comments sections are. I can't think of another site that's even tried to come up with a better moderation system than simple up/down votes. At best, there are some behind-the-scenes algorithms that decide how exactly to prioritize comments based on the voting, but that's derived from popularity as well. An immeasurable side effect of this is that many heterodox comments simply aren't posted at all since people know they're going to be downvoted to oblivion anyway.
If you don't have the ability to vote, you can't influence the content in a positive way either. Some comments are pointless, like some tool making the "and my axe" joke for the millionth time.
Reddit lost its way when they started heavily moderating or banning entire subs that didn't fit with their woke US-centric world view, while rape porn was "fine". I closed my account a while back and stopped visiting the site, but unfortunately, there are so many organisations and FOSS projects that use it in an official capacity that it's unavoidable.
Reddit lost its way when they started heavily moderating or banning entire subs that didn't fit with their woke US-centric world view, while rape porn was "fine". I closed my account a while back and stopped visiting the site, but unfortunately, there are so many organisations and FOSS projects that use it in an official capacity that it's unavoidable.
In more user-centric (as opposed to content-centric) forums this problem is solved by banning users who repeatedly make low quality posts. One crappy comment here and there is something anyone might make, but the same person posting pointless comments in every thread deserves a ban.
The solution is simple: Use downvotes for rude and disrespectful comments. I am all for moderating a forum for pointless and useless comments. Most downvotes now-a-days are about disagreements. Using downvotes as a tool to push others into conformity is the shittiest part of HN.
I actually have a sort of nice idea about this: make your downvotes' worth be inversely proportional to how many downvotes you give.
A person who gives 100 downvotes per month will have his downvotes count 1/20th as those of a person who downvotes 5 times per month. An incenctive to be really judicious in handing out downvotes and not simply using them to drown out minority opinions.
A person who gives 100 downvotes per month will have his downvotes count 1/20th as those of a person who downvotes 5 times per month. An incenctive to be really judicious in handing out downvotes and not simply using them to drown out minority opinions.
Only issue here is that you are penalized for activity even if it’s in removing objective garbage. But I like the idea quite a bit. That you take a hit for being a negative ass that downvotes questions you think are beneath you.
Interesting. I think we would still have the issue of 10 people piling up on a comment with downvotes, as judiciously as they can spend the budget.
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They'll also go through your recent history and downvote any comments you've made that are still fresh enough. Downvote culture has some clear drawbacks that I have never seen validated, let alone addressed, by any community mod/admin. Dang responded to me once, but not with validation, and not to my follow up. It's the best I've ever been treated by a mod. I must be a bad person with evil opinions.
HN is not anything like the old internet forums or BBSes.
Content would get moderated but you could still read messages. Even the ones that went against the dogma.
Not at HN, anti-dogma posts get downvoted into oblivion or flagged if they are bad enough. I recently posted a counter-opinion on burnout and was downvoted pretty badly. I didn't flame, and tried to articulate my point well.
HN is composed of the exact microcosm of people who have ruined the internet. It's just an echo chamber where counter-points are nuked. No different than facebook, or anything else. At least /. made you think about using your modpoints to downvote. Now it's free - and for many very pathetic people downvoting is a source of dopamine. It's far easier to drive-by-downvote without having to even articulate a reply as to why. Comparing this to the old BBSes and forums, you at least got a moderator note (or a VERY disparaging note from a user) in your PMs about why you're being moderated. It is wildly frustrating to type something well thought out and be downvoted into oblivion because your stance isn't en-vogue.
Content would get moderated but you could still read messages. Even the ones that went against the dogma.
Not at HN, anti-dogma posts get downvoted into oblivion or flagged if they are bad enough. I recently posted a counter-opinion on burnout and was downvoted pretty badly. I didn't flame, and tried to articulate my point well.
HN is composed of the exact microcosm of people who have ruined the internet. It's just an echo chamber where counter-points are nuked. No different than facebook, or anything else. At least /. made you think about using your modpoints to downvote. Now it's free - and for many very pathetic people downvoting is a source of dopamine. It's far easier to drive-by-downvote without having to even articulate a reply as to why. Comparing this to the old BBSes and forums, you at least got a moderator note (or a VERY disparaging note from a user) in your PMs about why you're being moderated. It is wildly frustrating to type something well thought out and be downvoted into oblivion because your stance isn't en-vogue.
While I don't think it is often as bad as some people here try to make it out to be, it's also sad that comments pointing it or mostly dead, which is why I vouched for you.
Because there are to many dead comments that did not deserve that status.
This orange website is truly a fascinating place. We reminisce about the old, less commercialized internet while rubbing shoulders with the people who made it the way it is today.
Indeed. I find it extremely ironic how people here - of all places - are sympathetic to this sort of stuff.
And we (software professionals) are the ones with the power to fix it! It seems obvious but the answer is to just stop working on products/companies that are making the Internet worse!
“Ads are annoying and intrusive!” posts the HN commenter whose next Jira ticket at work is to integrate a new ad SDK into their product.
I’ve quit jobs that I believed were making the world a worse place. Software Engineers supposedly are in demand and have the power to pick their projects and companies. Be part of the solution then, and not part of the problem.
“Ads are annoying and intrusive!” posts the HN commenter whose next Jira ticket at work is to integrate a new ad SDK into their product.
I’ve quit jobs that I believed were making the world a worse place. Software Engineers supposedly are in demand and have the power to pick their projects and companies. Be part of the solution then, and not part of the problem.
I'm not personally a software professional, but to me it seems that the problem is economical. Centralization and walled gardens happen because they are a way to couple the internet platforms to the economic system. I think that if done "nicely", much of the software and internet tech exist in market failure corner of the economy. It's not like there aren't many federalized/decentralized/community driven and open source projects in existence, it's just that no-one wants to fund and/or market them so that they often become non-viable in the long run.
> And we (software professionals) are the ones with the power to fix it! It seems obvious but the answer is to just stop working on products/companies that are making the Internet worse!
I'm not convinced. We don't work in defense contracting but that industry seems to be doing fine without us.
I'm not convinced. We don't work in defense contracting but that industry seems to be doing fine without us.
The problem is the bulk of the demand is at the places with all the money, and those places mostly make the ads, show the ads, or serve companies that make or serve the ads.
Fwiw I’m old enough to remember people deriding the internet for replacing more pure bbs’ and newsgroups with flashy websites like /. and digg.
The internet killed bbses. Bbses were local (or not) more personal, easy to make longterm friends, meetups in malls died with the bbses.
I miss bbses. I resisted the internet switch for as long as possible. I remember the last c64 release..wasn't it monsters of mayham.. the graphics were amazing and the gameplay fast. Sort of like a mario world.
BBS could be elite where you needed references. It could be local family focuses with no swearing. There was a network of bbses who would share posts.. that was cool.
The best thing about bbses. As a SysOp I could start chatting with any user. The person logging in actual used your computer so in real time you could watch what the user was doing. Websites lost that.
I miss bbses. I resisted the internet switch for as long as possible. I remember the last c64 release..wasn't it monsters of mayham.. the graphics were amazing and the gameplay fast. Sort of like a mario world.
BBS could be elite where you needed references. It could be local family focuses with no swearing. There was a network of bbses who would share posts.. that was cool.
The best thing about bbses. As a SysOp I could start chatting with any user. The person logging in actual used your computer so in real time you could watch what the user was doing. Websites lost that.
Some BBSes evolved into forums but even those were different.
We lost the “local” based internet groups and we only really have “subject” based groupings anymore.
We lost the “local” based internet groups and we only really have “subject” based groupings anymore.
Yeah. Phpbb was a huge deal in the early 2000s. Then reddit came along with subreddits and Facebook groups took over. All stuff now happens under the curated moderation of the corporation that owns whatever hobby/interest.
You're omitting a major driver of the exodus from private forums to walled gardens. It's the same driver of many other problems: assholes.
Spammers killed many a forum because it became a full time effort by admins and moderators to remove them. Automated tools, especially early tools, had limited effectiveness. People running a site as a hobby don't want to spend their days removing spam comments.
Assholes also (for many reasons) will DDoS forums. This is another administrative headache for site owners if not a financial headache.
The same driving force saw blogs remove comments for centralized solutions like discus or abandon self-hosted blogs for Medium and the like.
While Facebook and reddit have plenty of spam issues the "owners" and mods of a group/subreddit are different from the site admins. There's a lot less financial risk for someone running a group there than their own server. They also let a wider swath of people run a group rather than only those that are interested in a niche topic, have the technical skills to effectively run a forums, and the money to pay for it all.
Spammers killed many a forum because it became a full time effort by admins and moderators to remove them. Automated tools, especially early tools, had limited effectiveness. People running a site as a hobby don't want to spend their days removing spam comments.
Assholes also (for many reasons) will DDoS forums. This is another administrative headache for site owners if not a financial headache.
The same driving force saw blogs remove comments for centralized solutions like discus or abandon self-hosted blogs for Medium and the like.
While Facebook and reddit have plenty of spam issues the "owners" and mods of a group/subreddit are different from the site admins. There's a lot less financial risk for someone running a group there than their own server. They also let a wider swath of people run a group rather than only those that are interested in a niche topic, have the technical skills to effectively run a forums, and the money to pay for it all.
I actually found HN quite late (a few years ago) and was pleasantly surprised how well the spirit of the old Reddit and Slashdot lives on here.
What the hell happened to Slashdot? I was on it from 1997 until about 2010ish, and now it is pretty ugly.
I think /. cratered due to poor moderation. It's just toxic. Digg is now like Axios for people who think link I do, so I check it daily. And reddit is, well, since the Digg/Reddit wars, its just become all-consuming and too noisy for me.
I'm guessing HN has remained civil because paid mods--who strive to be objective--really do make a difference.
I think /. cratered due to poor moderation. It's just toxic. Digg is now like Axios for people who think link I do, so I check it daily. And reddit is, well, since the Digg/Reddit wars, its just become all-consuming and too noisy for me.
I'm guessing HN has remained civil because paid mods--who strive to be objective--really do make a difference.
On HN with its dang moderation that is often praised, I have noticed a tendency to ascribe Slashdot's fall to poor moderation. That wasn't actually how things happened, though.
Slashdot's decline started in the years around 2004 because of a site redesign that was taken very badly by the community, and the sale of the site to new owners who began to make all kinds of annoying changes with a view to monetizing. A lot of longtime users bailed out. It was only due to this loss of the productive participants that the site seemed to be taken over by low-quality posting.
Slashdot's decline started in the years around 2004 because of a site redesign that was taken very badly by the community, and the sale of the site to new owners who began to make all kinds of annoying changes with a view to monetizing. A lot of longtime users bailed out. It was only due to this loss of the productive participants that the site seemed to be taken over by low-quality posting.
I remember the site UI change, but I was mostly grumbling because it looked even more 1990's post-redesign. I didn't realize that cause people to leave en masse. I'm surprised UI was more important than discussion, esp. when the UI change wasn't really that dramatic, IMHO.
I'm kind of thinking that it was more about the new owners than about the site redesign.
I still visit /., but it just isn't what it used to be. If anything, the trolls are even more vile than they were back then.
I still visit /., but it just isn't what it used to be. If anything, the trolls are even more vile than they were back then.
The UI changes weren't especially popular, but I don't think they were the cause of a mass exodus. I think it's more that Reddit was gaining in popularity. Slashdot posts had to go through their "editors," who were kind of laughingstocks who regularly let dumb mistakes through, reposted old articles, and regularly posted low-quality, flamebaity articles and thinly disguised advertisements. People put up with it since the articles were largely an excuse for a discussion topic. But then Reddit bypassed this and let people submit things directly. And the quality of Reddit posts and comments was a lot higher since it drew a more cerebral crowd in those early days, which made it more of a threat to Slashdot than the more mainstream Digg (which it also replaced ultimately).
Facebook was cool before it allowed to post images and the same goes for reddit. Once the multimedia content was allowed, the incentives changed, the crowd changed and things started to go downhill..
Take a look at HN, no images or videos, so it tends to bring more of the literate crowd.
Take a look at HN, no images or videos, so it tends to bring more of the literate crowd.
Many of us here followed the same path. HN is good for now, but it has been changing. It's unlikely we'll still be here in a couple years.
Sadly, you are probably right. For better or worse, I keep thinking that invite only forum is the way go to maintain a decent level of 'interesting conversations'. HN still has them, but it is getting harder to filter through.
I think that that will work in the short term, but unless you're very proactive about recruiting new blood your userbase is just going to dwindle away.
It's true that HN has gotten more crowded with more noise, but it is still the best there is. I won't be going anywhere.
I am constantly amazed at the thoughtful comments from people who are informed on a subject and take their time to layout a cogent argument. This makes it worthwhile to spend some time scanning more and more other stuff. I am getting to be quite a speed reader in this place.
HN will be just fine as long as Dang (and the other guy) spend so much energy here.
I am constantly amazed at the thoughtful comments from people who are informed on a subject and take their time to layout a cogent argument. This makes it worthwhile to spend some time scanning more and more other stuff. I am getting to be quite a speed reader in this place.
HN will be just fine as long as Dang (and the other guy) spend so much energy here.
I swear I read a comment exactly like this on Reddit, Digg, and Slashdot before they lost that quality.
Many discussions here turn argumentative but still retain their civility. Many posters will apologize and further clarify their ideas if anyone complains for the slightest reason. While not every discussion is of this level, there are many that are. The forums that I have personally followed as they went to hell showed very little of this even in their heyday.
We also have our own form of Kryptonite, the HN front page list of discussions. Many of the people that get kicks stirring up trouble would not understand or care to read this stuff.
We also have our own form of Kryptonite, the HN front page list of discussions. Many of the people that get kicks stirring up trouble would not understand or care to read this stuff.
Slashdot still exists, and the text internet is still a thing. It takes a deliberate effort to seek out smaller communities.
I run one myself, because I want more of them to exist.
I run one myself, because I want more of them to exist.
Slashdot indeed exists, but its comment section is complete garbage and the news are less and less about science and technology and more and more about politics and nerd tabloid style journalism ("You wouldn't believe what Linus Torvalds said on the Kernel developer mailing list!").
Hn, unlike the rest, doesn't have a business model they strongly encourages them to make the site a dumb as nails tabloid
Sadly, it’s the people.
The old internet had a filtering function where, because it was harder to use, people had to have some interest or skill to use it. So as a result, I think the proportion of people “online” had similar interest so more content was relevant and made by similar people.
Now everyone is online with more diverse interests and capabilities.
The old internet had a filtering function where, because it was harder to use, people had to have some interest or skill to use it. So as a result, I think the proportion of people “online” had similar interest so more content was relevant and made by similar people.
Now everyone is online with more diverse interests and capabilities.
I think that most of the filtering happened because different communities operated on different platforms rather than a single huge one like Reddit or Facebook.
A small, old time discussion forum for a specific interest in my (rather small) language had only perhaps a hundred active participants and another few hundred casual posters. In that sort of environment it is actually possible for the actives to get to know each other and have occasional live meetings, which builds a much better community. The threshold of participation is a lot higher since a new participant would first have to find the forum and then go through the registration process, both of which filter out people who were not actually that interested in the topic.
In Reddit or Facebook, any "community" (the word in quotations because I don't think they actually are very communal) for even a mildly popular topic gets filled with thousands and thousands of posts from thousands or millions of casual participants. The quality of the posts get very low, it becomes impossible for anyone to read all of them and personalities of the participants don't matter at all.
A small, old time discussion forum for a specific interest in my (rather small) language had only perhaps a hundred active participants and another few hundred casual posters. In that sort of environment it is actually possible for the actives to get to know each other and have occasional live meetings, which builds a much better community. The threshold of participation is a lot higher since a new participant would first have to find the forum and then go through the registration process, both of which filter out people who were not actually that interested in the topic.
In Reddit or Facebook, any "community" (the word in quotations because I don't think they actually are very communal) for even a mildly popular topic gets filled with thousands and thousands of posts from thousands or millions of casual participants. The quality of the posts get very low, it becomes impossible for anyone to read all of them and personalities of the participants don't matter at all.
I think it's a good point. Also everything being in the same place, easy to link or retweet means the small weirdo community will invariably see outside people coming to make fun of them or explain them that they're bad people who deserve to burn on hell.
Yep, this is something I noticed as well. Reddit calls its subreddits communities, but most communities are not about the people but about the content. As you can only have nuanced conversation when you repeatedly run into the same people, the only subreddits able to withstand conversation are niche or heavily moderated like AskHistorians.
What this means is that if you want good conversation on Keyboards, it better be about mechanical. Good conversation on coffee or want a new pair of headphones? Better be into audiophile equipment. There's no room for generalists who just want good enough. Overnight WallStreetBets went from an interesting community of people willing to gamble far more than I to a pile of garbage.
I'm beginning to think that Dunbar's number and the associated tribal splits are something that we should factor into our community building, and not try to work around through metrics and algorithms.
So HN does this aspect correct, by grouping by interest of a certain type of person, but even on HN as more people show up and post the same problems will become evident.
What this means is that if you want good conversation on Keyboards, it better be about mechanical. Good conversation on coffee or want a new pair of headphones? Better be into audiophile equipment. There's no room for generalists who just want good enough. Overnight WallStreetBets went from an interesting community of people willing to gamble far more than I to a pile of garbage.
I'm beginning to think that Dunbar's number and the associated tribal splits are something that we should factor into our community building, and not try to work around through metrics and algorithms.
So HN does this aspect correct, by grouping by interest of a certain type of person, but even on HN as more people show up and post the same problems will become evident.
There are subreddits pretty much dedicated to generalist hardware that does things "well enough". Reddit users recognise that not everyone has a large budget to play with, such as teenagers who have to scrounge together a setup with a few dollars and a handful of pocket lint.
I agree. It hasn't just ruined the internet, though. The internet has ruined them. Back in the day we didn't have any illusions about what the internet was. When you connected to a website you were literally just reading information from some random dude's computer. Nowadays there are older people who think the internet is finally lifting a veil on everything because anyone can say anything and mainstream media censors everything (ie. conspiracy theorists), and younger people who don't know anything except the internet and don't realise that there is so much stuff still out there that isn't online.
Not quite. Companies decided to monetize the internet, and because they want to earn all the money in the world, they want as many people as possible to use the internet. So they dumb it down to make it "easier to use".
> Not quite
You are just describing the same thing as OP said
And it is not even a matter of direct monetization, but growth into monetization
So yeah, OP is correct
You are just describing the same thing as OP said
And it is not even a matter of direct monetization, but growth into monetization
So yeah, OP is correct
"diverse capabilities" is quite the euphemism.
This. It also happens with everything, not just the old internet. It is the fun aspect of being one of the few first to reach a certain resource.
Come say hi at the Midnight (https://midnight.pub) if you miss the old internet. :) I built it for those reasons.
Flashing back hard to alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, where a bunch of William Gibson wannabes would write for each other as an audience, set within a "virtual bar" known as the Chatsubo.
Oooh this reminds me of hoe.nu or anada or http://textfiles.com/ ! Thanks!
+1 for zombo com. you can do anything on zombo com!
Remember the “back in my days” talk about some old stuff that you didn’t know or fully care about, or in some rare cases sparked some curiosity? Time is brutal and some of us have become that old dude. Scary. Cycle of life and evolution vs. nostalgia I guess.
I’m cuttently soldering a rs-232 to wifi modem (https://subethasoftware.com/2018/02/28/wire-up-your-own-rs-2...) to get my amigas back online. Pimiga is nice but too far from that 1:1 experience. Lots of telnet BBS out there.
I’m cuttently soldering a rs-232 to wifi modem (https://subethasoftware.com/2018/02/28/wire-up-your-own-rs-2...) to get my amigas back online. Pimiga is nice but too far from that 1:1 experience. Lots of telnet BBS out there.
That's a nice hack. Also, if you can power it from somewhere, you can use a bare ESP8266 module and put it in the serial enclosure to make it fully self-contained.
To a certain extent, Wikipedia has replaced a lot of the old Geocities sites for a certain subject.
The sort of nerdy/obsessive detail is still there, it's just kinda centralised on a fairly bland website. Your opinion on if this is an improvement or not depends on your affinity for animated GIFs I guess :)
The Geocities style stuff still exists, it is just the discovery is harder now as you will find the Wikipedia page first and then probably stop reading.
Things like webrings we're kinda cool for discoverability.
The sort of nerdy/obsessive detail is still there, it's just kinda centralised on a fairly bland website. Your opinion on if this is an improvement or not depends on your affinity for animated GIFs I guess :)
The Geocities style stuff still exists, it is just the discovery is harder now as you will find the Wikipedia page first and then probably stop reading.
Things like webrings we're kinda cool for discoverability.
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I believe the main reason the internet has turned out this way is because of flawed economic incentives. It's a winner take all game ruled mostly by American corporations. The individual blogger, Usenet contributor, IRC moderator, or open source software creator never got a piece of the cake. As the internet became mainstream, the incentives to engage in these kind of activities vanished.
I hate to be the guy to bring up crypto since it never ends well on HN, but I believe that if the internet had had a "payment layer" that rewards early users from the start it would've turned out very differently.
I hate to be the guy to bring up crypto since it never ends well on HN, but I believe that if the internet had had a "payment layer" that rewards early users from the start it would've turned out very differently.
We all miss the old internet. But what is to be done about it honestly?
What made the early internet great was a combination of a somewhat high bar of entry, with the right type of people climbing it. I'm not entirely sure how to recreate that.
Paraphrased from Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, in which he referred to books but I think he captures the sentiment universally:
It's not the old internet you miss, it's some of the things that were in the old internet. The same things could be in the internet today. It's not the old internet you're looking for. Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.
The old internet was only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget...The magic is only in what the internet says, how it stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
The old internet showed pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.
It's not the old internet you miss, it's some of the things that were in the old internet. The same things could be in the internet today. It's not the old internet you're looking for. Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.
The old internet was only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget...The magic is only in what the internet says, how it stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
The old internet showed pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.
It's just nostalgia
You could say that you 'miss the old _____' and apply it to almost everything in life and you will feel nostalgia for it, even to the point of looking for a way to get back to it and once you are trying it, you become meh and get back to the new thing, as you realize that it changed for good
This happens repetitively to me and my friends with tech/videogames, we are randomly chatting about how good it was some game (i.e) and we decide to try it again, some 20 minutes into it we are already pretending we are having fun when in reality we are bored/hating it
We might miss litle things, but it's quite hard to actually give a good reason to get back to something 'old' besides just nostalgia
You could say that you 'miss the old _____' and apply it to almost everything in life and you will feel nostalgia for it, even to the point of looking for a way to get back to it and once you are trying it, you become meh and get back to the new thing, as you realize that it changed for good
This happens repetitively to me and my friends with tech/videogames, we are randomly chatting about how good it was some game (i.e) and we decide to try it again, some 20 minutes into it we are already pretending we are having fun when in reality we are bored/hating it
We might miss litle things, but it's quite hard to actually give a good reason to get back to something 'old' besides just nostalgia
There's a search engine that indexes only traditional HTML based websites at: https://wiby.me
Is there a term for when people reminisce something and think those were the days at the same time think everything contemporary has gone to the dogs?
Like my uncle who is an old car enthusiast who thinks ambassador was the greatest car ever made in India yet if you are really objective about it was truly a bad car (wrt milege, comfort, safety, design, etc).
I feel the same reading the comments here. Really don't miss anything about the old internet, especially the era of VSNL which was a downtime provider with some internet in between. Everything is much more amazing now. Want to learn anything from programming to chemistry there are hundreds of freely "animated" tutorials. God how easy my studies would be with the wealth of easy instant knowledge we have now. Add to that the amount of crazy content created everyday for every niche, it is just amazing (you just need to know where to look).
E.g. I just found out about two channels recently called Captain disillusionment and Great scott on youtube and I've learned so much about two really different things, things which I didn't even know I was even interested in.
Like my uncle who is an old car enthusiast who thinks ambassador was the greatest car ever made in India yet if you are really objective about it was truly a bad car (wrt milege, comfort, safety, design, etc).
I feel the same reading the comments here. Really don't miss anything about the old internet, especially the era of VSNL which was a downtime provider with some internet in between. Everything is much more amazing now. Want to learn anything from programming to chemistry there are hundreds of freely "animated" tutorials. God how easy my studies would be with the wealth of easy instant knowledge we have now. Add to that the amount of crazy content created everyday for every niche, it is just amazing (you just need to know where to look).
E.g. I just found out about two channels recently called Captain disillusionment and Great scott on youtube and I've learned so much about two really different things, things which I didn't even know I was even interested in.
Old.
I kid, but it does seem a function of age. I've always seen a dividing line between people whose fondest memories are in the past, versus how much they look forward to making new memories.
I am right in the middle right now, and trying not to let it swing too far into curmudgeonness.
I kid, but it does seem a function of age. I've always seen a dividing line between people whose fondest memories are in the past, versus how much they look forward to making new memories.
I am right in the middle right now, and trying not to let it swing too far into curmudgeonness.
I'm in my late 40s and already feel that curmudgeon voice in my head. Ignoring it is harder and harder every year. New Internet sucks because it's too commercialized. New software sucks because it's all cloud based rather than native. New cars suck because you can't wrench them. New music sucks because everything sounds the same. New movies suck because they are made for people with a 5s attention span. Everything else sucks because it's more expensive than I remember. It feels truer and truer every year.
My newest car is late 2000's and that's also around when I stopped subscribing to new stuff and adding new things to my home media library. I look at my parents who are kind of culturally stuck in the 60s-70s, and then see myself getting more and more stuck in 90s-00s. Happens to us all I guess.
My newest car is late 2000's and that's also around when I stopped subscribing to new stuff and adding new things to my home media library. I look at my parents who are kind of culturally stuck in the 60s-70s, and then see myself getting more and more stuck in 90s-00s. Happens to us all I guess.
"Romantic", as a noun for a person who has an idealized view of reality, especially one that has passed.
There is a term, it’s called memberberries:
https://youtu.be/OJoQJKTc3nM
https://youtu.be/OJoQJKTc3nM
I think the big change, which the author hints to at the end, is one of scale. It's not that the cool kids joined the internet; it's that absolutely everyone did. The internet went from being a small town of people, to a city of people in the ~90s, to a world of people in ~2010s. The internet can no longer contain a single culture; it's too big. It will always from now on be acultural, since there are simply too many people using it for too many reasons.
As result, you now need micro-internets to have a culture. An example of one was YouTube near when it started. And you see the same issue repeated there as YouTube grew from a city to a world itself. There was a lot of controversy around the YouTube year in review videos YouTube released in recent years, because everyone felt misrepresented. That's because YouTube now contained too many cultures to represent in one video. It, like the internet, no longer contains a culture because there are too many people using it for too many reasons.
Let's look at cars as an analogy. When cars were first invented, the only people who owned/used cars were enthusiasts. There was a barrier of entry (technical knowledge and interest/passion) that selected a subset of the population to create a culture. As cars became easier to use, that "selective membrane" disappeared, so there was no longer a culture associated with car ownership. Similarly, as the internet has become easier to use for not technical, not passionate people (in part due to websites like Google, Facebook, etc.), there is no longer a selective barrier separating internet-users from everyone else, and hence there is not, and can never again be, an "internet culture".
As result, you now need micro-internets to have a culture. An example of one was YouTube near when it started. And you see the same issue repeated there as YouTube grew from a city to a world itself. There was a lot of controversy around the YouTube year in review videos YouTube released in recent years, because everyone felt misrepresented. That's because YouTube now contained too many cultures to represent in one video. It, like the internet, no longer contains a culture because there are too many people using it for too many reasons.
Let's look at cars as an analogy. When cars were first invented, the only people who owned/used cars were enthusiasts. There was a barrier of entry (technical knowledge and interest/passion) that selected a subset of the population to create a culture. As cars became easier to use, that "selective membrane" disappeared, so there was no longer a culture associated with car ownership. Similarly, as the internet has become easier to use for not technical, not passionate people (in part due to websites like Google, Facebook, etc.), there is no longer a selective barrier separating internet-users from everyone else, and hence there is not, and can never again be, an "internet culture".
I guess this is a good thread to ask - can you share your favorite, lesser known, hidden gem corners of the internet that are still around?
It’s now mostly “top 10 whatever-you-search for”, or pages that generate automated comparisons. People unconsciously craved for authentic experiences after supermarkets, and chains. And same goes for the Internet.
I blame Facebook and Apple. The old Internet was doing great right until the "Web 2.0" idea combined with everyone getting access to it. First app installed on their new iPhone? Facebook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS/iPadOS)#Of_All-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS/iPadOS)#Of_All-...
Hop over to
https://neocities.org/
https://neocities.org/
Sadly the current state of the internet was predictable.
gotta wonder why that got a -1
not only was it predictable i am not the only one who predicted it
I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it.
I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate. Every new friendship was thrilling, every new skill opened up infinite horizons, every nook and cranny felt like somewhere I could belong. But life moves on. I'm more than half-way through my career, perhaps not the one I was expecting. I didn't marry the girl I met on IRC. I don't have strong opinions about Radiohead anymore. I find people, however delightful and kooky they are, quite tiring having got to know 10,000 of them at this point.
I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to. And I'm pretty sure older generations frowning upon it all is part of the rush anyway.
I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate. Every new friendship was thrilling, every new skill opened up infinite horizons, every nook and cranny felt like somewhere I could belong. But life moves on. I'm more than half-way through my career, perhaps not the one I was expecting. I didn't marry the girl I met on IRC. I don't have strong opinions about Radiohead anymore. I find people, however delightful and kooky they are, quite tiring having got to know 10,000 of them at this point.
I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to. And I'm pretty sure older generations frowning upon it all is part of the rush anyway.
Firstly I strongly agree with everything you said and also just wanted to say this was a very eloquent description that i hope i remember a year from now.
I wanted to suggest a kind of alternative for discussion. I think there was something magical about the early web in that it offered a new way of interacting with the world that did not previously exist. It was difficult or impossible to find people that shared my interests (etc) before it, and usually that meant to just kept a large part of myself internal. I agree we have also changed, and there’s nostalgia involved, and that the internet does exist still the way we remember and even ion more ways we don’t appreciate but our kids will.
However i think there is also a bit of frustration that that initial burst of excitement did not continue to develop. When i read on HN and realize just how many people there are like me, or that there’s people that are also way too into disc golf, acoustic guitar, or any other semi niche activity i wonder why it is so hard to make more regular connections and interactions with them. Posting semi anonymously to HN with people i may never speak with again is a HUGE improvement over life before it, but it’s still a very limited experience. With facebook and reddit we have imho suboptimal platforms that have captured much of this magic and perhaps stunned their growth. I don’t mean to be pessimistic and the current internet is absolutely improved on uncountable ways from the one we remember. I suspect a bit of the frustration is some people’s inner belief that we could have something even better and somehow we are stuck.
I wanted to suggest a kind of alternative for discussion. I think there was something magical about the early web in that it offered a new way of interacting with the world that did not previously exist. It was difficult or impossible to find people that shared my interests (etc) before it, and usually that meant to just kept a large part of myself internal. I agree we have also changed, and there’s nostalgia involved, and that the internet does exist still the way we remember and even ion more ways we don’t appreciate but our kids will.
However i think there is also a bit of frustration that that initial burst of excitement did not continue to develop. When i read on HN and realize just how many people there are like me, or that there’s people that are also way too into disc golf, acoustic guitar, or any other semi niche activity i wonder why it is so hard to make more regular connections and interactions with them. Posting semi anonymously to HN with people i may never speak with again is a HUGE improvement over life before it, but it’s still a very limited experience. With facebook and reddit we have imho suboptimal platforms that have captured much of this magic and perhaps stunned their growth. I don’t mean to be pessimistic and the current internet is absolutely improved on uncountable ways from the one we remember. I suspect a bit of the frustration is some people’s inner belief that we could have something even better and somehow we are stuck.
> When i read on HN and realize just how many people there are like me, or that there’s people that are also way too into disc golf, acoustic guitar, or any other semi niche activity i wonder why it is so hard to make more regular connections and interactions with them.
That hit me in the truth. I feel like that a lot: if I know these people exist, and care deeply about the things I care about, why am I not building lasting friendships with them?
And then I realize that it's not a flaw in the medium but in myself. I lack the confidence and determination to go form those connections. I could write to any of those people and say, hey, I'm coming through Cincinnati, and would love to see your project/talk with you over coffee about your research/drink beer and yell about liberty. But I don't, and that isn't the internet's fault.
That hit me in the truth. I feel like that a lot: if I know these people exist, and care deeply about the things I care about, why am I not building lasting friendships with them?
And then I realize that it's not a flaw in the medium but in myself. I lack the confidence and determination to go form those connections. I could write to any of those people and say, hey, I'm coming through Cincinnati, and would love to see your project/talk with you over coffee about your research/drink beer and yell about liberty. But I don't, and that isn't the internet's fault.
I used to do it a lot, it was great. So many people I’ve met IRL just as I had a perfect job where I was always going to random places.
The first time it was weird, I was going to meet this girl on irc about some forum drama, and it felt even more silly telling customs. But we had a fun night and I realised that people have weird fringe interests and that there is literally dozens of us.
It’s never too late
The first time it was weird, I was going to meet this girl on irc about some forum drama, and it felt even more silly telling customs. But we had a fun night and I realised that people have weird fringe interests and that there is literally dozens of us.
It’s never too late
I’ve found shared interest has actually been a very bad predictor of whether I’ll enjoy spending more than five minutes around somebody IRL.
isn't the internet's fault
An argument could be made on a tinder-ization of intellectual discussion. That is, it’s so easy to move on to the next stimulating discussion online that you are less willing to invest in chancy RL interaction.
isn't the internet's fault
An argument could be made on a tinder-ization of intellectual discussion. That is, it’s so easy to move on to the next stimulating discussion online that you are less willing to invest in chancy RL interaction.
That is probably true. Maybe "lasting friendships" was not exactly what I meant, anyway; maybe "sustained interactions" would be more like it. I think about the way people in the past, like the Wright brothers with Octave Chanute, Jefferson and Madison, Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann, corresponded over decades, bouncing ideas off each other and honing their arguments, encouraging each other and keeping each other grounded in reality, and I don't know if that happens to the same extent today, even though it would be far easier and faster. Maybe I'm generalizing from outstanding examples in the past, and it never happened on a broad scale, but I'm inclined to think it did, and we're the weaker for not carrying it on.
Pretty sure Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are exchanging ideas in the same way Jefferson and Madison did. These people all have something in common, though, even across time -- they were all influential, successful, well known people.
I don't think the average person at the end of the 18th century was having significant, long lasting, publishable correspondences.
It's interesting to me that you expect to have the kinds of experiences Jefferson and Madison did, instead of those the local butcher did. Don't know who you are, but maybe Nassim Taleb just hasn't gotten around to responding to your letters yet? :)
As for me, just like the local butcher of the 18th century, i mostly interact with my family and friends, have a few hobbies no one else really cares about, etc.
I don't think the average person at the end of the 18th century was having significant, long lasting, publishable correspondences.
It's interesting to me that you expect to have the kinds of experiences Jefferson and Madison did, instead of those the local butcher did. Don't know who you are, but maybe Nassim Taleb just hasn't gotten around to responding to your letters yet? :)
As for me, just like the local butcher of the 18th century, i mostly interact with my family and friends, have a few hobbies no one else really cares about, etc.
> why am I not building lasting friendships with them?
I remember arguing with a high school teacher that 50 years in the future countries as we knew them would no longer exist. People would cluster online based on shared interests and goals.
That was 30 years ago. I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest it ain't happening the way I thought it would.
I remember arguing with a high school teacher that 50 years in the future countries as we knew them would no longer exist. People would cluster online based on shared interests and goals.
That was 30 years ago. I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest it ain't happening the way I thought it would.
Maybe not, but the people are still clustering, and reality has a crack: different groups of people have disjoint mutually inconsistent but internally consistent narratives about events in the world, generated and sustained by their online clustering.
I am much the same way....but it would also make my day if someone reached out like that. Go for it! (I should too!)
> why am I not building lasting friendships with them?
I find the biggest problem is the lack of time to dedicate to it. Specifically, in my order of priorities it comes in behind a lot of other more important things that I don't have enough time for as it is.
I've noticed this has become a far more important equation with age, how I allocate time. When I was ~16-24 years old I burned up enormous amounts of time doing stupid shit. Time seemed inexpensive, plentiful, unlimited. And of course typically when you're young you have fewer responsibilities anyway. Now I'm far more certain about what matters and what doesn't in terms of ordering how I burn up what remains of my lifetime. As you get older you learn all of this, you learn what matters for yourself, and properly you allocate time accordingly.
Sometimes I think I'm getting grumpier as I get older, but it's not actually that at all. I dislike doing things I don't want to do more as I've gotten older, because I've acquired a far greater understanding of the value of time. How fast it seems to zip by, how scarce it is, how little of it we get relatively speaking. Stupid things that rob me of time, are a far greater annoyance with that understanding, that appreciation. When you're young, you can think you understand the value of your time; when you're older, you feel it in your bones, you walk around wearing the expense of time across decades.
Watching time vanish when you're 18, you don't think much about it. Time is infinite as far as you're concerned. Watching time vanish when you're 40 gets a lot more concerning. You become very aware of how quickly a decade seems to slip by. Blink, a decade goes by, you're 50; blink, blink, you're dead.
Your body also starts to deteriorate in accelerating fashion after anywhere from your mid 30s to your mid 40s, depending. You begin to notice that at 40 as well. Your memory isn't as sharp as it was at 20. You don't recover from damage as quickly. The physical aspect just reminds you that much more of the clock and how you're allocating your time. You can hear the little rusting springs in your telomeres as they keep getting shorter.
Chat rooms don't matter so much when you're 40 and you've spent a collective year or two of your earlier life hanging out in chat rooms (webchat broadcasting system, IRC et al.), bullshitting with people. You've got N years remaining to do things that really, really matter to you, and then you're going to die. And you're going to be dead forever. More chat rooms, to chat about things that you've chatted about 497 times in the past? No. Fuck no. On to the next, something more valuable, something more interesting, a new experience perhaps.
I too mentally miss the good 'ol days of being 18 and hanging out on IRC chatting about things that seemed super fascinating to me at the time. It's one part fantasy, one part longing to be young again, to feel young again (it's the reversal of the experience dulling concept of repetition, that people long for; every time you do something, it fades, exactly the same way many drugs do; repetitive experiences fade in the same way; we long toward the past in part due to that sensation of everything being vigorously new, exactly as drug addicts always miss the early addiction when the high was far better, before repetition eroded it).
We long for the early Internet / Web, because we've done so much Internet'ing, and every time you do it, it fades. It's not the old Internet that people actually miss. The problem is the experience repetition dulling everything, and that can't be rolled back; people miss the glorious experience of a new big world to explore online for the first time, that excitement. You can tell that that's the case, because people half my age experience the same sensation of missing what to them is the 'old' Internet (eg when they first started hanging out on Minecraft socializing online, or similar). Same concept, same longing, different Interwebs, same dulling over time due to experience repetition. Young people today will be longing for the exciting early days of TikTok, when they were doing dumb dance clones and it was stupid and silly and they'll miss the hell out of it, because it was all so new to them; like I might have missed hanging out on ICQ in its early days. And when those young people are 40, they'll still be able to go online and create short videos of themselves doing dumb dances, but they won't really want to, the repetitive experience effect will have dulled it all, it will no longer be new and exciting, and that can't be fixed, the life experience queue moves in one direction.
If you're fortunate, you get to decide what the meaning, the purpose, of your life is. The purpose of my life will always be to seek out new experiences, pursue new things that I find interesting. And that means not burning much more of my life in chat rooms, I already did plenty of that.
I find the biggest problem is the lack of time to dedicate to it. Specifically, in my order of priorities it comes in behind a lot of other more important things that I don't have enough time for as it is.
I've noticed this has become a far more important equation with age, how I allocate time. When I was ~16-24 years old I burned up enormous amounts of time doing stupid shit. Time seemed inexpensive, plentiful, unlimited. And of course typically when you're young you have fewer responsibilities anyway. Now I'm far more certain about what matters and what doesn't in terms of ordering how I burn up what remains of my lifetime. As you get older you learn all of this, you learn what matters for yourself, and properly you allocate time accordingly.
Sometimes I think I'm getting grumpier as I get older, but it's not actually that at all. I dislike doing things I don't want to do more as I've gotten older, because I've acquired a far greater understanding of the value of time. How fast it seems to zip by, how scarce it is, how little of it we get relatively speaking. Stupid things that rob me of time, are a far greater annoyance with that understanding, that appreciation. When you're young, you can think you understand the value of your time; when you're older, you feel it in your bones, you walk around wearing the expense of time across decades.
Watching time vanish when you're 18, you don't think much about it. Time is infinite as far as you're concerned. Watching time vanish when you're 40 gets a lot more concerning. You become very aware of how quickly a decade seems to slip by. Blink, a decade goes by, you're 50; blink, blink, you're dead.
Your body also starts to deteriorate in accelerating fashion after anywhere from your mid 30s to your mid 40s, depending. You begin to notice that at 40 as well. Your memory isn't as sharp as it was at 20. You don't recover from damage as quickly. The physical aspect just reminds you that much more of the clock and how you're allocating your time. You can hear the little rusting springs in your telomeres as they keep getting shorter.
Chat rooms don't matter so much when you're 40 and you've spent a collective year or two of your earlier life hanging out in chat rooms (webchat broadcasting system, IRC et al.), bullshitting with people. You've got N years remaining to do things that really, really matter to you, and then you're going to die. And you're going to be dead forever. More chat rooms, to chat about things that you've chatted about 497 times in the past? No. Fuck no. On to the next, something more valuable, something more interesting, a new experience perhaps.
I too mentally miss the good 'ol days of being 18 and hanging out on IRC chatting about things that seemed super fascinating to me at the time. It's one part fantasy, one part longing to be young again, to feel young again (it's the reversal of the experience dulling concept of repetition, that people long for; every time you do something, it fades, exactly the same way many drugs do; repetitive experiences fade in the same way; we long toward the past in part due to that sensation of everything being vigorously new, exactly as drug addicts always miss the early addiction when the high was far better, before repetition eroded it).
We long for the early Internet / Web, because we've done so much Internet'ing, and every time you do it, it fades. It's not the old Internet that people actually miss. The problem is the experience repetition dulling everything, and that can't be rolled back; people miss the glorious experience of a new big world to explore online for the first time, that excitement. You can tell that that's the case, because people half my age experience the same sensation of missing what to them is the 'old' Internet (eg when they first started hanging out on Minecraft socializing online, or similar). Same concept, same longing, different Interwebs, same dulling over time due to experience repetition. Young people today will be longing for the exciting early days of TikTok, when they were doing dumb dance clones and it was stupid and silly and they'll miss the hell out of it, because it was all so new to them; like I might have missed hanging out on ICQ in its early days. And when those young people are 40, they'll still be able to go online and create short videos of themselves doing dumb dances, but they won't really want to, the repetitive experience effect will have dulled it all, it will no longer be new and exciting, and that can't be fixed, the life experience queue moves in one direction.
If you're fortunate, you get to decide what the meaning, the purpose, of your life is. The purpose of my life will always be to seek out new experiences, pursue new things that I find interesting. And that means not burning much more of my life in chat rooms, I already did plenty of that.
It's never too late. Read about solarpunk and low-power computers/devices. The old is becoming new again (as new Pubnix communities are rising again, among the gopherspace), plus non energy-wasting science:
http://phroxy.z3bra.org/bitreich.org:70/0/con/2020/rec/energ...
http://phroxy.z3bra.org/bitreich.org:70/0/con/2020/rec/energ...
What a great read. This is why I read HN. Thanks! (I am 50+ and agree with everything you say).
“The Last Surprise” by Richard Brautigan
The last surprise is when you come
gradually to realize that nothing
surprises you any more.
The last surprise is when you come
gradually to realize that nothing
surprises you any more.
You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…
And that, I think, was the handle— that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
And that, I think, was the handle— that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas by Hunter S Thompson, for anyone not familiar with the quote
> I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to.
Yup. "Today's IRC" — the place for kids to idle around and make friends — isn't Discord; it's Minecraft. (Not that weird; Minecraft is a low-stakes graphical MUD, and MUDs have always served double-purpose as chatrooms.)
And "today's GeoCities pages" — shrines for an individual's personality, beliefs, and curated tastes — are now sprawling multimedia affairs split between a Twitch/YouTube streaming channel for community-engaged events; an Instagram/Snapchat for live stories/high-engagement lifelogging; a Discord/subreddit for async community engagement; and a Wordpress/Tumblr site with a comissioned custom theme to hold evergreen reference stuff, longform supplemental materials for videos, etc. (And maybe a Squarespace/Shopify/Redbubble store, too, if there's anything to sell; or a Bandcamp/Patreon, if the published online material is itself the thing to be sold.)
(Tangent: the number of different pieces of "heavy infrastructure" Internet plumbing required to make the modern approach to a "shrine of personality" work, should be a hint as to why people don't just make plain websites any more. They want to interact more with their audiences/fans/communities, and with higher fidelity, than a plain website / comments section / forum can offer; even more than a heavily-built-up Sandstorm.io instance could offer.)
Yup. "Today's IRC" — the place for kids to idle around and make friends — isn't Discord; it's Minecraft. (Not that weird; Minecraft is a low-stakes graphical MUD, and MUDs have always served double-purpose as chatrooms.)
And "today's GeoCities pages" — shrines for an individual's personality, beliefs, and curated tastes — are now sprawling multimedia affairs split between a Twitch/YouTube streaming channel for community-engaged events; an Instagram/Snapchat for live stories/high-engagement lifelogging; a Discord/subreddit for async community engagement; and a Wordpress/Tumblr site with a comissioned custom theme to hold evergreen reference stuff, longform supplemental materials for videos, etc. (And maybe a Squarespace/Shopify/Redbubble store, too, if there's anything to sell; or a Bandcamp/Patreon, if the published online material is itself the thing to be sold.)
(Tangent: the number of different pieces of "heavy infrastructure" Internet plumbing required to make the modern approach to a "shrine of personality" work, should be a hint as to why people don't just make plain websites any more. They want to interact more with their audiences/fans/communities, and with higher fidelity, than a plain website / comments section / forum can offer; even more than a heavily-built-up Sandstorm.io instance could offer.)
Roblox also, maybe moreso - https://felipepepe.medium.com/roblox-is-a-mud-the-history-of...
Roblox is indeed a MUD, but I would argue that Roblox contains too much varied niche "game content" to meet the needs of kids looking for a platform for mediated socialization. Not enough of the people who are playing Roblox are playing it just to socialize. You get more of the MMO experience (or, I guess, the "social multi-game lobby" experience, ala NeoPets), where no strangers want to stop and talk OOC; they only want to engage with the game elements themselves or with your character via RP. Everyone's there to see or do some novel-to-them thing. Nobody's treating it like an old, familiar place to hang out.
Minecraft doesn't have that same constant flow of novel game-elements to match the number of hours people invest into it; and so most play in Minecraft is a lower-key "post-game" kind of engagement with evergreen mechanics — the same "maintenance" kind of play that you see in e.g. Animal Crossing, together with the "practice" kind of play you see in the speedrun community. That kind of gameplay is extremely amenable to being interrupted for socialization. It's like gardening in a community garden.
(Analogy for socially-mediated entertainment for the pre-MMO-era kids: it's like getting together with your friends with a bunch of individual LEGO sets you got for your birthday to construct them all; vs. getting together with your friends to play with the same big old tub of random assorted LEGO bricks you've had for years. Building the sets favors engagement with the novelty of the work, over social engagement with your friends. Building from a tub almost forces social engagement with your friends, as that's the mechanism through which any consensus arises as to what you're going to be spending your time doing.)
Minecraft doesn't have that same constant flow of novel game-elements to match the number of hours people invest into it; and so most play in Minecraft is a lower-key "post-game" kind of engagement with evergreen mechanics — the same "maintenance" kind of play that you see in e.g. Animal Crossing, together with the "practice" kind of play you see in the speedrun community. That kind of gameplay is extremely amenable to being interrupted for socialization. It's like gardening in a community garden.
(Analogy for socially-mediated entertainment for the pre-MMO-era kids: it's like getting together with your friends with a bunch of individual LEGO sets you got for your birthday to construct them all; vs. getting together with your friends to play with the same big old tub of random assorted LEGO bricks you've had for years. Building the sets favors engagement with the novelty of the work, over social engagement with your friends. Building from a tub almost forces social engagement with your friends, as that's the mechanism through which any consensus arises as to what you're going to be spending your time doing.)
What is a MUD?
Short for Multi User Dungeon, it's a world you can explore and interact with alongside other users. They were generally text-based (like Zork), though I believe there were some roguelikes and graphical MUDs too.
Many multiplayer online games played today have a heritage that comes from the MUDs. Minecraft is certainly one of them and fills a similar niche, though to categorize it as a MUD seems strange, unless any multiplayer virtual world with an ROG-like element is also a MUD.
Many multiplayer online games played today have a heritage that comes from the MUDs. Minecraft is certainly one of them and fills a similar niche, though to categorize it as a MUD seems strange, unless any multiplayer virtual world with an ROG-like element is also a MUD.
The link in the grandparent comment is (essentially) a really good and extensive definition of the term. And then also a history of MUDs and what they've since evolved into.
You used to be able to find high quality information, by people who loved the topic. Now the top search results are SEO commercial sites; the old sites are gone or filled with ads; and the new sites... there aren't any new sites like this. Maybe stackexchanges are the closest (recently sold).
The landscape has changed, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t high quality content available anymore. For example, a lot of content is on YouTube. That may or may not be someone’s preferred medium to consume, but there’s definitely good and niche content.
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I think a lot of expert content is now mostly video content. A lot of the time I'm finding I'm just typing things into youtube rather than google if I'm after some kind of expertise.
The information tends to be of lower quality (despite the love). For example, I wanted to know why left and right bicycle pedals are threaded differently. Three youtubers gave reasons that I could tell didn't quite make sense. But Sheldon Brown's website explained it ("precession"). https://www.sheldonbrown.com/pedals.html
Looks like he added this detail later - it's easier to increase the quality of information like this with text, than with video.
Some people add VO later (jarring); Khan Academy re-does videos (breaking references between, confusingly). Most youtubers don't do either.
Videos often have paid product placement, unacknowledged. It's very effective promotion, because it feels grass-roots.
Looks like he added this detail later - it's easier to increase the quality of information like this with text, than with video.
Some people add VO later (jarring); Khan Academy re-does videos (breaking references between, confusingly). Most youtubers don't do either.
Videos often have paid product placement, unacknowledged. It's very effective promotion, because it feels grass-roots.
It’s weird that YouTube and Google is now synonymous with “the internet.”
People still make good websites. You just can't find them with Google (unless you're writing keywords to search for the exact site).
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Search engines were pretty crappy when I first used the internet in the 90s. I’m not even sure that we had search engines, actually. Anyway, crappy search results were par for the course. The interesting content required some work to find. I think it’s still the same. There’s more content than ever, and a huge % is crap. Maybe that % is larger today then when we started, but there’s still a trove of good stuff out there. Way more, in absolute terms, than when I started.
I’m thankful for the internet and the career it’s given me. There’s plenty of room for improvement, but all the same, it’s pretty great.
I’m thankful for the internet and the career it’s given me. There’s plenty of room for improvement, but all the same, it’s pretty great.
Signal-to-noise is a serious problem - hence Google's riches. BTW My reference era is post-search, pre-SEO.
> Way more, in absolute terms, than when I started.
Is it? How can you tell? I would expect there to be more... but also it's less encouraging to do all that work, and people not be able to find it...
> Way more, in absolute terms, than when I started.
Is it? How can you tell? I would expect there to be more... but also it's less encouraging to do all that work, and people not be able to find it...
I've seen this sentiment more and more over the last few years here (and on Reddit). Can you give an example of some high quality content that loses out to SEO clickbait at the moment? As far as I can see, a "correctly" crafted query (read: the querymy parents would ask, not the query I would ask) will lead me to a well thought out response on Google 9/10 times, which is judtas often as it did 10 years ago.
OP here, a recent one I was thinking of (I don't recall the exact search I used) "bicycle pedals threading" https://www.google.com/search?q=bicycle+pedals+threading
The top results (including youtubers) gave the right answer, but the wrong reasons. You have to get down to the 5th (Sheldon Brown's) for expertise (it's "precession"). Sheldon passed away a few years ago, and now his site has ads - a limitation of personal websites.
> a "correctly" crafted query (read: the querymy parents would ask, not the query I would ask)
Can you elaborate please; an example?
Maybe you mean a grammatically correct sentence, which good for finding answers on forums, but I'm more interested in an expert's whole site.
Note that correct terminology is half the battle for searching, perhaps much more!
The top results (including youtubers) gave the right answer, but the wrong reasons. You have to get down to the 5th (Sheldon Brown's) for expertise (it's "precession"). Sheldon passed away a few years ago, and now his site has ads - a limitation of personal websites.
> a "correctly" crafted query (read: the querymy parents would ask, not the query I would ask)
Can you elaborate please; an example?
Maybe you mean a grammatically correct sentence, which good for finding answers on forums, but I'm more interested in an expert's whole site.
Note that correct terminology is half the battle for searching, perhaps much more!
I have some first-hand experience with this problem. I'll give a specific example:
In 2005 I published one of the Internet's earliest articles on the "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon"[1], also known as Frequency Illusion. In the intervening 15 years, thousands of sites have linked to my article, so you would think it would rank really well.
Instead, my article is barely on the first page of Google's search results. Above mine are more recent copycat articles, few of them containing any meaningful details beyond what I included in mine. Some of them are so similar that they are clearly just lazy rewrites of my article (similar jokes, etc). They appear to be ranked higher than mine solely due to being more recent, and presumably some SEO shenanigans.
This is not the only example--far from it--but it's one of the clearest.
[1]: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomeno...
In 2005 I published one of the Internet's earliest articles on the "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon"[1], also known as Frequency Illusion. In the intervening 15 years, thousands of sites have linked to my article, so you would think it would rank really well.
Instead, my article is barely on the first page of Google's search results. Above mine are more recent copycat articles, few of them containing any meaningful details beyond what I included in mine. Some of them are so similar that they are clearly just lazy rewrites of my article (similar jokes, etc). They appear to be ranked higher than mine solely due to being more recent, and presumably some SEO shenanigans.
This is not the only example--far from it--but it's one of the clearest.
[1]: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomeno...
Thanks for replying! There's clearly some "google-washing" going on here, as searching for "baader meinhof phenomenon" on google places the Damn interesting article 5th in my search results. The other results above that may not have huge differences, but they do offer at least the same information on "more reputable" (read: names that I recognize in 2021) websites which would likely Garner a click from Mr..
Wikipedia probably covers a lot of this ground now, though it's a reference and of varying quality and approach.
As far as I'm concerned it has nothing to do with joy. The internet enables a lot of things that can improve human knowledge and prowess. It also enables the opposite. This has always been the case, but I think the hindrances are progressing faster than the helpers.
Here are a couple of the best things that I think the internet provides, both of which have been around basically since its inception:
1. Instant communication ie. email and instant messaging
2. Free sharing of knowledge ie. scholarly articles, and yes, Wikipedia
If you have an Android phone and have ever used the Google news feed (from AMP), then you've seen what I think are the worst parts of the internet today. As far as I know it's grown more and more prolific over the years:
I'm talking about content that's created solely as a vehicle for advertising. It's either speculation (which may provide some value) or simply "reporting" on information that has changed hands many times. In other words, while the original source might be available on the internet, you will never find it because it's been re-reported by ten thousand other sources that all want a slice of the ad revenue.
Proliferation of misinformation, both accidental and intentional, goes along with the above, though there are other opportunities for this as well (like social media).
There are countless pros and cons that I don't even know about of come in contact with, but I would agree on the whole with the idea that the internet is a poorer tool for good than it was, at least 15 years ago, and probably 20 as well.
Here are a couple of the best things that I think the internet provides, both of which have been around basically since its inception:
1. Instant communication ie. email and instant messaging
2. Free sharing of knowledge ie. scholarly articles, and yes, Wikipedia
If you have an Android phone and have ever used the Google news feed (from AMP), then you've seen what I think are the worst parts of the internet today. As far as I know it's grown more and more prolific over the years:
I'm talking about content that's created solely as a vehicle for advertising. It's either speculation (which may provide some value) or simply "reporting" on information that has changed hands many times. In other words, while the original source might be available on the internet, you will never find it because it's been re-reported by ten thousand other sources that all want a slice of the ad revenue.
Proliferation of misinformation, both accidental and intentional, goes along with the above, though there are other opportunities for this as well (like social media).
There are countless pros and cons that I don't even know about of come in contact with, but I would agree on the whole with the idea that the internet is a poorer tool for good than it was, at least 15 years ago, and probably 20 as well.
That free sharing of knowledge more or less destroyed the music industry, and commoditized many other things too. It’s extremely hard to make a living wage at many things now. We have a fake gig economy to replace middle class jobs
I'd rather have it harder to make a living in the music industry if it means the free sharing of music (and thus I have access to all music from all of history). We have more musicians in absolute terms than every before anyway.
False. We have more musician gig workers, but the lack of any music movement in the last 20 years is because musicians don’t have an opportunity to develop their own styles while earning a modest living. We have an army of part timers and a few at the top. Meanwhile, you are just enjoying the freebies
I enjoy tons of music from the past 20 years. One of my favorites, Nikolai Kapustin, died last year. I don't know in what sense you think music has stopped happening but you're very much incorrect about that.
Why do you say the music industry is destroyed? With streaming, music industry revenues are almost back to their late '90s peak, and the diversity of options today is incredible.
Music used to earn a lot of people a middle class income. Streaming only really benefits the top of the charts. Everyone else works part time and music innovation stagnates since risk is so much higher for anyone who actually wants to earn anything. App stores do this too, commoditizing apps - only 0.01% of apps make back their dev cost. So what if a handful at the top make a dump truck of money? Nobody but risk averse executives can afford to spend years at a time experimenting
https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/9999-in-10000-mobile-apps-...
https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/9999-in-10000-mobile-apps-...
> I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it.
But where? The venues where that happened are gone. You can have a public discussion with 100.000 eyeballs, but not the kind of more intimate, local environment that were earlier boards and chat rooms.
But where? The venues where that happened are gone. You can have a public discussion with 100.000 eyeballs, but not the kind of more intimate, local environment that were earlier boards and chat rooms.
BBS forums are still in abundance. Many of them seem relatively clunkier now and are niche, but they exist. And they all end up starting Discord servers.
Discord servers seem to be the place where it is happening right now. There are still some community forums, and maybe Facebook groups. On a more public scale, there are some well managed subreddits.
Edit: Plus the oldschool, geeky stuff like BBS, usenet, mailing lists, IRC etc... that still exist but are usually limited to technical people and subjects.
Edit: Plus the oldschool, geeky stuff like BBS, usenet, mailing lists, IRC etc... that still exist but are usually limited to technical people and subjects.
Hey, I'm currently building a website that I think would fit well with what you're looking for. It's called Reason, and it's designed to help find small (3-10 users per chat or so) group chats about the topics you're interested in. I started working on this specifically because the casual, small places to meet like-minded people on the internet have kind of disappeared.
http://www.reason.so/
Make sure you post it to Show HM when it's ready, I would definitely check it out.
>I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and [...]
I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate.
Thank you for writing that. I also expressed the same sentiment a few months ago about getting older distorting my perception of tech's evolution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897792
Thank you for writing that. I also expressed the same sentiment a few months ago about getting older distorting my perception of tech's evolution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897792
Time scales too. Remember how long the death March to Chicago was? It was 1993 and NT had finally shipped, Linux was slightly useful and this was OS/2’s era to shine as Microsoft had stagnated with no consumer releases of any meaning post Windows 3.1. 1993 finished, and 1994 came and went as well. IBM pushed out Warp as this was their chance to arrive early, and then it was late summer of 1995 that Chicago finally shipped.
Now look at the window of the MacPro 2013 to 2020. And it felt like nothing. How long has Windows 10 been a thing? Feels like only yesterday we finally moved all production off of Linux 2.6
Time really telescopes
Now look at the window of the MacPro 2013 to 2020. And it felt like nothing. How long has Windows 10 been a thing? Feels like only yesterday we finally moved all production off of Linux 2.6
Time really telescopes
I can't tell if this is a "getting older" thing or a "I got used to marking time with exponential growth in tech and tech-adjacent culture" thing.
2000 to 2010 felt like a huge jump, and it was -- you had the explosion of broadband, enabling huge MMOs like WoW which was a life-absorbing phenomenon for me, and computers and GPUs went from scrawny, green-board things to beefy, pro-sumer luxuries blazing with LEDs. Fat client IMs and social media redefined how we connected to people online.
Compared to that, 2010 to 2020 feels like an inertial flatline. We dropped Skype for Discord, which is the best IM since WLM (yet still inferior in many ways lol), GPUs have gotten beefier since they're purely parallel compute machines (and yet nearly 70% of people still have a 1080p display according to the Steam Hardware Survey[0], a resolution that was readily available on LCDs 13 years ago!). Motherboards have more LEDs than before, and look more and more like exotic alien space cities, which is awesome. SSDs have gotten... slightly bigger. Ray tracing and VR, which seem like the only major innovations of the decade, are both kind of here, but only kind of, and not enough for a WoW equivalent or genre to capitalize on. The games we play or their graphics haven't changed significantly. I started using Linux and learned exponentially more about tech than in the prior decade, and I now play those samey games on an open source OS, and that's cool. :p Crypto came, and a lot of security lessons have been learned in the tech world. That's nice. But it feels like bacteria filling out the blank spots of a petri dish that's stopped expanding.
0: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
2000 to 2010 felt like a huge jump, and it was -- you had the explosion of broadband, enabling huge MMOs like WoW which was a life-absorbing phenomenon for me, and computers and GPUs went from scrawny, green-board things to beefy, pro-sumer luxuries blazing with LEDs. Fat client IMs and social media redefined how we connected to people online.
Compared to that, 2010 to 2020 feels like an inertial flatline. We dropped Skype for Discord, which is the best IM since WLM (yet still inferior in many ways lol), GPUs have gotten beefier since they're purely parallel compute machines (and yet nearly 70% of people still have a 1080p display according to the Steam Hardware Survey[0], a resolution that was readily available on LCDs 13 years ago!). Motherboards have more LEDs than before, and look more and more like exotic alien space cities, which is awesome. SSDs have gotten... slightly bigger. Ray tracing and VR, which seem like the only major innovations of the decade, are both kind of here, but only kind of, and not enough for a WoW equivalent or genre to capitalize on. The games we play or their graphics haven't changed significantly. I started using Linux and learned exponentially more about tech than in the prior decade, and I now play those samey games on an open source OS, and that's cool. :p Crypto came, and a lot of security lessons have been learned in the tech world. That's nice. But it feels like bacteria filling out the blank spots of a petri dish that's stopped expanding.
0: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
Telecom monopolies are to blame for the flat line in tech from 2010-2020.
Computer advances follow network bandwidth increases. Network upload bandwidth has been stagnant for almost 20 years.
Give everybody symmetrical gigabit and watch the sparks fly.
Computer advances follow network bandwidth increases. Network upload bandwidth has been stagnant for almost 20 years.
Give everybody symmetrical gigabit and watch the sparks fly.
A 2010 computer is still fine for most anything today. In 2010 a 2000 computer was not sufficient. The advances have been in connectedness, mobile phones, smart home stuff etc.
I can vouch for this, still using the computer I built in 2009 (Windows XP at the time, now Windows 10). Her days are drawing to a close, but she's perfectly functional. The AMD Phenom 2 was a criminally underrated chip.
Yeah.. this younger generation you speak of will at some point lament about Discord or Snap with the same nostalgia. Maybe.
They already do so for Vine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uxJd7aoFM4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uxJd7aoFM4
Won’t be long. Discord is in talks to be sold. I can see it becoming as scummy and invasive as LinkedIn or Facebook depending who buys it
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-talks-buy-discord-m...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-talks-buy-discord-m...
I completely agree. A lot of times I'll see people dig up old stuff from Something Awful forums or whatever and... honestly it's not as funny as I remember. It's just as lame and stupid as what people are passing around today.
Have you ever lurked wallstreetbets? It seems (or seemed, before the Gamestop stuff brought many new people in) like a sorting function for the now-older SA/4chan demographic, and they're the most consistently hilarious people I've ever seen on the Internet (still toxic af, of course, but less-so than in the old days, like tastefully mellowed with age).
Not for me but I probably would have liked it when I was younger.
I don't think I've seen a more succinct display of this as in The Daily Show, when Jon Stewart was lambasting Sean Hannity.
"You know why America was so great to you when you were 12? BECAUSE YOU WERE 12!"
"You know why America was so great to you when you were 12? BECAUSE YOU WERE 12!"
Almost every blog I used to read 10–15 years ago has transitioned from a hobby to a form of content marketing or self-branding social media get-followers game. In that sense, a lot of the magic has disappeared. Maybe new people have taken their place and I just haven’t found them yet
The thing that's even easier to forget is that back then, a much smaller fraction of people were online and thus we had a very special self-selected group. Going on the Internet basically guaranteed you'd find someone interesting. Then the commercialization happened (Al Gore remember?), AOL hordes came in, trolls came in, jocks figured out how to use it, and it went down the toilet from there.
It's always September somewhere on the Internet ...
To me the main change that internet got is this: the old internet was like a parallel universe, you picked up a random username, and no matter who you were in real life, you could socialize and share interest with other people without any prejudice.
This is especially important for introverts like me, that if they have to put their real name on something, for example a comment on Facebook, they think about it 100 times, while being anonymous they are more inclined to share things with strangers. You don't have to worry about what people thinks about you, or about prejudice that people have based on your age, your social life, your job, because nobody knows who you really are. The only thing that matters is your contribute to the discussion. I still remember discussions that I made with people that I only recognize by a username, and they were so interesting, much more interesting than everything you can find on Facebook.
In the old days you were told to never share your real name on the internet, to always pick up usernames, nowadays companies forces you to register with your real identity, Facebook can even ask you to provide a photo of your ID, and YouTube won't let you watch content for over 18 if you don't identity yourself. There are even countries that would like to force internet companies to ask for the identity of the people!
In the old days internet was a place where an introvert that didn't know how to relate with other people in real life could have escaped to share it's interests with other people freely and without any anxiety. Nowadays it's no longer like this, unfortunately. Forums are desert, nobody still uses IRC, and everything is a Facebook group or something like that on a social media platform where I don't want to sign up. Even websites in the old days had comment sections, nowadays you want to comment? Do it on Facebook. There are only a few exception of course (one of this is this website, that I like a lot for exactly this reason).
The only website that still maintains the old web philosophy, and the only social media that I use, is Reddit, that still doesn't require you to register with your real identity. But I fear that it will not last for long...
Also in the old internet there was a spirit of collaboration and community that I never saw in the modern web. You were a newbie in something, for example using Linux? Sign up to a forum, or ask on IRC, and people would have helped you, helped solving the problem, for free, only for the gratification on doing so. And most of the time even the person helping you to solve the problem learned something new in the process! It was fun for everyone. Nowadays even on the few forum that remained, go and ask a newbie question, and they will tell you "just search on Google", make fun of your ignorance, or something like that.
This is especially important for introverts like me, that if they have to put their real name on something, for example a comment on Facebook, they think about it 100 times, while being anonymous they are more inclined to share things with strangers. You don't have to worry about what people thinks about you, or about prejudice that people have based on your age, your social life, your job, because nobody knows who you really are. The only thing that matters is your contribute to the discussion. I still remember discussions that I made with people that I only recognize by a username, and they were so interesting, much more interesting than everything you can find on Facebook.
In the old days you were told to never share your real name on the internet, to always pick up usernames, nowadays companies forces you to register with your real identity, Facebook can even ask you to provide a photo of your ID, and YouTube won't let you watch content for over 18 if you don't identity yourself. There are even countries that would like to force internet companies to ask for the identity of the people!
In the old days internet was a place where an introvert that didn't know how to relate with other people in real life could have escaped to share it's interests with other people freely and without any anxiety. Nowadays it's no longer like this, unfortunately. Forums are desert, nobody still uses IRC, and everything is a Facebook group or something like that on a social media platform where I don't want to sign up. Even websites in the old days had comment sections, nowadays you want to comment? Do it on Facebook. There are only a few exception of course (one of this is this website, that I like a lot for exactly this reason).
The only website that still maintains the old web philosophy, and the only social media that I use, is Reddit, that still doesn't require you to register with your real identity. But I fear that it will not last for long...
Also in the old internet there was a spirit of collaboration and community that I never saw in the modern web. You were a newbie in something, for example using Linux? Sign up to a forum, or ask on IRC, and people would have helped you, helped solving the problem, for free, only for the gratification on doing so. And most of the time even the person helping you to solve the problem learned something new in the process! It was fun for everyone. Nowadays even on the few forum that remained, go and ask a newbie question, and they will tell you "just search on Google", make fun of your ignorance, or something like that.
Old internet had a bit RTFM and show your work to solve this before asking questions culture too. And were pretty curmudgeony back in the 90s on irc. Tbh its reasonable to ask people to bother to search for a minute before askinf questions, and if you tell people i tried searching with this before asking, they’re a lot more friendly.
That sense of community is there with discord, you gotta use that.
That sense of community is there with discord, you gotta use that.
It was different. If you go for example on a Facebook group to ask a legitimate noob question they will not answer you, or make fun of you. In the old days in the forums people were more friendly, and for example explained to others even stuff that is considered simple enough, or pointed up good material to read. The only exception is of course if someone asked a question already answered in another topic, and thus the moderators would have gently invited to continue discussing on the already existing thread and closed the discussion.
> That sense of community is there with discord, you gotta use that.
Not in that sense. Discord is mainly a platform where you do voice chats. It has four disadvantages:
* not everyone wants to talk, for whatever reason, being introvert, not knowing the language so well to have a conversation, not having a microphone on the computer, and a ton of other reason
* a forum is public on the internet, someone that is not subscribed to the forum that has a similar problem could read it and find the solution, everyone could register and ask something. Discord servers are not.
* forums are textual content, that is preserved in the years. Sometime I have a problem with some old hardware or software and I find my answer in a response in a forum from 15 years ago. It's something that is indexed by search engines, of course even if forums were public, you cannot index voice chats.
* the forum had an asynchronous nature, as most of the old web had (take the email, for example). It means that I can start a discussion, and then go back to it when I have time. In the old days I used to check my forums at most once or twice a day, on the evening, check the thread I was following, maybe respond or simply read. Discord is synchronous, either you participate now or you don't.
> That sense of community is there with discord, you gotta use that.
Not in that sense. Discord is mainly a platform where you do voice chats. It has four disadvantages:
* not everyone wants to talk, for whatever reason, being introvert, not knowing the language so well to have a conversation, not having a microphone on the computer, and a ton of other reason
* a forum is public on the internet, someone that is not subscribed to the forum that has a similar problem could read it and find the solution, everyone could register and ask something. Discord servers are not.
* forums are textual content, that is preserved in the years. Sometime I have a problem with some old hardware or software and I find my answer in a response in a forum from 15 years ago. It's something that is indexed by search engines, of course even if forums were public, you cannot index voice chats.
* the forum had an asynchronous nature, as most of the old web had (take the email, for example). It means that I can start a discussion, and then go back to it when I have time. In the old days I used to check my forums at most once or twice a day, on the evening, check the thread I was following, maybe respond or simply read. Discord is synchronous, either you participate now or you don't.
I think that is a specific community culture thing then? FB groups & chats I've used have been really friendly and helpful!
Also when people say "use a discord", they are really referring to a text chat discord. It's the new IRC, with all of its good and bad parts. Almost nobody is using audio chat.
Discord's audio chat is mostly used in small groups of 3+ for parties in multiplayer games where quick audio communication helps a lot. It's the new teamspeak / ventrilio.
Here is a couple examples of community discords:
https://discord.com/invite/buildapc
https://discord.com/invite/obsproject
There has been a general response to withdraw into more private & semi-private communities although, as a response against the internet outrage mob that could ruin a person's life. That is a big shame.
Also when people say "use a discord", they are really referring to a text chat discord. It's the new IRC, with all of its good and bad parts. Almost nobody is using audio chat.
Discord's audio chat is mostly used in small groups of 3+ for parties in multiplayer games where quick audio communication helps a lot. It's the new teamspeak / ventrilio.
Here is a couple examples of community discords:
https://discord.com/invite/buildapc
https://discord.com/invite/obsproject
There has been a general response to withdraw into more private & semi-private communities although, as a response against the internet outrage mob that could ruin a person's life. That is a big shame.
> Discord is mainly a platform where you do voice chats.
I don’t know if this is true, but personally I wasn’t even aware Discord had voice chat support until I read your message.
I don’t know if this is true, but personally I wasn’t even aware Discord had voice chat support until I read your message.
This crystallized for me during a discussion about which websites people missed, when someone said “I would say Purevolume but there’s nothing that it did that SoundCloud or Bandcamp don’t do just as well”. I realized that it’s not the websites I’m nostalgic about — it’s the people, the culture and my younger self.
Nostalgia is not really about the places and things you're reminiscing about; it's more about remembering the positive way you felt when you experienced those places and things in the past. We miss those feelings and want to recapture them in some way, but we can't. That's why nostalgia is painful in a strange, indescribable way.
It's a bit of a downer response. I think there's plenty to get excited about on the internet still, and I'm in my 30s. You don't have to accept boredom/apathy as a consequence of aging, although the catalysts will change. I don't expect an adult to scream with jubilation about toy trains.
That’s not really what I was trying to say, but perhaps I’ve still not mastered the medium after all these years, eh? I founded a company with people I met on Twitter who were all doing the same hobby, scraping data from the web and trying to make meaning out of it. The company started as a blog (remember those!) So yes, still excited by the Internet. But I’m not going to beat myself up (nor the youth of today) trying to recapture the feeling of the 90s web through the eyes of a teenage me, because I think that’s impossible.
I'm totally with you. Most of these lamentations are not people missing the old internet but their old selves, when everything was new and exciting. The OP rues the loss of Geocities but most of those sites were terrible and hard to read.
I disagree. I miss Geocities, and, more recently, Myspace.
Both let YOU, the user, customize and design your "home".
So what if it was hard to read with 20 blinking GIFs and an autoplaying music player, it was YOURS.
The worst things about Facecrook are not it's monopoly, ok that's the worst, but I rather dislike that blue boring nav bar, 5000 friend limits (their graph DB can only handle that many or what's the bottleneck? cheap bustards!) and the generally lame mainstream design of the whole building. Like, who approved "pokes"? Even Friendster was hipper than Facehooked.
So what if it was hard to read with 20 blinking GIFs and an autoplaying music player, it was YOURS.
The worst things about Facecrook are not it's monopoly, ok that's the worst, but I rather dislike that blue boring nav bar, 5000 friend limits (their graph DB can only handle that many or what's the bottleneck? cheap bustards!) and the generally lame mainstream design of the whole building. Like, who approved "pokes"? Even Friendster was hipper than Facehooked.
You have a point, but ultimately the internet is now almost entirely profit driven and largely controlled by a few key players.
The landscape is very different; I'd argue society is not in a better position as a result.
The landscape is very different; I'd argue society is not in a better position as a result.
To paraphrase what an old boss said “they just happened to make the best music when I was the most emotionally vulnerable”.
The internet had some different qualities when it was something that no-one had ever grown up with.
This younger generation would be happy with an Internet that would constantly stream video content that they have ANY control over (AKA TV) ... that doesn't mean that it is better... WTF am I reading...
> I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to.
I might as well say that I know that this isn't true because they don't know what the Internet could be... all they know is the centralized cloud.
I might as well say that I know that this isn't true because they don't know what the Internet could be... all they know is the centralized cloud.
You know this? As far as I can tell, it's still possible to find weird little sub-sub-sub-culture groups on the internet if you actually want to, and curious kids can do it. Maybe most kids aren't, but I don't think there was ever a time when most kids were exploring the full possibilities of the internet either. Put another way, maybe the fraction of internet-using kids doing stuff we'd think is cool was higher back in the day, but I think the fraction of kids in general doing stuff we'd think is cooler is higher now.
There are two mutually exclusive views of the web. As a set of protocols set to allow individual humans to share information about things they love and the web as a set of protocols to make a living.
Profit motivated web presences want views, they want attention, they need nine 9s uptime, need to be able to do monetary transactions absolutely securely, and they want to be an application not a document. They live and die on the eternal wave of walled garden's recommendation engines because that's the network effect and that's where money flows. It doesn't matter if this means extremely high barriers to entry because money solves everything.
Individuals' websites are freeform presentations about the things that person is interested in. They are the backyard gardens of the mind and the most important thing is lowering the friction from thought to posting. There's no need to get tons of traffic instantly (or ever), they're mostly time insensitive.
The old web (and other protocols) still exist but they're much harder to find because they are not constantly updated. The time sensitive search engines deprioritize the static sites or even drop them after a handful of years.
Profit motivated web presences want views, they want attention, they need nine 9s uptime, need to be able to do monetary transactions absolutely securely, and they want to be an application not a document. They live and die on the eternal wave of walled garden's recommendation engines because that's the network effect and that's where money flows. It doesn't matter if this means extremely high barriers to entry because money solves everything.
Individuals' websites are freeform presentations about the things that person is interested in. They are the backyard gardens of the mind and the most important thing is lowering the friction from thought to posting. There's no need to get tons of traffic instantly (or ever), they're mostly time insensitive.
The old web (and other protocols) still exist but they're much harder to find because they are not constantly updated. The time sensitive search engines deprioritize the static sites or even drop them after a handful of years.
If you miss the old internet, then don't be two-faced and support big corporations that centralize it and act as ministries of truth. That's not what the old internet was about.
[deleted]
Some Tor hidden services, or `Onionland` as it's called are very similar to the early web. For some reason a lot of the pages look like Angelfire[0]. I can't figure out why though. Perhaps the technical challenge of setting up an .onion was so hard that the webmasters were glad just to have something hosted and the bulk of their energy was spent on the hidden service and they didn't spend 5 hours creating a Javascript single page app in their free time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelfire
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelfire
Many tor services eschew javascript because it's recommended not to have javascript enabled for services requiring anonymity/security (or, at least it was several years ago when I last checked). A lot of the sites will be very technically simple.
Ah, back when you could safely ignore a racist tirade because it came from xXBone_Lord420Xx instead of John Smith from Accounting.
Ignorance is bliss, they say - it was still John, but you just didn't know it.
Also, back then when it was allowed to have more imaginative names we were also able to have actually meaningful arguments online. Now you have to be in the line of "non-entity_#83591" without any opinions on anything to not offend anyone, and mostly voicing a different opinion results in a veritable s*tstorm that has no relevance to the topic that was discussed. SJWs and white-knighting simps... /sigh.
Also, back then when it was allowed to have more imaginative names we were also able to have actually meaningful arguments online. Now you have to be in the line of "non-entity_#83591" without any opinions on anything to not offend anyone, and mostly voicing a different opinion results in a veritable s*tstorm that has no relevance to the topic that was discussed. SJWs and white-knighting simps... /sigh.
While I agree, there is still great content to find online, content of the type he refers to, it is just damn hard to find. To discover it I use alternative search engines and custom built crawlers.
There should be more portal sites, just links to quality content. Used to be many of those, too.
There should be more portal sites, just links to quality content. Used to be many of those, too.
I had been in DOS for almost a decade when I got my first (dial-up) unix shell. I had been using ported unix utilities (MKS Toolkit) for some time so it was somewhat less painful than being thrown into the deep end. Now I have a terminal Debian container on my Chromebook and can wax nostalgic whenever I wish. And no, I do not conflate the internet with the web...
I have never seen the old internet but looking at the remains of it, it does appear really interesting.
It is sad that the most popular search engine throws complete garbage at you when there still exist fabulous websites with real content.
What’s the alternative?
From the thread:
> If you've never had to configure a sendmail.conf you've had it easy.
Been there, done that. Even with the usual .mc files and m4, once I had to dive deep into the rabbit hole of sendmail.conf to figure out what was going wrong.
Nowadays, I just use Postfix. :)
> If you've never had to configure a sendmail.conf you've had it easy.
Been there, done that. Even with the usual .mc files and m4, once I had to dive deep into the rabbit hole of sendmail.conf to figure out what was going wrong.
Nowadays, I just use Postfix. :)
Nostalgia never changes. In 20 years todays kids we will be lamenting how everything was better, more fresh, more fun and more innocent back in the 2020's.
Based on the direction the web is going, it might continue to be true. Easily 90% of the bandwidth a typical webpage uses is trackers, battery/CPU drains, and assorted worthless fluff when some text and a few pictures would suffice just fine in the majority of cases.
Would there be much interest in a large pubnix system? A high-trust social network of a sort, with the big system as a base?
It is still possible to find great communities outside of the corporate monopolies and fun websites, you just have to dig and spend time on the internet. Sometimes it is hard to escape your bubble of watch-time-increasing or addiction-inducing algorithms of giant ad-filled sites. Some sites cause addiction due to community and some due to algorithm.
I miss web directories, like old Yahoo or Altavista. Does anyone still use or miss those ones?
For me, it's Reddit which has killed the internet. It (along with Facebook Groups) has sucked the oxygen out of internet communities. It favours recency, but only at the thread level, so new comments in old threads will never be seen but new threads with the same conversation will always pop up.
This causes one of two effects: old timers leave communities because it's just the same repetitive threads over and over, and communities become dominated by newbies; or, worse, old timers develop lexicons of inside jokes and memes, and the community becomes impenetrable to newcomers who might otherwise have a lot to offer.
This causes one of two effects: old timers leave communities because it's just the same repetitive threads over and over, and communities become dominated by newbies; or, worse, old timers develop lexicons of inside jokes and memes, and the community becomes impenetrable to newcomers who might otherwise have a lot to offer.
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Missing it other times too:
I Miss the Old Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402518 - Oct 2019 (306 comments)
Tell HN: I miss the old internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552 - June 2018 (221 comments)
I Miss the Old Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402518 - Oct 2019 (306 comments)
Tell HN: I miss the old internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552 - June 2018 (221 comments)
The metaphor I came up with (and am proud enough of to flog here) is, "The Internet was Burning Man, now it's Bangkok."
To each it’s own Eternal September
OK Boomer.
You might remember this one: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/gratefuldead/shakedownstreet...
"Maybe you had too much too fast. Maybe you had too much too fast. Or just over played your part.
Nothin' shakin' on Shakedown Street. Used to be the heart of town. Don't tell me this town ain't got no heart. You just gotta poke around."
You might remember this one: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/gratefuldead/shakedownstreet...
"Maybe you had too much too fast. Maybe you had too much too fast. Or just over played your part.
Nothin' shakin' on Shakedown Street. Used to be the heart of town. Don't tell me this town ain't got no heart. You just gotta poke around."
Any groups/clubs that engage in slow html?
I like hand written html pages / don't like css.
I like hand written html pages / don't like css.
I’m 14, and internet wise, I wish it was the 90s. I coded my website, blog occasionally, and get noticed once in a great while. I chat on open platforms, and like decentralization and freedom from corporations.
Every time they add a new law to control the Internet, it more then likely is a bad day for everyone. (Except for the Gov. and corporations, of course.)
I haven't seen anyone mention my observations yet: The internet used to be a place we visited. Now we live there. Life was the abundant, fun thing, and like any mild intoxicant, 30-60 minutes of internet enhanced life.
We shuttled ideas between life and the internet, (let's look up how to make fireworks! Let's find girls online at other universities!) but money was much more difficult or impossible to transfer. We used to send a check to an ISP like several other mild media such as telephone and cable. Now we burn through electricity to verify our payments.
And not everyone was on the internet. It wasn't easy or immediately rewarding. No slick salesman put a phone into your hand for $50 and gave any dickwad keys to the universe. You had to put some effort into it and earn your place there. You had to put together a number of pieces of information from other experts, persistently asking questions and taking chances. It was a nifty club with other lucky, brave, dedicated, skilled people. We considered ourselves grateful and (more or less) treated it with respect, vs taking for granted that the space would never offend us and conquering territory for ourselves (social media) and filling it with lies for our own selfish ends (fake news).
Now everyone is there (...Here!) all the time. It's like living in a subway station. Yes you can have fun there, but surely it's better to be outdoors mostly and re-enter as desired.
It was not unlike an intimate relationship's honeymoon, versus living together and suddenly required to have a productive partnership and responsibility. Sure, it's fulfilling for many people, but the carefree, easy days are over. Yes, you can still go to html5zombo.com, but don't stay too long! Your bills are in that other tab. And the camera in your child's pre-school in the other. And you've got to finalize your purchases or the Amazon delivery window closes. And you've got to research everything finance related. And double-check all the news because lies abound. And don't forget to maintain appearances on linkedin. And keep learning, because everyone else is learning and they'll learn more than you. And your school is analyzing your child's every breath and keystroke.
That phone screen and browser window are the new eyes through which you're looking at the world. We have left the world behind and now nature becomes the 30-60 minutes of unknown amusement and delight we dream of rather than our proper home. Try to count how many half hours go by this week in which you a. are awake and b. don't touch the internet. It's not the internet we miss, it's its subordinate relation to the real world we miss.
We shuttled ideas between life and the internet, (let's look up how to make fireworks! Let's find girls online at other universities!) but money was much more difficult or impossible to transfer. We used to send a check to an ISP like several other mild media such as telephone and cable. Now we burn through electricity to verify our payments.
And not everyone was on the internet. It wasn't easy or immediately rewarding. No slick salesman put a phone into your hand for $50 and gave any dickwad keys to the universe. You had to put some effort into it and earn your place there. You had to put together a number of pieces of information from other experts, persistently asking questions and taking chances. It was a nifty club with other lucky, brave, dedicated, skilled people. We considered ourselves grateful and (more or less) treated it with respect, vs taking for granted that the space would never offend us and conquering territory for ourselves (social media) and filling it with lies for our own selfish ends (fake news).
Now everyone is there (...Here!) all the time. It's like living in a subway station. Yes you can have fun there, but surely it's better to be outdoors mostly and re-enter as desired.
It was not unlike an intimate relationship's honeymoon, versus living together and suddenly required to have a productive partnership and responsibility. Sure, it's fulfilling for many people, but the carefree, easy days are over. Yes, you can still go to html5zombo.com, but don't stay too long! Your bills are in that other tab. And the camera in your child's pre-school in the other. And you've got to finalize your purchases or the Amazon delivery window closes. And you've got to research everything finance related. And double-check all the news because lies abound. And don't forget to maintain appearances on linkedin. And keep learning, because everyone else is learning and they'll learn more than you. And your school is analyzing your child's every breath and keystroke.
That phone screen and browser window are the new eyes through which you're looking at the world. We have left the world behind and now nature becomes the 30-60 minutes of unknown amusement and delight we dream of rather than our proper home. Try to count how many half hours go by this week in which you a. are awake and b. don't touch the internet. It's not the internet we miss, it's its subordinate relation to the real world we miss.
In a rare moment of unity, blue + red is ready to (rightfully) break up the companies that destroyed the old internet.
I understand where the author is coming from. I run a Ministry website (Industrial music website), and have since 1994. Used to be, and still is the place to go for information, however it doesn't even show up in google searches, and yet generic lyrics sites, or other non-detailed sites do. It's a completely different time.
I miss the pre-Internet and especially the Time Before The Web. I can still hear the sound of my dial-up modem connecting to local BBSes. Telnetting into a MUD. Porn at 2k/second. Compuserve.
Nostalgia? Yes. Was it better? No, just different. But the Internet and Web’s advent felt like waking up to see a freeway had been run through my residential street. And there was no going back. It’s difficult to describe the feeling of those days to someone who has only known the Web and Internet.
OP here:
I didn't thought that this story will blow up. That's great.
To clarify, I didn't wrote the article https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/i-miss-the-old-intern.... A guy named Jonathan Scott Griffin wrote it. I tried to find him because I want to send him a message that I have posted his article on HN. I found his medium profile https://medium.com/about-me-stories/about-me-jonathan-scott-... (not sure if it's him).
To clarify, I didn't wrote the article https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/i-miss-the-old-intern.... A guy named Jonathan Scott Griffin wrote it. I tried to find him because I want to send him a message that I have posted his article on HN. I found his medium profile https://medium.com/about-me-stories/about-me-jonathan-scott-... (not sure if it's him).
I agree, and I think some comments are apt to note that we have as (grown, adult) people changed, and what we're seeking is really, on some level, a lost part our former selves (cc: In Search of Lost Time) —- at the same time, however, it _is_ pretty difficult to make these "garish" (as op puts it) spaces today. (Whether or not it's important that the internet is "garish" is a separate argument —- my short argument is I prefer, and would encourage, a greater ecodiversity in the internet landscape.)
Anyway -- I think, despite HTML + CSS + VPS services still existing, the alternatives —- the Well-Styled & Gridded Squarespace sorts, and the plug-n-play platforms like Twitter/Facebook —- are so easy to use that we've come to have disproportionately more cleaned up, mall-like spaces than not. I think.
About a month ago, I did a Show HN for https://mmm.page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424) that was my (small) attempt at creating a platform/tool to help people more easily create these spaces. It's still in alpha, but the Discord (link on homepage) is quickly growing with ppl who have this same frustration.
I have a feeling we'll see more and more counter-2010s-platforms platforms emerging over the next few years... platforms that try to correct our overcorrection toward cleanliness and order and optimization and profit, etc. etc.
Anyway -- I think, despite HTML + CSS + VPS services still existing, the alternatives —- the Well-Styled & Gridded Squarespace sorts, and the plug-n-play platforms like Twitter/Facebook —- are so easy to use that we've come to have disproportionately more cleaned up, mall-like spaces than not. I think.
About a month ago, I did a Show HN for https://mmm.page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424) that was my (small) attempt at creating a platform/tool to help people more easily create these spaces. It's still in alpha, but the Discord (link on homepage) is quickly growing with ppl who have this same frustration.
I have a feeling we'll see more and more counter-2010s-platforms platforms emerging over the next few years... platforms that try to correct our overcorrection toward cleanliness and order and optimization and profit, etc. etc.
A 10 minutes video with the usual 'subscribe and hit the bell icon', a word from the sponsor, a long winded introduction and then "click on menu, then click on this item, then select the size".