The internet used to be a really cool place full of wild ideas and weirdos.
Now its like a tidy, tightly policed suburban shopping mall.
Whats the next big thing?
Honestly? I've taken to hanging out on phone conferences with friends a lot more recently. It's not exactly a high bandwidth medium, but there's a lot you can squeeze into mu-law as a codec, and I'd genuinely like to see the network stretched in interesting ways. I guess the most obvious thing for a non-realtime discussion would be like a bulletin board; 818-260-6100 is an example of one for jobs on a small scale.
The phone network has been around for over a century in some form now, and has remained as open as it always has. Just how I see it, anyway.
I like this. I've started to try to call my friends more instead of messaging them through some social network, this seems like the natural extension to that. Does iOS or Android offer some kind of built in conference function? Or do you use a service or something self hosted?
I thought Google hangouts allow for conference calling. I'm not sure what the limits are in terms of how many people you can have on a hangout at a time.
I'm pretty sure this was one of the selling points of hangouts to begin with.
Most phones have a three-way calling feature. With most cell phones, it's done via the switching equipment rather than the cell phone itself to avoid generational loss from the mobile codec/reception issues. You can string a bunch of three-wayed calls together if you want.
The switching equipment itself also has some pretty interesting conference related features. There's a line of equipment called the DMS-100 that's pretty popular for wireline stuff. It has a function where it'll pretend a conference bridge is a ringing number when it's empty. When someone else gets on, it'll play a short burst of ringtone to indicate it, and conference together quite a few people. AT&T runs one of these in the bay area; 415-274-0001.
You might want to look into what phreakers were doing from the 60's onwards for an idea of how you can stretch the phone network. An old favorite was voicemailboxes as a sort of forum. You'd take over some poorly secured company voicemailbox and use it as a communications hub. Of course nowadays the theft aspect is no longer necessary.
I agree. I haven't been on Facebook for at least 2 months. The Verge has become boring and more opinion than fact. News sites have become so overburdened with ads that they don't load well. I stream radio and go to developer sites...that's about it.
Twitter -> blog is about the only useful information gathering form factor I use for gathering news.
No urls or domains. Search engines becoming deep linked discovery services for web applications. Favicons are replaced with full size icons and structured data for discovery registration.
This is already happening. You have to click on the address bar in Safari to see the full URL. People google everything, even domains like "facebook.com" or even "google.com." Gmail's favicon displays the amount of unread emails.
In its simplest form the internet is just a bunch of computers connected to each other. So, if you are looking for a place where people can express themselves without the fear of repercussions, all you need is anonymity.
You don't need something to replace the internet for that, just a sub space where people can't have their writings/ideas/creations tied to their real identity.
1. The Intercloud. Clouds of clouds of clouds. Containers and virtualization play a part in this, but much is left to be done in building out less-opinionated stacks, which become deployment targets.
2. Pay-to-deploy what used to be SaaS software onto various deployment targets on the Intercloud based on trust levels. Enables the MSaaS (managed SaaS) software model. Enables 'house hosting' private data.
3. Blockchain contracts applied to MSaaS'd APIs to enable routing of data to other MSaaS'd APIs based on privacy policies. Also applies to payments for #2 and target validation via #1.
While these things may or may not be interesting developments in the infrastructure of the internet, it doesn't really counteract what OP is saying. Streamlined, boring, closed garden social networks and ad-filled "news". And only the techies are left on the IRC servers :(
I tell you what is boring: people voting down responses because they don't agree with them and then having nothing to contribute other than a lame rationalization. Better?
You have kind of a point there, the advent of {up,down}voting on sites adds to the dullness by putting disincentives on controversial speech. HN is slightly better, but reddit it a great example of this. The most visible content is the lowest common denominator of comments, often cringy jokes and quips. While 4chan has its fair share of issues, the content is often interesting (to me) because they don't rank posts at all.
EDIT: And for the record I didn't downvote you, I'm not even allowed :/
I implied you downvoted me, but shouldn't have. Apologies. It was a blaming statement because I colluded the downvote with the 'rationalizations'.
To clarify my original post a bit, I would say that the Internet is infrastructure, and that changes in that infrastructure give way to changes in the way it is used for all sorts of things. Once a good amount of decentralization with infrastructure happens, we're going to see really interesting use-cases popping up. Robot vacuums with cryptowallets to keep themselves updated, for example.
> siri: FidoNet is a worldwide computer network. It uses a store-and-forward system to exchange private (email) and public (forum) messages between the BBSes in the network...
You can trust hosted things as long as you trust the deployment targets. Or, more specifically, have a trusted relationship with the deployment target.
We have IPNS, which allows you to have a mutable pointer to immutable content in ipfs. On top of that, you can put your IPNS name (which is still a longish ugly hash) into a DNS record to hide everything away (although youre still depending on DNS at that point)
If you want to read more about ipns, its discussed in section 3.7 of the paper[1]. Do note that a few things have changed since the paper was last updated, so its not the source of truth right now.
I definitely agree, but it is still missing anonymity, which I consider extremely important. Of course it's built in such a way that you could run it on top of any anonymous network in theory but these networks are still way too slow to offer a good experience in my opinion.
Still, I'm super excited every time I hear people talking about it.
Don't quote me on that but I'm pretty sure that the data you add on IPFS isn't automatically replicated on participating nodes. Other nodes will only acquire the data when they request it.
I don't think it's enough since it seems to be storage oriented. You need compute and cheap non-persistent messaging too instead of just data storage/retrieval to reach parity w/ the modern internet.
You mean the Web perhaps, rather than the Internet. In this case it's a critical distinction. There is no replacement for the Internet coming, and it's not the source of the lameness - it's an infinite blank canvas that you paint upon, that most future technology will rely on. Globally we've got trillions of dollars sunk into development of the Internet's infrastructure and the services/businesses riding on top of the Internet. The Internet will be similar 50 years from now, to what it is today: a 'dumb pipe.' In the same way that transmission lines don't change much, nor do water pipes.
This is my exact frustration. If you want something intellectually exciting with no ads, no filter bubble, and no click-bait, I'm building Canon of Man.
Something has definitely changed though, the internet communities of the past used to be very VERY tight-knit.
There just wasn't that many of us, so you'd talk to people unlike you. I knew my bbs friends all by their first and last names, had photos of them, would talk to the better ones on the phone, they were some of my best friends despite them usually being completely different from myself.
These days, I don't know a single person on the internet, and I rarely interact with people on the internet who are different from me, so I never get into the depth of conversation I once did. That's something lost.
The internet used to be like a dive-bar in an ivy-league college town, full of geniuses and weirdo townies. These days it's more like the city of New York -- no one knows you, and no one cares to.
That was kind of the original beauty of the internet, friendships across nationality, age, sex, religion, etcetera. {An,Pseud}onymous or not. Now we're back to hanging out with the same people on the internet as we do in real life.
Not really. The general population maybe, the latecomers and the new generations of the Internet (specially the 65+ Crowd that just got their first smartphone with FB and email apps).
However there are still plenty of people congregating both anonymously (see 4chsn and other specialist forums) or pseudonymously (see HN, slashdot, reddit, many IRC channels and many other places), even in greater numbers than in the good old BBS/Usenet days.
It just feels they it's disappearing because it is the exception now instead of the rule but places to share (sometimes weird) interests where nobody knows you're a dog are plenty and varied.
While I see your point, I frequent most of the places you mentioned, and somehow they don't give me the same feeling of comradery as the IRC channels of yore. There are probably many reasons for this, but part of it is the numbers -- there is simply too many people on HN/most subreddits/chans etc. for me (may be different for other people obviously) to see people as anything but statistics. Also I think the {up,down}vote mechanic are good for aggregation sites, but toxic to communities in general. It rewards groupthink and noncontroversial content so much that for any, say, subreddit, with more than some certain amount of users it becomes incredibly uninteresting.
Exactly, the fact that there are more people (at "HN, slashdot, reddit, many IRC channels and many other places") means that you don't really know anyone.
Remember back when you'd join a new forum, and they'd have a Welcome Thread just for you, asking you about your interests, etc.? When's the last time you've received a real personalized welcome to a web community? I think it's been at least 15 years for me.
I'm not sure how many people on Hacker News actually remember that internet, most of the community here might be too young to even know what we're talking about.
Edit: Someone ought to make a Web 1.0 emulator, that is invite only. People can set up their own websites, etc. but there is a limited amount of people allowed to join. We can live in the old days FOREVER. XD
A thought coming from military logistics: one of the best things you could do for the "friendliness" or "camaraderie" of a group of people is to cut it into monkeysphere-sized packets (~150 user cap), such that the people in that packet associate mainly with one-another. This is a "Company."
So, imagine a website like Reddit, where upon registration, you get assigned at random to a Reddit Company—a little shard of Reddit with its own posts and comments. Imagine further that you could give people an invitation link to allow them to move from their company to yours—again, permanently, though if you made friends in the original company they'd likely be willing to invite you back.
This would have a lot of the Web 1.0 feel, I think; the users would probably get to know one-another quite well, and those "welcome threads" would be perfectly common.
Interestingly, even though a given user's view of the website would only show items from their partition, you could still use statistical information collected from the entire user-base to do "wisdom of crowds" things, like ranking items. In a company-partitioned Reddit, each post's votes could be aggregated by URL across all Companies, with the Company itself then getting to decide to what degree they care about the tastes of the masses, versus the tastes of their (presumed) peers.
That's remarkably close to suggestions I've had for a "Dunbar's Web". You could cover the entire population of Earth with a small set of tiers: six or seven, each neighboring with 50-150 others.
I also see the possibility for both immigration and some form of exclusion or shunning. There are further complications: the 90/9/1 rule, multiple personals, etc. But I find it interesting.
hodwik: It seems we've exhausted the max depth of the comments, so I'll reply here.
I think you're a bit older than me, I never really experienced the BBS-days for example. Nonetheless, I agree completely. I remember especially a gaming forum in my language that I used to hang out on for years, where I knew 80% of posters, knew who was the trolls and who was the pros and we'd meet up for pizza every now and then etcetera. I miss those days. I see the forum is still up, but at some point it was overrun with users and the old sense of some kind of fellowship died out.
You can still find those communities, but you have to go looking for them.
Between about 2006 and 2012 I used to spend a ton of time in the Amiga community. It was an interesting mix of experiences, each of the different forums had their own feel and different core users, though there was a lot of cross-pollination between them, with discussions often a mix of underdog us-against-the-world wide-eyed optimism, nostalgia, caustic technical posturing and kitchen sink dramas. It was varied enough to keep my interest, but small enough to get to know the people involved (I recognise some people who post in HN who I knew from my Amiga days). I also learnt a bunch, first exposure to FPGAs was through Amiga developments, for example. If you're interested in classic computing I'm sure it'll still be relatively active, would start lurking at amigaworld.net and see where it takes you. I'm also sure you could find other similar communities if Amigas weren't your thing.
However there are still plenty of people congregating
But not in the same way.
I used to know people's lives from IRC and ICQ. I remember chatting online for hours. I was interested in their lives and they were interested in mine, and not just in the current vapid "HN cares inordinately about young successful people and old rich people because it gets you in their good graces" sort of way. Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know.
HN is kinda useless from a "developing friendships" point of view because it's topic hopping, not just open for daily rambling discussions. Reddit is even worse off because you can't have a meaningful community of 300 million people.
We've definitely lost something. I think it'll come back, but we have to engineer it—the past won't circle back on its own with the current barrage of centralized-only, for-private-profit only, fast-flux, buzzfeed-adhd-driven discussion platforms being shoved down our keyboards.
>I used to know people's lives from IRC and ICQ. I remember chatting online for hours. I was interested in their lives and they were interested in mine, and not just in the current vapid "HN cares inordinately about young successful people and old rich people because it gets you in their good graces" sort of way. Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know.
I still use IRC and don't have this problem at all. I've even been in the same IRC channels for nearly 5-6 years now. These random strangers from around the globe know more about me and my interests than my own family.
I still do. Not even holdover communities; I joined a new community about a year ago, and another two years before that. These folks are cool, I like them, I've met a bunch of them in person whenever they come to town for PAX or whatever.
> Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know.
That sounds like a friend-selection problem to me.
It's diverse in the way Google is diverse: lots of races, gender identities and sexualities, but everyone's a 20-something graduate of the same handful of schools, has the same attitudes and politics, similar jobs etc.
You live in a filter bubble. Start clicking like on things that challenge instead of gratify you. Upvote things that are different.
Get off HackerNews and go hang out at a sceptics' message board. Or go hang out at an artist's community. They exist. They don't care about tech and startups as much.
The internet is still out there. It's still interesting. It's still fun. But the big data/community silos are afraid of offending you because most people really really don't want to be challenged.
It's up to you. You have to go find the challenge. Just like always. Step out of your comfort zone.
The internet isn't boring because the internet has changed. The internet is boring because you got older and don't enjoy a good flamewar anymore. Or just don't have the time and energy to consistently challenge yourself with new ideas and communities.
The internet has grown, and people have gravitated towards the slick sanitary UI of and larger user base of the social media capital cities. If there's anything to learn from Ello, it's that there's a large mass of social internet users who are willing to migrate to new services that arn't as shady and advertisement infested as the current juggernauts are, it's critical to offer an easy to use service like the juggernauts do or else it's not quiet worth it.
If you care to do some exploring, there's plenty of communities out in the boonies but you would never know if you never went searching.
may be just age? I think the youth do have their tight-knit communities of friends, game teams, etc... We are gen X, we're about technology and thus all the thrills of discovery of the capabilities during the early Internet (and that time has of course passed since then), the next generations just take it as matter of fact, as electricity from wall socket, and their excitement and life in the Net is in different plane, not that visible to us. It just we who moved into (and make up) the suburbia while new cool kids on the block are living their urban life.
In the BBS days, the bar was higher to getting online. Some technical knowledge was required, and there were extra costs. I'd like to know the modern day equivalent.
I would be interested in seeing some sort of mesh network become popular, completely separate from "The Internet", with completely different protocols and paradigms, that you could access and participate in, just by sticking an antenna on your roof, plugging in some kind of adapter, and running some software.
Or perhaps you could utilize existing Wifi hardware and run a completely different set of protocols on it.
You should pass a test to transmit but there's a ton of pirate activity out there. I have some respect for rule breakers on that front because the barrier to breaking the rules is pretty high.
If I had the inclination I'd build a QRP station and learn Morse. My days of burning fingers on a soldering iron and climbing up trees is gone now.
I'm not saying it's a modern day equivalent, but MetaFilter has kept its relatively high bar of a $5 one-time membership fee: http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi
I find that enlightening discussions happen there with a surprisingly high frequency, even today.
> These days, I don't know a single person on the internet
Getting to know people is a function of spending time with them. As you get older, you spend less time socializing on the internet.
The internet, especially a forum, is a really time-consuming and inefficient way to socialize. You meet more of a person saying "hi" to their face than you do after months of reading their posts online.
When I was a teen stuck at home with the family and school, I had time for that back when the internet and games were an escape and a way to have some control over my social life. It's me that's changed, not the internet.
I'm going to have to disagree. While is spend less time socializing on the internet now than when I was younger, that is not because I have less time on the internet, but for lack of opportunities. Hell, I spend more of my days on the internet now, whether I'm studying or working. And while the internet can never (for me) become a substitute for socializing in the real world, I don't really find it more efficient than on the internet. If you simply read someone's posts, sure, but from conversing (on e.g. IRC)?
I don't disagree but it's hard to say the internet hasn't changed. 15 years ago Digg didn't exist, Facebook wasn't even a concept, and no one ever used the term "social media."
I wonder if the proxy interactions, things such as likes, karma and retweets, etc. have replaced the desire to get any approval from other people? Maybe we never really cared about the heartfelt appreciation from a person we didn't actually know, but it turned out the number of people we reached was always more interesting. You don't actually have to get to know or interact with other people; you can shout into the void and know someone else heard you from a couple numbers, and maybe we collectively decided that's all we really wanted.
edit: I suppose I'm using "we" as "people" in this comment, also I didn't consider how old danneu might actually be; Maybe younger is 5 years ago.
> You meet more of a person saying "hi" to their face than you do after months of reading their posts online.
Yes, but that don't stop you from reaching out and saying "hi".
I am (mainly) a front-end developper, and I occasionally send emails to the developper of product or websites that I love and simply offer to help them out. I don't work for free, but what I am doing isn't working. It's sharing knowledge.
I would email "Hi there! I love your product! I noticed that your X isn't working correctly... did you try Y solution? I had the same problem a while back." Sometime, this email is ignored. Sometime, a developper end up reading it. Sometime, it's some guy who is passionate about his product but has no idea what code even is.
Yes, the internet is turning into a mall. That doesn't stop you from becoming friend with the managers of the store next to yours.
Hi, Phil and everyone, Paweł here (you can call me Paul, Polish is hard).
This article highlighted the existence of Urbit to me (and probably many more)... and I shouldn't probably talk about your startup, since this thread is arguing exactly against it. Just to say: you're doing good work – and I might meet you some time in Urbit's chat :D
In a way, it's no different than the old days; the good stuff is out there, you just have to dig and find it...and now most of it is also right next to / under a mile-high mountain of rubbish :)
> ... I never get into the depth of conversation I once did. That's something lost.
Others have given some good answers, but I think there is another factor: the way discussions are organized.
In a typical BBS, or on UseNet in days of old, a thread was linear, identified only by its subject line. Multiple people could stay with a thread for a relatively long time and have an extended discussion.
Today, most online forum software (HN, Reddit, etc.) displays threads as trees. Each reply begins a new subthread. As a result, a conversion involving more than 2 people will rarely be linear, and a reply 2 or 3 or 4 levels in will be read by almost no one.
But the solution is not to move back to linear threads. Those were abandoned for a good reason: they do not scale. Six active posters might be able to have a reasonable linear discussion. 100 cannot. Linear threads are also much easier for one poster to hijack. Among 6 people, there is a decent chance that none of them is a jerk. Among 100 people, the chance is pretty much zero. So the thread gets filled with troll posts. Conclusion: tree-shaped discussions, along with voting, are what prevents us from being drowned in troll posts & flamewars.
So, what is the solution? I don't know. It's an interesting problem to consider.
I think about it regularly. There is the Discourse solution that is mostly linear but with a replies button to show inline the replies. There is the google wave solution, if I remember well, that is tree like but more dynamic than reddit. Maybe there should be something hybrid where new answers are shown at the top but can be inline expanded to show the context and the replies, and the tree structure is kept after.
I've experimented with having both - the first level showing the entire thread as a tree but each individual thread page only displaying its immediate children, acting like a flat layout. I suspect people prefer trees for navigation and discovery and flat layouts for actually communicating.
Although you're right, it is interesting to consider the way the structure of a site shapes its community. Imageboards and PHPBB style forums are linear, and derailing threads on those is practically an art form.
> a reply 2 or 3 or 4 levels in will be read by almost no one
Partly because there's no OOTB way to follow up on a thread, especially if it's not one you're participating in. I had to write a user script [1] to highlight new comments and collapse threads without new comments, to make it _possible_ to follow discussions beyond the initial read.
But Usenet had threads, in a way, with your client trying to detect and put them together as best as possible. It didn't always get it right, but 99% of the time is good enough to get the benefits.
Same goes for mailinglists. Posts get sorted in threads.
A internet where people do not have to think about whether or not they should post a link on their Facebook about controversial issues and can actually be themselves. A internet where I feel I can ask a dumb question on StackOverflow as I progress in learning new programming techniques. Everyone projects their crafted image to the world via the current internet when in reality they are completely different. I could go on and on but overall I would summarize that we need an internet with no ads, a place where we don't have to fear 24/7 about some stupid tweet from years ago being in a data brokers database forever
REAL LIFE. Real Life is the next internet! In the future, people will go outside and talk to one another, face to face! We will congregate in libraries and bookstores, and drink coffee that doesn't suck or cost over $2 a cup. The future is coming....
It's still a bit expensive at the moment though, as it requires smartphones with a decent front camera and fast connectivity, but early results are encouraging.
I keep thinking this same thing myself, and have tried to work the IRL-angle, but when you're an adult no one really wants to meet you.
Up until the early 00s, I used to hang out at a coffee/cigarette bar where I knew just about every single person who walked through the door, and people would sit there for hours and hours talking to strangers about very interesting stuff, while drinking insane amounts of coffee and chain smoking.
If those sorts of places still exist, I have no idea where they are.
I do this all the time where I live, in Somerville, MA. Somerville is where all the hippies went when the tech assholes pushed them out of Cambridge; they're being pushed out towards Medford now, but Somerville is still mostly human and hasn't turned into a bench of vendorware mannequins yet (though I see an unhealthy number of kids wearing startup T-shirts, le sigh).
Maybe it's because I've always found it difficult to engage people I don't know well, for a variety of reasons. I'm still struggling to get past it. I'm no longer scared to, but still have other mental blocks preventing me. Despite lots of efforts to fix it. It's extremely annoying actually.
I find there's this weird invisible line with most people. They're all willing to talk and hang out and be jovial, but then once you cross the strange invisible line, they don't want to interact anymore. I'm not talking about something creepy, it's more like you've used up all of your in person minutes or something. Now you have to wait till next month before you can engage them again.
One theory I have is that if people don't factor you into their long term goals, they won't want to devote too much time to you. Or maybe I'm overthinking this whole thing.
We gave greasy cafes in the UK. They are the equivalent.
I used to get breakfast every Thursday with a one legged motorcycle courier (still have no idea how that worked) who fought in the gulf war, an HSBC executive and a fishmonger. I miss that.
I have kids now and other parents are horrible people.
My friend, we should meet. First cuppa coffee is on me, or five. Same goes for the rest of you. If Imgur can have a camp, I think hacker news can take over a coffee shop/bookstore
Overrated. The internet is immensely more stimulating, that's what drove us there in the first place. If you 're old enough to remember the pre-internet world, you 'd know what i mean.
I am! I remember the incredible discovery of meeting people far away across large bulletin board systems, and IRC chat rooms. It led to lifelong in person friendships. I'm afraid that now because it's so easy to meet people and disengage from people at will, we have no reason to invest in long-term friendships.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadThe phone network has been around for over a century in some form now, and has remained as open as it always has. Just how I see it, anyway.
I'm pretty sure this was one of the selling points of hangouts to begin with.
http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/
The switching equipment itself also has some pretty interesting conference related features. There's a line of equipment called the DMS-100 that's pretty popular for wireline stuff. It has a function where it'll pretend a conference bridge is a ringing number when it's empty. When someone else gets on, it'll play a short burst of ringtone to indicate it, and conference together quite a few people. AT&T runs one of these in the bay area; 415-274-0001.
tightly policed private boutiques
It's alpha but check it out brah
It's a mess out there.
You don't need something to replace the internet for that, just a sub space where people can't have their writings/ideas/creations tied to their real identity.
1. The Intercloud. Clouds of clouds of clouds. Containers and virtualization play a part in this, but much is left to be done in building out less-opinionated stacks, which become deployment targets.
2. Pay-to-deploy what used to be SaaS software onto various deployment targets on the Intercloud based on trust levels. Enables the MSaaS (managed SaaS) software model. Enables 'house hosting' private data.
3. Blockchain contracts applied to MSaaS'd APIs to enable routing of data to other MSaaS'd APIs based on privacy policies. Also applies to payments for #2 and target validation via #1.
EDIT: And for the record I didn't downvote you, I'm not even allowed :/
To clarify my original post a bit, I would say that the Internet is infrastructure, and that changes in that infrastructure give way to changes in the way it is used for all sorts of things. Once a good amount of decentralization with infrastructure happens, we're going to see really interesting use-cases popping up. Robot vacuums with cryptowallets to keep themselves updated, for example.
> siri: FidoNet is a worldwide computer network. It uses a store-and-forward system to exchange private (email) and public (forum) messages between the BBSes in the network...
> me: so it's sorta like what I said earlier?
> siri: i don't understand
> me: that's ok, nobody else does either.
http://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsN...
If you want to read more about ipns, its discussed in section 3.7 of the paper[1]. Do note that a few things have changed since the paper was last updated, so its not the source of truth right now.
[1]: https://github.com/ipfs/papers/raw/master/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs-...
Still, I'm super excited every time I hear people talking about it.
It's a cool/potentially useful concept, but definitely not the next internet.
It's so easy to find stuff these days, if we could instill the idea of discovery and actually exploring the internet again, I would dig that.
You can sample it at: https://canonofman.meteor.com
It's not launching until Monday, but follow @canonofman on Twitter or sign up on the site and I'll let you know when it's live.
Something has definitely changed though, the internet communities of the past used to be very VERY tight-knit.
There just wasn't that many of us, so you'd talk to people unlike you. I knew my bbs friends all by their first and last names, had photos of them, would talk to the better ones on the phone, they were some of my best friends despite them usually being completely different from myself.
These days, I don't know a single person on the internet, and I rarely interact with people on the internet who are different from me, so I never get into the depth of conversation I once did. That's something lost.
The internet used to be like a dive-bar in an ivy-league college town, full of geniuses and weirdo townies. These days it's more like the city of New York -- no one knows you, and no one cares to.
However there are still plenty of people congregating both anonymously (see 4chsn and other specialist forums) or pseudonymously (see HN, slashdot, reddit, many IRC channels and many other places), even in greater numbers than in the good old BBS/Usenet days.
It just feels they it's disappearing because it is the exception now instead of the rule but places to share (sometimes weird) interests where nobody knows you're a dog are plenty and varied.
Remember back when you'd join a new forum, and they'd have a Welcome Thread just for you, asking you about your interests, etc.? When's the last time you've received a real personalized welcome to a web community? I think it's been at least 15 years for me.
I'm not sure how many people on Hacker News actually remember that internet, most of the community here might be too young to even know what we're talking about.
Edit: Someone ought to make a Web 1.0 emulator, that is invite only. People can set up their own websites, etc. but there is a limited amount of people allowed to join. We can live in the old days FOREVER. XD
So, imagine a website like Reddit, where upon registration, you get assigned at random to a Reddit Company—a little shard of Reddit with its own posts and comments. Imagine further that you could give people an invitation link to allow them to move from their company to yours—again, permanently, though if you made friends in the original company they'd likely be willing to invite you back.
This would have a lot of the Web 1.0 feel, I think; the users would probably get to know one-another quite well, and those "welcome threads" would be perfectly common.
Interestingly, even though a given user's view of the website would only show items from their partition, you could still use statistical information collected from the entire user-base to do "wisdom of crowds" things, like ranking items. In a company-partitioned Reddit, each post's votes could be aggregated by URL across all Companies, with the Company itself then getting to decide to what degree they care about the tastes of the masses, versus the tastes of their (presumed) peers.
I also see the possibility for both immigration and some form of exclusion or shunning. There are further complications: the 90/9/1 rule, multiple personals, etc. But I find it interesting.
I think you're a bit older than me, I never really experienced the BBS-days for example. Nonetheless, I agree completely. I remember especially a gaming forum in my language that I used to hang out on for years, where I knew 80% of posters, knew who was the trolls and who was the pros and we'd meet up for pizza every now and then etcetera. I miss those days. I see the forum is still up, but at some point it was overrun with users and the old sense of some kind of fellowship died out.
Between about 2006 and 2012 I used to spend a ton of time in the Amiga community. It was an interesting mix of experiences, each of the different forums had their own feel and different core users, though there was a lot of cross-pollination between them, with discussions often a mix of underdog us-against-the-world wide-eyed optimism, nostalgia, caustic technical posturing and kitchen sink dramas. It was varied enough to keep my interest, but small enough to get to know the people involved (I recognise some people who post in HN who I knew from my Amiga days). I also learnt a bunch, first exposure to FPGAs was through Amiga developments, for example. If you're interested in classic computing I'm sure it'll still be relatively active, would start lurking at amigaworld.net and see where it takes you. I'm also sure you could find other similar communities if Amigas weren't your thing.
But not in the same way.
I used to know people's lives from IRC and ICQ. I remember chatting online for hours. I was interested in their lives and they were interested in mine, and not just in the current vapid "HN cares inordinately about young successful people and old rich people because it gets you in their good graces" sort of way. Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know.
HN is kinda useless from a "developing friendships" point of view because it's topic hopping, not just open for daily rambling discussions. Reddit is even worse off because you can't have a meaningful community of 300 million people.
We've definitely lost something. I think it'll come back, but we have to engineer it—the past won't circle back on its own with the current barrage of centralized-only, for-private-profit only, fast-flux, buzzfeed-adhd-driven discussion platforms being shoved down our keyboards.
I still use IRC and don't have this problem at all. I've even been in the same IRC channels for nearly 5-6 years now. These random strangers from around the globe know more about me and my interests than my own family.
I still do. Not even holdover communities; I joined a new community about a year ago, and another two years before that. These folks are cool, I like them, I've met a bunch of them in person whenever they come to town for PAX or whatever.
> Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know.
That sounds like a friend-selection problem to me.
A much larger issue IMHO is the lack of any provision for private messaging (aside from email addresses in profiles).
Also, it was nice meeting you at jQSF :)
Not saying that you won't meet awesome people, but I think the demographic is a lot less diverse than most people like to think.
You live in a filter bubble. Start clicking like on things that challenge instead of gratify you. Upvote things that are different.
Get off HackerNews and go hang out at a sceptics' message board. Or go hang out at an artist's community. They exist. They don't care about tech and startups as much.
The internet is still out there. It's still interesting. It's still fun. But the big data/community silos are afraid of offending you because most people really really don't want to be challenged.
It's up to you. You have to go find the challenge. Just like always. Step out of your comfort zone.
The internet isn't boring because the internet has changed. The internet is boring because you got older and don't enjoy a good flamewar anymore. Or just don't have the time and energy to consistently challenge yourself with new ideas and communities.
It happened to me too. And it sucks.
If you care to do some exploring, there's plenty of communities out in the boonies but you would never know if you never went searching.
I would be interested in seeing some sort of mesh network become popular, completely separate from "The Internet", with completely different protocols and paradigms, that you could access and participate in, just by sticking an antenna on your roof, plugging in some kind of adapter, and running some software.
Or perhaps you could utilize existing Wifi hardware and run a completely different set of protocols on it.
If I had the inclination I'd build a QRP station and learn Morse. My days of burning fingers on a soldering iron and climbing up trees is gone now.
I find that enlightening discussions happen there with a surprisingly high frequency, even today.
The internet, especially a forum, is a really time-consuming and inefficient way to socialize. You meet more of a person saying "hi" to their face than you do after months of reading their posts online.
When I was a teen stuck at home with the family and school, I had time for that back when the internet and games were an escape and a way to have some control over my social life. It's me that's changed, not the internet.
I wonder if the proxy interactions, things such as likes, karma and retweets, etc. have replaced the desire to get any approval from other people? Maybe we never really cared about the heartfelt appreciation from a person we didn't actually know, but it turned out the number of people we reached was always more interesting. You don't actually have to get to know or interact with other people; you can shout into the void and know someone else heard you from a couple numbers, and maybe we collectively decided that's all we really wanted.
edit: I suppose I'm using "we" as "people" in this comment, also I didn't consider how old danneu might actually be; Maybe younger is 5 years ago.
Yes, but that don't stop you from reaching out and saying "hi".
I am (mainly) a front-end developper, and I occasionally send emails to the developper of product or websites that I love and simply offer to help them out. I don't work for free, but what I am doing isn't working. It's sharing knowledge.
I would email "Hi there! I love your product! I noticed that your X isn't working correctly... did you try Y solution? I had the same problem a while back." Sometime, this email is ignored. Sometime, a developper end up reading it. Sometime, it's some guy who is passionate about his product but has no idea what code even is.
Yes, the internet is turning into a mall. That doesn't stop you from becoming friend with the managers of the store next to yours.
This article highlighted the existence of Urbit to me (and probably many more)... and I shouldn't probably talk about your startup, since this thread is arguing exactly against it. Just to say: you're doing good work – and I might meet you some time in Urbit's chat :D
https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...
They're still out there. They don't advertise, for obvious reasons.
Others have given some good answers, but I think there is another factor: the way discussions are organized.
In a typical BBS, or on UseNet in days of old, a thread was linear, identified only by its subject line. Multiple people could stay with a thread for a relatively long time and have an extended discussion.
Today, most online forum software (HN, Reddit, etc.) displays threads as trees. Each reply begins a new subthread. As a result, a conversion involving more than 2 people will rarely be linear, and a reply 2 or 3 or 4 levels in will be read by almost no one.
But the solution is not to move back to linear threads. Those were abandoned for a good reason: they do not scale. Six active posters might be able to have a reasonable linear discussion. 100 cannot. Linear threads are also much easier for one poster to hijack. Among 6 people, there is a decent chance that none of them is a jerk. Among 100 people, the chance is pretty much zero. So the thread gets filled with troll posts. Conclusion: tree-shaped discussions, along with voting, are what prevents us from being drowned in troll posts & flamewars.
So, what is the solution? I don't know. It's an interesting problem to consider.
Although you're right, it is interesting to consider the way the structure of a site shapes its community. Imageboards and PHPBB style forums are linear, and derailing threads on those is practically an art form.
Partly because there's no OOTB way to follow up on a thread, especially if it's not one you're participating in. I had to write a user script [1] to highlight new comments and collapse threads without new comments, to make it _possible_ to follow discussions beyond the initial read.
[1] https://github.com/insin/greasemonkey/blob/master/hncommentt...
Same goes for mailinglists. Posts get sorted in threads.
Yes, using the "References:" and/or "In-Reply-To:" headers. Later clients tended to do this, I think.
> ... to get the benefits.
Yes, and the drawbacks: in-depth discussions involving multiple people were harder to come by.
In any case, in both Usenet -- late in the game -- and many mailing lists, there are relatively few participants, so scaling is not really an issue.
On the subway.
On the bus.
At college campuses.
At bars.
At night clubs.
...
It's still a bit expensive at the moment though, as it requires smartphones with a decent front camera and fast connectivity, but early results are encouraging.
Up until the early 00s, I used to hang out at a coffee/cigarette bar where I knew just about every single person who walked through the door, and people would sit there for hours and hours talking to strangers about very interesting stuff, while drinking insane amounts of coffee and chain smoking.
If those sorts of places still exist, I have no idea where they are.
I used to get breakfast every Thursday with a one legged motorcycle courier (still have no idea how that worked) who fought in the gulf war, an HSBC executive and a fishmonger. I miss that.
I have kids now and other parents are horrible people.
https://www.ethereum.org/