Why does it need to be all-or-nothing? There wasn't anything about MySpace that hinged on browser incompatibilities. We can try to bring back the parts of the old Internet that were cool and fun without bringing back all the baggage too.
I made pocket change in high school by debugging IE CSS issues for strangers on the internet, which was absolutely fun and occasionally also quite weird :)
The web of 2006 was fun, but to be honest, I find the modern web to be even more fun.
I mean, if we want to take off the rose tinted glasses and look at it honestly, disregarding the homogeneity of modern frameworked layouts versus a Geocities page with a fire background and crimson Morpheus text, the quality and variety of content is much better on the modern web than the old, as is the availability of media and depth of interaction that social media, for all its negatives, provides.
I feel like what the modern web may lack in style, it gains (and surpasses the old web) in substance. And I think that's a fair trade.
But yeah, a lot of custom MySpace pages were just terrible. A friend of mine set the background to his to a snowy forest and set the foreground text to white, making it basically unreadable. He tried to defend it by pointing out that if you highlight the text, it becomes readable. I tried to show him that if he really wanted that image as a background, he should spend two seconds in Photoshop to lighten the image so he can put black text over it and keep it readable, but he just went off about how much he prefers white text.
Why? Because people with bad intentions discovered its potential and took advantage. It’s the iconic example of the lament “That’s why we can’t have good things”
> It was a beautiful mess. As the internet grew up, consumer products stopped trusting their users, and the internet lost its soul.
I think that's the wrong assumption to make - we figured out the language of the internet, and developed a design methodology that worked, though it continues to evolve.
Allowing arbitrary HTML allows hackers to use your site to impersonate login pages, using your trusted SSL certificate to make the page appear authorized in the browser header.
Allowing arbitrary content allowed hackers to exploit browsers to run arbitrary code and go wild from there with user permissions.
Allowing arbitrary HTML mixes poorly with having more than one user doing it on a page.
Allowing arbitrary content to be uploaded and served out means that if you're lucky, you'll go bankrupt serving people pirated movies, and if you're not lucky, you'll go bankrupt and to prison for serving child porn.
This is just a sample of the problems.
You have to sandbox this stuff, and the crazier the line you try to draw with the sandbox around what is safe to do, the harder it is to secure.
Then you strip out interactivity. Which is a pretty huge component of making the internet interesting and weird.
For its many sins, Flash was actually a pretty great sandbox for people to play with that way (as long as it didn't have one of its many security issues at the time)
There was a period when you could use Flash to invoke a javascript: protocol link and it would be executed in the containing page! They fixed it eventually but it was a great way to escape the Flash sandbox.
I never claimed the problems were hard to solve. (It's probably harder than you think, but there's off-the-shelf solutions for them now, as long as you've got a developer smart enough to reach for them, or one skilled and experienced enough to know how to build them in a pinch.)
But by the time you've solved them all, you're pretty much back to where Reddit, HN, Facebook, etc. are. I assume the author does not consider those "fun and weird".
I mean, I remember when Slashdot was having trouble with user abuse of <pre> tags. A simple <pre> tag of all things! When you scale up, you have to close all the little holes, and what's left is not "fun and weird".
You can have fun and weird. It's out there, if you look, and worst case, you can always deploy your own site and do anything you want. But you can't have fun and weird at scale.
The other problem that bedeviled sites that allowed arbitrary HTML back in the day was crude phishing attempts: convert your user profile into a fake login page with CSS and HTML. Blocking this entirely is probably impossible. I suppose some machine learning could be used to detect pages styled as phishing attempts.
There were also all sorts of ways to sneak JavaScript back in. I remember embedding a javascript: protocol link inside a Flash applet would do it (flash eventually blocked that though).
Pretty sure if there's no JS you could just block iframes and maybe form tags and then people would have no way to submit anything. They could click a malicious link, sure, but they can do that on today's social networks.
Then you can replace the website "chrome"- the headers, the links back to the rest of the site- with doppelgangers that take you to a phishing page that makes it look like you've been logged out. All of those you'd expect to be internal links, so when they show you a "please log in again" screen you will have no reason for suspicion. You can't do that on Facebook today.
Alternatively, you don't need a form tag. Just show a login set of text inputs and an image that looks like a submit button. That button links you to a phishing site that says "oops! try again" and then you put your password in a second time and this time it's a real form. So you'd have to get rid of text inputs entirely.
If I understand you correctly those "you are leaving example.com" interstitial pages with a redirect are a solution to this problem. Although they are not so pleasant.
Is it technically possible to completely strip out javascript but still retain full html + css compatibility? I had the impression that somebody always finds a way to outsmart any filter using UTF arcanes or some other method.
Hmm. I can't say for absolute sure, but if the root document is HTML and there are no <script> tags (or <iframe>s, I guess), I don't see how you'd get JavaScript to execute. I think those are strictly the only entry-points JS can have, and it's not like HTML or CSS could mutate the document to create one after the fact.
EDIT: I brainfarted and totally forgot about inline event handlers. Go easy on the downvotes please.
Most of these things I think are pretty easy to mitigate.
>Allowing arbitrary HTML allows hackers to use your site to impersonate login pages, using your trusted SSL certificate to make the page appear authorized in the browser header.
Make each user have their own custom virtual host (yourname.example.com).
>Allowing arbitrary content allowed hackers to exploit browsers to run arbitrary code and go wild from there with user permissions.
Arbitrary does not mean you can't sanitize it. You can specifically restrict javascript for example.
>Allowing arbitrary HTML mixes poorly with having more than one user doing it on a page.
You don't necessarily need more than one person doing it on a page. Each person can have their own page.
>Allowing arbitrary content to be uploaded and served out means that if you're lucky, you'll go bankrupt serving people pirated movies, and if you're not lucky, you'll go bankrupt and to prison for serving child porn.
You could say the same thing about Facebook. We have the safe harbor act and we have the ability to monitor these systems for misuse.
I don't know enough about MDX and JDX that Codeblog seem to allow. Where, in your opinion, does Codeblog land on the spectrum: More on the secure but boring side or on the fun and weird but dangerous side?
That's only half the answer. The real answer is that no one wants to spend the time to offer those features securely.
It's perfectly cromulent to allow users to upload CSS and html and even javascript. You just have to put a lot of effort into making it safe.
Look what we did on reddit -- we allowed users to make almost any CSS they want, and look at the beautiful creations that have come from that (like all the sports reddits). It was a lot of work figuring out how to make it safe, but we did it.
And now they're putting in a ton of effort to make it work on mobile too. Because reddit still values user creativity.
It's totally possible to allow all that creativity, it just takes time and consideration to make it safe.
Sadly yes, but they are trying really hard to make the new experience as close to custom CSS as possible while still maintaining the ability to be creative. Unfortunately it's not really a security problem as much as it is a design problem making things mobile and app friendly.
> That's only half the answer. The real answer is that no one wants to spend the time to offer those features securely.
>It's perfectly cromulent to allow users to upload CSS and html and even javascript. You just have to put a lot of effort into making it safe.
I work in an online payment company. Custom CSS is one of the features we hate the most implementing. It is very difficult to get it right and the cost of maintenance is quite high.
I actually agree with you, but on topic, I can't help but think the original author does not consider reddit "fun and weird", or the objection being made would make little sense.
> Look what we did on reddit -- we allowed users to make almost any CSS they want, and look at the beautiful creations that have come from that (like all the sports reddits).
The main reason I have a reddit account is so I can turn off custom CSS for subreddits because otherwise it's almost as garish as MySpace. When they finally eliminate the "old" reddit, I'm gone (unless they hire a competent UX person before then).
it had its balls cut off. What made it edgy and fun was removed as it was promoted to normal people who just wanted to read movie listings, or whatever.
Well, I sort of agree with that, and I was with you until you used the term. But I don’t see anything less masculine about the internet now than as it was in 1993. Perhaps “sanitized” would be more applicable?
sure, I agree the term definitely has a masculinity implication. but, I actually think the term is roughly correct given that at the time, the net was 95% male while now it's much closer to 50-50.
Understood. And I MUDded with some women. Am I disappointed that the net is less masculine? Not particularly. I certainly felt more welcome, and more comfortable with the net before when it was a more masculine environment, and in some sense I miss that. But I'm not the deciding user, and as a parent with kids... my feelings are complicated.
This is why the internet isn't fun. Because assholes write useless press releases for yet another product that's not new or interesting and disguise it as someone putting their thoughts out there.
I think the question maybe is why users in social media spaces can't .... be more creative?
I used to use Geocities and yeah the internet and HTML were sort of synonymous. As users my friends and I all had pages we'd do things on and show each other.
I suspect the issue is that long term that doesn't bring in users who DO NOT want to do that and thus your user base is limited, and once you make a place that does appeal to the folks who don't want to dip their toes in code.... you just stick everyone there.
I don't doubt it, but as it was a given user's space that was bad as far as navigation or such ... so what? Kinda like the dumpy diner people go to because it is cheap and has that atmosphere they're looking for. Maybe the table wiggles and it's not a great spot, but that's what it is.
If you're talking about security issues, I get that, valid concern. I've got no good answer for it.
I do think there is a loss, that there isn't that personality.
...and no, it all wasn't able to be saved - but a massive amount was managed to be preserved (it used to be available as a torrent - assuming it is still being seeded, you might be able to download a copy if you really want it - but it ain't small).
Geocities really wasn't "social media", though. The closest thing at the time would have been PHPBB forums or the like, and customization with those tended to be limited.
I think there just isn't much of a desire among most people to be "creative" with their layouts. Most people use social media like an appliance, they care about the networking and communication and are satisfied as long as that works.
It certainly isn't social media as we describe it now.
It is though a good example of "fun and weird" and a little sad it was left out as social media grew. I get why, but still feels like that character missing is a loss of some kind.
I think the answer is sturgeon's law essentially. Even by the standards of social media freeform customization degrades consistency. Most people aren't good at it or interested in learning it for its own sake.
Essentially with mass adoption it got increasingly lowest common denominator.
Jarred was probably young when the internet was first taking shape, and every generation shares the feeling that things were better in their youth (aka the Golden Age Fallacy).
The internet was a lot smaller and inhabited by curious nerds - to find similar fun and weirdness, just find a community today that shares those properties. Packet radio, infosec, crypto, gaming, music production, etc. - there's plenty of weird and fun to be found if you look for it.
A lot of online communities today are unbearable tho as everything's become so politicised. It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it for attention. It was probably something that also happened before that but it somehow became really prevalent, at least. And often that took the fun out of it. I kind of think fondly of those times. Now of course this is just anecdotal, but that's what I've experienced in most communities I used to frequent and perhaps lots of other people here did too.
In fact, it's something I really appreciate here on HN, the tone of discussions is rather pleasant and on topic and it's very rare to see people intentionally driving it into the ground, although in contrast to something like a Facebook group it's a lot less personal.
>It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it for attention.
It was actually in September 2013 when it started ... or was it September 1993 ...? Uh, oh, how time flies, never mind.
As someone who has been interacting online since FidoNet was a thing, I have to say ... this is a problem as old as humans. There were plenty of politicized discussions back then, plenty of contentious people, plenty of trolls. In some ways the vibe was different, but really, it wasn't better. Or worse, to be honest.
I distinctly remember a discussion about Something Awful's slogan ("the internet makes you stupid") and how it was actually a keen observation about the internet. Pre-internet you would have people with really bad ideas. These people were so obvious to any normal person that bad thinkers generally shut up because sharing their bad ideas meant being socially ostracized or at least getting shunned.
But then you add the internet, and all these radically bad thinkers find each other and their ideas almost seem normal amongst their type. They not only normalize bad thinking, but they also push for even more radically bad thinking in an effort to out-do each other. End result, you end up with a vociferous contingent of town idiots who don't realize they are town idiots because they only listen to fellow town idiots. Add advertising companies who function on a metrics-first approach, and those town idiots dictate how companies act.
This SMBC from 2013 illustrates the issue as well as anything. And all joking aside, I think it is 100% accurate, and a real problem that we don't yet have a solution for.
There are people being loud in the center who are still incorrectly labelled as "far right" or some other meaningless label and targeted for deplatforming.
Unfortunately, politicization is inevitable when double standards exist in moderation. If you're going to have rules, they need to be applied evenly. We've seen that several of the internet giants are incredibly inconsistent in their approaches to banning content or users from the two sides of the political spectrum. Nowhere seems to be safe, including HN.
A few years ago, I never would have thought I'd be sympathising with Reagan and his "I didn't leave..." quote, particularly considering that I lean left on most political decisions. But man has it been a shock to see how quickly the progressive side of the left shifted what was considered left and right here in the US. And I am dismayed by how all political opinions across the board are now considered shibboleths for a purity test rather than subjects worth discussing.
When I was growing up, my father was a diplomat for the US Foreign Service. He was a small-d democrat. His best friend was a small-r republican. They both greatly valued each other's thoughts and opinions, and each allowed the other to sway their positions across convivial dinner-table discussion. I know such approaches are possible because I saw it on a regular basis, and I would like it if we could get back to said approach.
That was of a different era where politics anb religion wasn't discussed in mixed company. Now you need to yell which side you are on as virtual signage.
> He was a small-d democrat. His best friend was a small-r republican.
Uh, that's not what those mean, unless your father was a monarchist and his friend a believer in dictatorships?
"Small-p Partyname" is used to differentiate the actual word that the party's name is from the proper noun. A small-c conservative is someone who holds conservative beliefs, regardless of whether they support a Conservative party.
In my experience, the other guy has it right: "Small-d democrat" means someone who supports democracy (... enough compared to some base line in whatever context that it's worth discussing), not someone who weakly endorses the Democratic party. A small-d democrat may be an avid big-D Democrat, or a weak one, or not one at all. I'm sure a big portion of the Republican party are small-d democrats when the alternative is monarchism.
> There are people being loud in the center who are still incorrectly labelled as "far right" or some other meaningless label and targeted for deplatforming.
And so on. But are these meaningful examples? I would argue both yes and no. No, because it's difficult to argue that the people calling them out are not a minority of activists who are just pushing their own political agenda.
Yes, because even if it's a minority viewpoint, it's effective - people apathetic to the given issue are likely to take the word of the activists as gospel, which leads to deplatforming.
A very visible example of the effectiveness of this tactic is Charles Murray and The Bell Curve. Regardless of the validity of more sophisticated criticism of his work, he has been effectively denounced as a racist and deplatformed.
This also leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where speakers presenting their ideas find themselves shunned by group X, and supported by group anti-X. As X step up silencing/deplatforming efforts, either the speaker fades into obscurity, or receives enough support from anti-X to continue their work, but now they can reliably be demonized via guilt by association(Jordan Peterson and the NBC news piece is an example).
They are not far-right or alt-right but they continually show sympathies with such ideas, and defend the same status quo that the right-wing wants to support. They are continually invited and supported by right-wing speakers. It's not as though these people are exactly centrists, and even if they were, there's a reason for a left-wing individual to critique them too.
>Charles Murray
Is a member of a right-wing think tank and the serious criticism of his work often alleges him of using scientific racism. Is it a far stretch to say that a proponent of scientific racism is himself a racist? Is it wrong to denounce people on such matters? Perhaps the critique can stretch beyond the mere empirical validity of the results and into the philosophy of what the authors are arguing. These methodological issues are in the purview of critical theory too.
>his also leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where speakers presenting their ideas find themselves shunned by group X, and supported by group anti-X.
I'm skeptical of the idea that the only reason why such people are supported by anti-X is because they have been shunned by X.
It's a popular, or at least persistent, european meme to dramatically underestimate the political diversity of the American public. He believes that all Americans are on the right.
As an American living in Europe, it's actually a fairly accurate one. The American greater public is generally much narrower than in Europe, in particular due to Europe's history with Communism and the various degrees of strength of the labor class compared to America.
There are a lot of "left" policies that are unthinkable and unspeakable at a national discourse level.
That's not accurate. And there are Americans who are very far to the left. Anybody making blanket statements starting with "all Americans" or "no Americans" is guilty of generalization.
It is accurate. Reread what I've said. "It's a fairly accurate portrayal of the national discourse and the court of public opinion," to paraphrase
When was the last time you found yourself questioning capitalism in the USA? That tends to be the center in Europe, and is unthinkable by the general public and national discourse in media in the USA.
Obviously, I am not defending generalizations and recognize extremist political factions exist in the USA. I am not going to get into a semantic battle about what someone else said when the general idea is there and was just expressed poorly, and the poor semantics are used to somehow disprove the actual idea.
> When was the last time you found yourself questioning capitalism in the USA? That tends to be the center in Europe, and is unthinkable by the general public and national discourse in media in the USA.
You might have missed this since you've been living in Europe, but questioning capitalism is extremely popular in the United States ever since 2016. In fact, many European countries are far more secure in the turn-of-the-21st-century neoliberal consensus than the United States is.
The window of allowable discourse in the US doesn't reach as far left as the center of Canada.
Most Canadians steadfastly believe in health care for all, and they'll defend that. They might quibble a tiny bit about the edge like "Should there be any private health care at all?".
In Europe, in many cases, the farthest right parties aren't even as far right as the Democrats in the US. Standard government policies are complete heresy to discourse in the US.
Try talking about Unions in the US. Even in California, that bastion of the Left on the Leftest of coasts. At which point, you're likely going "Yeah, but who worries about Unions in this day and age?", which is exactly what I mean. The rest of the developed world does. A lot.
It's not a generalization, the window of allowable discourse does not encompass much of the spectrum in the US.
The Obamacare reforms brought us about 3/4 of the way to a German-style multiple-payer universal health care system, and those were widely supported as well (enough to be passed into law!). A majority of Americans consistently support at least some type of health care reform that approaches universal coverage: https://www.kff.org/health-reform/poll-finding/kff-health-tr...
> In Europe, in many cases, the farthest right parties aren't even as far right as the Democrats in the US. Standard government policies are complete heresy to discourse in the US.
The last presidential campaign included a debate between the Democratic candidates where both candidates effusively praised the policies of Denmark, which one candidate identified as “socialist”. The Prime Minister of Denmark replied, “Denmark is a market economy”. https://www.thelocal.dk/20151101/danish-pm-in-us-denmark-is-...
> It's not a generalization, the window of allowable discourse does not encompass much of the spectrum in the US.
Bullshit. Half of the country is falling over itself trying to turn the US into a replica of Europe or Canada.
If anything, it’s the opposite—only in the United States is a full, wide spectrum of allowable discourse present. Not only can you find lots of Americans who support virtually any policy commonplace in Europe, but you can find many more who hold views unthinkable or at least unsayable in Europe.
Here are some ways in which the United States is either within European norms or, at times, even further to the left:
* US judicial precedent establishes a constitutional right to abortion on demand early in pregnancies, and some states, including most recently New York, extend this right to any point before childbirth. Most European countries only allow abortion in the first or sometimes the second trimester.
* The United States also recognizes a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, which is not at all recognized in Italy, Greece, Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Switzerland, and Northern Ireland.
* US corporate taxes and regulations are within the European norm. The Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index (https://www.heritage.org/index/) (which defines "economic freedom" as embracing the right-wing economic policies the Heritage Foundation tends to advocate for) rank Switzerland, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Iceland above the United States while ranking the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, and Luxembourg within one point of the US rating.
* In terms of civil liberties, the US is virtually unique in recognizing an absolute right against self-incrimination and an exclusionary rule of evidence, where evidence collected in contravention of anyone's civil rights is admissible in court.
* One of the biggest controversies in recent American politics is whether to overturn the constitutional standard of jus soli birthright citizenship--the notion that any human being born on American soil is unconditionally an American citizen. No European country has this policy at all, let alone enshrined in a written constitution.
* The US does not have mandatory military service. However, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Norway, and Switzerland all do.
* Unlike many European countries, the US has a virtually complete lack of media censorship by the government.
* Austria, France, Belgium, Germany, and Bulgaria have all outlawed face coverings, while Switzerland has banned the construction of minarets. France prohibits the wearing or display of "conspicuous religious symbols" in schools, a law targeted at hijab-wearing Muslims. The United States has no equivalent laws, and any such laws would almost certainly be ruled unconstitutional.
Yeah, and that's best case because it assumes that these are normal populations with normal a-hole distributions, but all acting in good faith--even the a-holes, as much as they can. By that I mean that these are people with genuinely held ideas, some of whom aren't the nicest IRL, and so are just expressing their beliefs "as best they know how".
Instead, we know that there's been great effort to purposely troll and manufacture dissent for political and other purposes. It's really just coming into view as a sustained, organized, and scaled effort but, looking at the tactics on display, it's easy to believe that it's likely been going on much longer.
So, this trashing of the Internet has been deliberate and effective. Hence, the wastelands that YouTube comments, Twitter, FB, et. al. have become.
So what we've now got is weird, but certainly not fun.
There's an information asymmetry that some multiplayer games have exploited to solve this sort of problem (namely, pit all the cheaters and troublemakers against each other), but I think it's that lack of global information that lets it work.
In other forums I think it's easier to detect that you've been shadow banned, and that the reason only certain people are responding to you is that they're the only ones who can see your rants.
What's very interesting and frightening to me is the mental health version of this dynamic.
Someone with anorexia or another illness that destabilizes your perspective may find support in an online community. But they can also seek out and find communities that catalyze the destabilization.
but conversely you might have the contrarian town geniuses also interacting where they would not previously. so I guess it depends on the relative size of the 2 groups and their respective probability of being ostracised in their home environment
There is also more annoying version of this. Previously people with stupid ideas didn't get much practice in rhetorics. In live conversations you get demoralized very quickly when people don't respond in any way.
Today people with stupid ideas are the ones who get most practice in rhetorics. And practice makes you good.
As a result you find very specific kinds of stupid. If you know Nassim Talebs IYI (intellectual yet idiot) there exist supermutants of that phenomenon. For example I just argued with self proclaimed Marxist who managed to have opinions of fascists straight from 40's. He had absolutely delusional view of multitude of things like not believing in industrial revolution, or that machines could outproduce people when making bulk materials. Yet he could muster huge array of minutiae from history, usually correct and supporting whatever weird point he was making. This dude actually was rhetorically decent and very passionate about.. I don't really know what.
Such individuals are far from stupid despite their stupid ideas and they seem to be able to shut down intelligent discussion on niche boards. Specifically because nothing seems to stick: they are not trolls, not really malevolent, not really belonging to any definite camp. Just really twisted, bored and eager to engage others.
>For example I just argued with self proclaimed Marxist who managed to have opinions of fascists straight from 40's.
Is this really a bad thing? Do fascists become less objectionable with time? I'd say they still hold the same abhorrent ideas as they did in the 40s.
>not believing in industrial revolution
As a Marxist myself, that's an odd thing for a Marxist to be saying, but Marx himself does not use that term, so there could be some confusion there - we should be careful with terminology, since they can and do convey particular histories and prejudices and ideologies.
>or that machines could outproduce people when making bulk materials
That's absurd, since Marx makes exactly the opposite point in the first 3 paragraphs of Capital.
Now before you categorise me as twisted, bored and eager to engage others, I'd like to do it first - I really am bored, and at least eager to engage others. When I see a post on a topic I'm relatively familiar with (in this case Marx) I feel the need to comment on it. Now I pledged that I would do that less, but I felt a kind of draw to reply to your comment. Why, I'm not even sure. Perhaps to correct the record on a topic I feel passionately about. But I hope you don't see me as shutting down intelligent discussion, anyway.
Since getting into philosophy I've started to become skeptical of calling people stupid if I don't have any grounds to disagree with them, even if Taleb would group such people, ideas we often think are bad or false at first sight can actually be very reasonable once we peer under the ideology.
>without some minority of users politicising it for attention
What does "politicising" mean, and how do you know their motives? If you mean what I think you mean, i.e. women for example standing up for their right to be included in historically male-led organizations (say, a SDR club), I must admit skepticism - perhaps what you are witnessing isn't "doing something for attention," but instead "demanding to be treated as an equal?"
> What does "politicising" mean, and how do you know their motives?
Example right here. For better or worse, some people will try to make everything about their pet issues. It doesn't really matter if their motives are good when every single discussion gets dragged into the 2010's version of Godwin's Law.
The OP gave no example, so I had to make a guess. In my experience, people that complain about "groups getting politicized" generally mean "a minority joined and was upset when we weren't inclusive."
Perhaps I should have simply left it at the question, but the internet is a frustrating place to have dialogues like that - clarifying every tiny point before running out of space for a counter argument.
He meant you were the example. I am not saying it was your intention, but the way you mentioned a particular issue and then added your opinion on the issue in your comment is one way people inject their beliefs into otherwise unrelated conversation. I know you needed an example to make your point, but the grandparent was trying to make a point of your comment.
I remember it always being political. Back in 2002 most of the posts in the Command and Conquer Generals forums where various views on if Bush should invade Iraq or not. That community died the day EA banned political discussions.
The day EA killed Westwood Chat and it's active community and replaced it with their hideous in-game matchmaking was I think the day the internet stopped being fun and weird for me.
Or I maybe just lost my internet innocence, seeing Big Game come in and decide on a whim to toss in the bin the place where I spent most of my after school time. Also where I learned how to un-ban myself by editing the right registry key. :D
>A lot of online communities today are unbearable tho as everything's become so politicised. It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it for attention
Can you help me understand your argument by giving examples of what this means? What is "politicising" and what communities have you seened ruined by "some minority of users politicising it for attention?"
Just exploring the subject here, please don't feel attacked: what would "not be tolerated" mean, and what sort of opinions could be considered "dissenting?"
A recent example from reddit: An influential person in a small community came out as trans and preferred to live as a women now. The OP who wanted to bring this to the attention of the community and wrote:
> Given the misogynistic reputation that the community has, I think it would be good for people to go out of our way to send a message or say something about how her coming out is a positive thing.
Que the comments being about this inflammatory statement and not about what the post was meant to be about, and for good reason. People that criticised OP were met with angry replies and stuff like this:
> Lotsa male white fragility all over this thread.
2 hours later another user made a solid post highlighting nothing but her, her achievements and detailing just how influential she has been and still is for the community, the comments were nothing but praise, positivity and celebration.
IMO a pretty good example of something being politicised for no reason and directly being a detriment to the community.
On the Internet you get a Covington Catholic school incident every other day. There's lots of extreme accusations (racism, homophobia, sexism etc) thrown around with little backing evidence. I think Jonathan Haidt explains it best, where the barrier to communication has moved from "reasonable person" standards (if someone says something that could be construed as extreme/hateful you give them the benefit of the doubt but get them to clarify) to "most sensitive person in the room" standards (anything that could be offensive, even if its not intended at all, is construed as the person being some horrible monster). It leads to extreme self censorship because people are scared to talk in case they something that could be taken out of context, treated uncharitably and used to whip up a twitter mob. Coming from a moderate position it seems to me that this has had a chilling effect on debate and lead to the public square being dominated primarily by the extremes of both sides.
> In fact, it's something I really appreciate here on HN, the tone of discussions is rather pleasant and on topic
I've been a member here since 2008, 10 odd years! It has been quite consistent, and an almost daily visit for me since joining. I don't know how they do it but I am glad that they do.
...and sometimes, things really were better, too. Regressions happen, and the Eternal September is real.
This does not mean that there aren't wonderful things available in today's web environment, too. There is no one to blame other than the natural evolution of a system. But something was lost, and it is ok to miss it.
> Regressions happen, and the Eternal September is real.
Now that UUCP time has come and gone, I wonder if Usenet might have returned to its once former glory. It would be a really good place for technical conversation.
It's a decent ready-to-go forum. I only used it for the clojure groups, but then the clj community discovered slack. All that useful topically categorized awesomeness now must be mined from worthless slack logs.
Usenet still exists independent of Google Groups. Google provides an interface for users to post on Usenet groups, at least until they decide to stop supporting it, but you don't need Google at all to get on Usenet: http://www.eternal-september.org/
But 'Eternal September' describes what happens to a particular platform, as something moves from niche to mainstream. There are new niche things that take their place, but people are often at a point in their lives where they aren't seeking out the new niche stuff anymore.
>There are new niche things that take their place, but people are often at a point in their lives where they aren't seeking out the new niche stuff anymore.
Speaking just for myself, here, but this has not been my experience. In my opinion, that interest in the early internet was a niche was essentially orthogonal to what it offered. It just so happened that the mindset of folks who would be attracted to the early offerings was a small portion of the overall population. But it wasn't the fact that the group was comparatively small that was what was interesting.
Right, but my point was that during that early internet period, you just happened to be in the niche group that was on it. There are new niche things out there now, but you aren't in the right group to be in that niche anymore.
Re-reading what I wrote, I see that I neglected to mention the other salient aspect- I don't find it difficult to find niche interests nowaday at all. Thanks to the internet, finding like-minded individuals for just about anything has never been easier.
But it's a different feeling than it was before, because of how things work. And some of that works against the process of forming smaller, tight-knit communities than how it used to be. And it's ok to lament loss.
>Regressions happen, and the Eternal September is real.
Is that a regression, though? I mean the state pre-ES was basically that the unwashed masses weren't able to use a special service for their more-refined betters.
To me, it's essentially the difference between a country club and a public park. Certainly, the country club is better maintained and more pleasant for its members than a public park. But there's, at minimum, a strong case to be made that a park that all may use is a greater social good than a country club limited to a few.
They rapidly became a place where people from all walks of life could, and did, come for lively discussion. And their rapid increase in popularity caused them to collapse from their own success.
Early access to the internet was, by definition, limited to people who were on academic or military networks. But by the time BBS culture came about, it was the thrill of finding like-minded folks from wherever they might be- it was not a culture based on exclusion per se, like what you would find at a country club.
I chose country club specifically because I think there has always been a strong fiction of meritocracy in IT and I was very specifically highlighting the exclusatory nature of the culture.
"All walks of life" is a polite fiction. The September in "Eternal September", after all, refers to university intake. "Wherever they might be" is a bit of a cop-out, because they weren't really "wherever", they were in other universities.
It wasn't a coffee shop, it was a strongly walled garden which only very specific groups of people could reasonably access.
Modems have been around for a very long time. By the time the mid-80's rolled around, a 300-baud cuff modem was well within the range of a young kid who had some paper-route money, because that's what I did. And my family was not wealthy at all.
[edit]- I found an article from 1987 talking about how amazingly fast (and cheap) the new 2400 baud modems were. I had to chuckle, as I still remember going from 300 (slow enough that your reading speed was baud-limited) to 1200 (wow! I can barely keep up!) 2400 and above was a speed that seemed almost decadent.
Not all parents were OK with blocking the phone line with a modem when they have just watched a movie were a curious teenager almost started WW III by accidentally hacking into the Pentagon (speaking from experience).
I thought it was so cool to have an acoustic-coupler modem like Broderick's character in War Games. Never did find the number to connect to the WOPR, though.
In the mid-80s, only maybe 10% of U.S. households had a computer, much less a modem. You also paid by-the-minute long-distance charges for calling anyone (or any computer) outside your town.
That's why local BBSes that were part of a relay network were so popular. Communicating with folks far outside one's home range 'for free' was exciting!
Oh, yeah, if local calls weren't free, BBS's would have never taken off the way they did. It was a thrill being part of a network where each BBS would make a nightly call to the furthest still-local BBS, which would then repeat the process... You could reach all the way across the country and back in a few days, for free! It felt like you were getting away with something. Exciting times.
I think what changed is less access to consumption, but access to making your own. When you wanted to host your own community, you need a domain and a server and some technical skills. That was a much higher bar than you need to create a Facebook community. That's ultimately what made the internet boring. Every special interest group used to have their own hand created websites that were a labor of passion. Now it's just another Facebook group or sub Reddit.
That's part of it, no doubt. I got started in the BBS era, pre-WWW, and the folks that set up their own bulletin boards were all interesting in their own right. Each board, even if it used the same base software as another, had its own distinct personality and flavor.
Access to a modem, a piece of hardware that cost hundreds of dollars, and obviously also required a machine that cost thousands. Unless you attended a university, which was also more exclusive in the early 80s than now.
Things changed very rapidly back then. By the time I was old enough to be part of BBS culture (mid-80's), a Commodore was a couple hundred dollars, and a modem not even $100. Penetration by % of population was low compared to today's ubiquity, but competent machines were readily affordable to the majority of Americans.
>But there's, at minimum, a strong case to be made that a park that all may use is a greater social good than a country club limited to a few.
Can't both sides be correct? There is certainly a host of good feelings one gets when they're a part of something that is exclusive. (Not saying it's morally right, just making an observation.) Whether those feelings are altruistic or not is besides the point. From that person's point of view, they no longer have those good feelings when their club is no longer exclusive.
From the view of the larger public, the ends justify the means as the happiness of all is larger than the loss of happiness of the few. But for those few, it's still worse.
I suppose it depends on where you are, but where I'm from many populist folks don't really believe in the Tragedy of the Commons. God gave them the resources to use, we can't possibly use them all up, humans aren't powerful enough to change the earth, yadda yadda.
Global Climate Change is just one big Tragedy of the Commons.
- no regulations (yet)
- lots of unknowns
- very few hidden motives
That said, the duration of this state is probably quantifiable. Everything has these traits at first, until human stay for a while, then organization naturally takes place, taking the virginial beauty off at the same time.
I've read that some antique cultures believed in burning things to the ground. I wonder if that's not a useful thing.
There's been a real qualitative change too. It was October 27th, 1994, and it was Wired's fault. The same year those bottom feeding lawyers decided to bombard Usenet with their green card spam. The first banner advertiser was AT&T:
I think, weirdly, I have a harder time finding communities around that sort of thing now. I mostly read HN. Where would I go to find something like HN for, say, sustainable living? woodworking? cycling infrastructure? A lot of it is, if nothing else, subsumed in to a Facebook group, or a slack group, etc.
The best I've found is small subreddits. Which is not ideal, because discovery is a giant PITA. Much like the split between /r/trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts (the /trees subreddit was first founded by people who were talking about weed, and people who wanted to talk about actual trees were a little nonplussed at the whole thing, thus creating /marijuanaenthusiasts and using it for tree-talk) most of the better communities are using a name that is not immediately obvious, so that they aren't oversaturated from the get-go.
The bigger problem with reddit, in my experience, is that 95% of the comments on any given post are pure garbage filler. Joke chains as far as the eye can see.
Hacker news is 30x worse because you don't even see replies to your comments so the fire and forget mentality is very strong. Also very discouraging to reply to older comments because once it gets over a day old its likely even the person you reply to wont see it.
HN is also quite bad to have long-term discussions about a topic, and suffers from the same constant rehashing of topics happening on reddit. It sort of works for news and random individual articles, where there aren't necessarily longer logical threads, but that's not what many communities need.
E.g. a typical comparison between forums and reddit: A hobby forum often has a "I just bought X" megathread or two, where people post new things they've bought and want to share their excitement about, but that don't warrant a full thread. On hobby subreddits, a large amount of the threads can be "I just bought the thing everyone always recommends and everyone has seen 20 times this week, can't wait to use it!". Similarly, what would have been a single post on an old thread in a forum needs to be it's own thread on reddit, loosing context and making search harder (even if people try to link other relevant threads). Which in turn leads to more repeat questions etc.
Moderation is definitely key to dealing with that issue.
For me, as with HN, I don't like the inherent stress of commenting on submissions before they fall off the front page. The earlier one comments, the higher the chances of getting eyeballs/responses. After that short ~24 hour window, people may still read the comments, but submitting new comments seems futile.
As opposed to older "style" forums, even today, threads often stay open, allowing people to post months or years later to revive "dead" threads.
The two-hour edit window and rapid falloff on HN are two of my least-favorite aspects of discussion on this site. It is almost a daily occurence I'll come across something interesting here, get ready to type a contribution to the conversation, then realize that it's too late, and it won't be read. It is a little demoralizing.
I'm sure this approach also eases the moderation burden, and I'm pretty impressed overall with how dang handles things. So maybe it is a simple workload necessity. It does strike me that HN could be quite a bit more if these two restrictions were loosed.
Most SO sites have too many moderators squelching any attempts at constructive, and deleting the unique as duplicate. Like Wikipedia it's become incredibly hostile to newcomers.
The Internet was better because it was not yet another way to spoonfeed culture to a complacent populace. The Internet was for interested people, now it's for everyone. It is not better now. I mean sure the video is HD but the content is usually garbage.
Maybe the internet was just new. And then it got old. Then your mom started using it. The first album is always the best. By the fifth album the band just sucks.
> just find a community today that shares those properties
How? I can't even search for shit anymore without being drowned in results that have nothing to do with what I searched for, but are kinda-sorta similar and get visited a lot more often.
I think this is closer to what I think has happened. The internet is used by such a large percentage of the population that "weird" sites now are going to be smaller in relation to sites that appeal to "the masses." The ratio of "weirdos to non-weirdos" on the internet today is significantly smaller than the mid 90s. "The masses" were very underrepresented online back then. :)
This is the most obvious Golden Age Fallacy I saw in Jarred's text:
> MySpace showed the world that if you make powerful and complicated tools (like coding) accessible to anyone, people are smart enough to figure out how to use them.
My own experience with MySpace was that every page I landed on looked like a dumpster fire. I can't recall a single person who exhibited competence in using the tools MySpace gave you. Everything was always poor contrast with a cockeyed layout.
That's their whole point - each page was individualistic, people were trying crazy things and showcasing their own personal style. The one thing that it wasn't was bland.
> My own experience with MySpace was that every page I landed on looked like a dumpster fire.
Reading this, I finally get what people mean when they say "But Snapchat is supposed to have an unintuitive UI".
I was big into editing Myspace HTML back in the day. There were simply so many possibilities. The design was an extension of your style, howrver crude and unfinished it might have been.
That Glitch is not as popular as My Space was tells something about what people that use internet want; and shows that the internet is still fun and weird for people that like fun and weird.
Glitch sounds amazing, and way better than the tools that existed back then.
But back then, Geocities was popular and loads of people had heard of it. I have never heard of Glitch. It seems like there's become a re-division between "people who like to tinker" and "literally everyone else". On the one hand that's great but it kind of feels like everything is AOL again now.
The last vestige of fun, weird and popular is probably Tumblr, which everyone agrees has the absolute worst user interface. But you can theme your Tumblr page to your absolute heart's desire.
No joke, I do remember when Facebook came onto the scene, I liked it way better than MySpace. I absolutely hated how customized MySpace pages became. It was dreck. Sound would blast when you opened someone's page. You could barely read what was on the page at times. It was occasionally fun but more often than not really terrible.
Reading the article my thought was "one person's fun and weird is another person's loud and obnoxious".
These days people have to focus more on the content because the presentation is so locked down. This may be for the better, but it can definitely feel antiseptic and corporate. The sense of fun is lost.
Where does Facebook offer a place to put "content"? AFAIK You can give them personal info and suggest interesting things, and Facebook decides how, if, or when to present this information, and to whom.
When Myspace came along, it clearly seemed to be the cesspool of the internet; I never created a page and never visited it out of principle. There was nothing I wanted out there.
Facebook's clean design was what I actually wanted. Not some autoplay crap music.
In fact, back in the day, everything in Facebook was a search. I could click on your residence or your class/section and see everyone else in it. It was awesome and useful.
The tinkerers were a larger proportion of web users in the 90's and hence had more visibility with their larger share of available content. Now they're drowned by the sea of services for norms to consume.
But Glitch isn't a way for a normal person to express themselves, is it? Sure, you can write code which can be viewed by everyone, but you can do the same with github, Glitch is mostly only used by programmers, and you can't express yourself through code like you can express yourself through styling your own social media profile.
Normal people already express themselves on mainstream social media, about normal things. Normal people aren't the ones wishing the web was weird and quirky again, and they couldn't care less that Facebook or Twitter doesn't let them customize their CSS.
They put a really strong emphasis on lowering the barrier to entry. While you're right that it still requires you to write code, so did the MySpace weirdness of olde. I think the difference is it allowed you to only write the code, and they would handle the rest.
Honestly, I can't fathom how you could make such a statement. Granted, most people can't express themselves through code - but that doesn't mean in general you can't.
When I am feeling creative, I need a medium that allows me to keep up the momentum. Coding requires too much thought for my creative process in a visual medium (for exmaple).
> [this] shows that the internet is still fun and weird for people that like fun and weird
Does it, though? Google used to give search results, now it gives Google Search Results™ and most navigation is dictated by what appears in social media feeds. The behemoths are able to enforce a sense of legitimacy in their own products while marginalizing any threats to their dominance. If they really can't stop a rising star that is pulling away users by squashing or copying them then it is no issue to throw some money at the problem and buy them out.
Sites like Glitch assume that you already have a good grasp of tech/software engineering.
The big appeal of the early internet was that anyone could make something neat with simple HTML shenanigans, and learn to code by hacking the HTML templates to their needs. Many coders got their start by hacking Neopets storefronts. (there were actual coding puzzles on Neopets too for their events!)
I think it is much easier for a non-technical person to put up a website today than in the 90s. Today you need absolutely zero coding knowledge, not even HTML.
Back in the 90s (at least in the second half) you didn't need how to code. You just used Dreamweaver or Frontpage and you got your site! The only technical bits were to use FTP to upload it to your free hosting provider.
Well, we've only been at this for a little while, and we don't even have a way to follow other people or invite your friends yet. :) Rest assured, we're planning to keep going. And probably with fewer Tila Tequilas, of either the MySpace or neo-nazi variety.
I've been saying that MySpace was the last time the internet was at all good for... years now. Of course most of it was annoying, but if you don't let people be annoying you're also restricting the range of everyone's speech. 99% of everything is crap, but if you don't allow the crap, the 1% of good stuff will evaporate, too.
Between the sanitized Facebook and the siloing of people into apps, there's fewer obvious social on-ramps to coding on the internet, especially now that so much is mediated by apps.
While it's true that platforms on the internet become more and more similar to each other, both in terms of functionality, lack of customizability, and design, it's not possible to allow unsanitized input anymore. There are too many ways to exploit input, not only with JS, but also with CSS, and trying to allow custom styles while preventing exploits is an arms race.
That said, social platforms not allowing users to express themselves through canvas and styles could be a matter of consistency and usability, while the myspace pages were a form of expression; they were certainly a pain to use and navigate through.
>Nobody ever talks about why this was bad for the world.
Stop just a minute there. Who says that random people copy pasting CSS and HTML they don't understand is even a good thing? Let's be clear, 99% of people don't understand that stuff, it's just copy pasting.
If you want a glitter blog, then launch a blog with that option. But letting people do it themselves just adds risk to themselves they'll never understand.
Edit: to be clear, if you said pasting <script>alert(911)</script> can be used to call the cops from your computer, then 99% of people would assume that's what it did until they tried it. 99% of people are not coders and it might as well be a foreign language they are pasting into a Google Translate to see what it means. If it happened to contain JS, well, too late. See the warnings in the FB JS console for a reminder that people are gullible and will copy paste anything they are told to.
I think you are remembering. In the blog screenshot of myspace, when it says "Javascript is not allowed", it was acting as "a sign, not a cop" [0]. Most websites were riddled with security flaws, to the point that you'll find there wasn't really any comprehensive listing of major vulnerabilities in websites because people didn't really understand that an XSS was a problem until someone actually used it in an attack. This example from 2005 shows that their security to prevent JS was sorely lacking.
To be fair, lots of random people (myself included) `npm install`'ing things they don't understand but seem to do the trick has generally been a good thing.
Or, at least there's been far fewer incidents of that blind trust spectacularly blowing up than the pitchfork mobs about to come after this comment might lead you to expect. Perhaps you might say that npm users at least understand the risks we take on when we do it, but I still don't think most npm users give it all that much thought...
It’s commercialized, that’s it. You still have the same weird stuff, probably even with some growth but it doesn’t get visibility relative to all the commercialism.
Having been on BBSes and the internet since the mid 80s I’m as sad and nostalgic about it as anyone but you can’t turn back the clock. Instead we need to fight today’s battle—big tech company hegemony.
The internet is the great equalizer (1996). People used to believe that. Today, it sounds sarcastic.
We — the programmers, designers, product people — collectively decided that users don't deserve the right to code in everyday products. Users are too stupid. They'd break stuff. Coding is too complicated for ordinary people. Besides, we can just do the coding...so why does it matter?
As a programmer, let me say that when I've switched over to the role of user: As for our bedside manner, we programmers xxxxcould stand to improve a bit! (Not all. But on average.) Remember to treat users as people you're supposed to serve, not as an underclass that needs to be kept in line.
As annoying as MySpace tended to be, I fully appreciate what the article is getting at.
I miss the days where people who wanted to have an online presence could create a website, and it was actually a comparatively good experience.
Facebook is the defacto standard now, and you have to do things their way. Yes it is by far the easiest way for most people to share their photos and thoughts if they want their friends to see them. Unless they are twitterers or whatever.
But I really wish the internet had continued to progress as....it could have.
The Internet is not fun and weird anymore because it was used to be a hobby. Nowadays content creators do it for the money. When you create content for your hobby you're more relaxed. You can say stupid things, make mistakes, interact with your visitors, try and build a community because relationships is all there is. The moment advertising comes into play everything has to look professional. You start asking for emails to send newsletters and you shove advertisements into the visitor's face in order to get a click. Your site becomes impersonal after a while.
I agree, along with a corresponding point, production values. Now, everyone who makes a video has to have theme music, an intro, and use specific cues. Podcasts all tend to sound the same too. Do these aspects really add anything or are they just gatekeepers about who can conform? I've seen plenty of slick videos on Youtube that have little content, while less produced videos may have way more useful content but they don't take off because they don't have support.
Maybe the slick presentations put people in a headspace, but that on its own is the start of the slippery slope of not being original because then everything has to be streamlined to those expectations, and productions aren't recognized unless they have these features.
It will probably take another leap before the internet moves past this, where presentations aren't videos with one view and one soundtrack focused on particular personality types, where text and charts aren't pictures but rather mixable data used to render arbitrary views. I guess ironically if Flash had taken over the Web in the early days we might be closer to that vision now since it was more the focus to create an interactive work rather than using a desktop application to generate a video, or the generally harder slog to create interactives in Web technologies.
But the author (vendor?) seems to miss what was actually fun and weird about the "old days." When you screwed around with MySpace like that, you got that pleasurable frisson borne of thinking that you were doing something you weren't supposed to do -- or that you were doing something the developers of MySpace hadn't foreseen.
Creating a tightly circumscribed environment in which "glitter" is one of your built-in affordances is hardly the same thing. It's the difference between discovering rocket jumping in Doom and having rocket jumping become an intentional mechanic in Quake. The latter might still be fun, but it's no longer weird (and certainly not fun because it is weird).
Man, this really resonates with me. I learned how to program because I wanted a website for my Halo 2 team back in late HS early college. I started with a MySpace and learned some basic HTML and CSS (a minute after I learned that making a website was not just dragging things around in MS office and saving the file as "www.my-cool-website.com"). It was ugly and it was hard. Then a friend told me he had some hosting we could use and I learned to hack together some PHP in notepad.exe with just enough MySQL to add and remove things. I used for loops and that was it. No functions or classes. One big file, similar things were copied and pasted all over. No version control, just a handful of different copies of the PHP file on my computer, and deploying was uploading via FTP. I got a bootleg version of photoshop and learned how to make fancy web 2.0 graphics, and I installed PHPBB and integrated it into our site. The forum was actually pretty successful for a hot minute (a hundred or so active users) and I learned a little bit about community management.
I do disagree that "coding is now a privilege" or at least that it's more a privilege because of the demise of MySpace. It's easier than ever to learn how to program; it just takes time and motivation. The only thing that's harder is figuring out which technologies you actually need to learn to realize your vision (because there are so many more ways of doing things than there were in 2006); however, people are also generally nicer now than in 2006 (when I would ask people for help, they often would expect me to have read certain textbooks or know C before they would send me the link on standing up a LAMP stack). The toxic bits of StackOverflow culture were just normal--if you didn't already know the answer, you didn't deserve to know it.
Anyway, that's my 5 minute stream of recollection.
Yeah, I think the issue is there's not a lot of low-hanging fruit anymore. No one hacks together some PHP scripts to create a community website anymore, they just make a Facebook group, or use Discord or whatever.
Agreed. I think it's a deficiency of imagination. If I had the time I'd reinvent wheels all day. I'd especially love to figure out how to make some of the cool open source cloud native projects feasible for use by some college kid who wants to run a distributed ecosystem on a cluster of old laptops and raspberry pis without 10 years of devops or sysadmin experience.
This still exists you just have to dig quite deeply for it. I created https://ratwires.space (NSFW) specifically to try and bring back some of the things that made the internet weird and wonderful when I was growing up but within a more modern framework rather than simply trying to make another GeoCities clone.
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[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 375 ms ] threadA typical case of retroactive romantecism. picking one aspect, romantecising it, ignoring everything else.
I mean, if we want to take off the rose tinted glasses and look at it honestly, disregarding the homogeneity of modern frameworked layouts versus a Geocities page with a fire background and crimson Morpheus text, the quality and variety of content is much better on the modern web than the old, as is the availability of media and depth of interaction that social media, for all its negatives, provides.
I feel like what the modern web may lack in style, it gains (and surpasses the old web) in substance. And I think that's a fair trade.
But yeah, a lot of custom MySpace pages were just terrible. A friend of mine set the background to his to a snowy forest and set the foreground text to white, making it basically unreadable. He tried to defend it by pointing out that if you highlight the text, it becomes readable. I tried to show him that if he really wanted that image as a background, he should spend two seconds in Photoshop to lighten the image so he can put black text over it and keep it readable, but he just went off about how much he prefers white text.
What I find funny you might find horrible.
Everything boils down to the most agreeable format in the end
I think that's the wrong assumption to make - we figured out the language of the internet, and developed a design methodology that worked, though it continues to evolve.
It's just that back in the days 1% of the Internet population would use them and today 0,0001%.
With Smartphones the non-outcasts found the Internet finally interesting and filled it with boring stuff like Instagram and Tinder.
Got a facebook page? Same format for everyone. Just another brick in the wall
Got a MySpace page back then? You have a playground to express yourself, you are a human being.
Allowing arbitrary HTML allows hackers to use your site to impersonate login pages, using your trusted SSL certificate to make the page appear authorized in the browser header.
Allowing arbitrary content allowed hackers to exploit browsers to run arbitrary code and go wild from there with user permissions.
Allowing arbitrary HTML mixes poorly with having more than one user doing it on a page.
Allowing arbitrary content to be uploaded and served out means that if you're lucky, you'll go bankrupt serving people pirated movies, and if you're not lucky, you'll go bankrupt and to prison for serving child porn.
This is just a sample of the problems.
You have to sandbox this stuff, and the crazier the line you try to draw with the sandbox around what is safe to do, the harder it is to secure.
For its many sins, Flash was actually a pretty great sandbox for people to play with that way (as long as it didn't have one of its many security issues at the time)
How many security updates did Flash have over the course of its life? Back in the heyday I remember it having to update multiple times a week.
One. When they finally killed it.
All other updates were more or less security sidegrades.
But by the time you've solved them all, you're pretty much back to where Reddit, HN, Facebook, etc. are. I assume the author does not consider those "fun and weird".
I mean, I remember when Slashdot was having trouble with user abuse of <pre> tags. A simple <pre> tag of all things! When you scale up, you have to close all the little holes, and what's left is not "fun and weird".
You can have fun and weird. It's out there, if you look, and worst case, you can always deploy your own site and do anything you want. But you can't have fun and weird at scale.
There were also all sorts of ways to sneak JavaScript back in. I remember embedding a javascript: protocol link inside a Flash applet would do it (flash eventually blocked that though).
Alternatively, you don't need a form tag. Just show a login set of text inputs and an image that looks like a submit button. That button links you to a phishing site that says "oops! try again" and then you put your password in a second time and this time it's a real form. So you'd have to get rid of text inputs entirely.
EDIT: I brainfarted and totally forgot about inline event handlers. Go easy on the downvotes please.
That document is scary! There are 70 different ways to encode an opening angle bracket, what is just a tiny side note...
https://xkcd.com/386/
>Allowing arbitrary HTML allows hackers to use your site to impersonate login pages, using your trusted SSL certificate to make the page appear authorized in the browser header.
Make each user have their own custom virtual host (yourname.example.com).
>Allowing arbitrary content allowed hackers to exploit browsers to run arbitrary code and go wild from there with user permissions.
Arbitrary does not mean you can't sanitize it. You can specifically restrict javascript for example.
>Allowing arbitrary HTML mixes poorly with having more than one user doing it on a page.
You don't necessarily need more than one person doing it on a page. Each person can have their own page.
>Allowing arbitrary content to be uploaded and served out means that if you're lucky, you'll go bankrupt serving people pirated movies, and if you're not lucky, you'll go bankrupt and to prison for serving child porn.
You could say the same thing about Facebook. We have the safe harbor act and we have the ability to monitor these systems for misuse.
As I said in a cousin reply, of course all the problems are solvable. But you end up back at not "fun and weird" by the author's definition.
That's only half the answer. The real answer is that no one wants to spend the time to offer those features securely.
It's perfectly cromulent to allow users to upload CSS and html and even javascript. You just have to put a lot of effort into making it safe.
Look what we did on reddit -- we allowed users to make almost any CSS they want, and look at the beautiful creations that have come from that (like all the sports reddits). It was a lot of work figuring out how to make it safe, but we did it.
And now they're putting in a ton of effort to make it work on mobile too. Because reddit still values user creativity.
It's totally possible to allow all that creativity, it just takes time and consideration to make it safe.
>It's perfectly cromulent to allow users to upload CSS and html and even javascript. You just have to put a lot of effort into making it safe.
I work in an online payment company. Custom CSS is one of the features we hate the most implementing. It is very difficult to get it right and the cost of maintenance is quite high.
And locking down gets really hard, unfortunately,
The main reason I have a reddit account is so I can turn off custom CSS for subreddits because otherwise it's almost as garish as MySpace. When they finally eliminate the "old" reddit, I'm gone (unless they hire a competent UX person before then).
Sanitized is also appropriate.
As one of the women who was online back then, I didn't perceive it as "masculine", fwiw.
I think the initial observation is interesting.
Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Reddit likes are good value from a marketing perspective.
It's the circle of life.
I used to use Geocities and yeah the internet and HTML were sort of synonymous. As users my friends and I all had pages we'd do things on and show each other.
I suspect the issue is that long term that doesn't bring in users who DO NOT want to do that and thus your user base is limited, and once you make a place that does appeal to the folks who don't want to dip their toes in code.... you just stick everyone there.
If you're talking about security issues, I get that, valid concern. I've got no good answer for it.
I do think there is a loss, that there isn't that personality.
[1] - https://neocities.org/
http://www.oocities.org/
...and no, it all wasn't able to be saved - but a massive amount was managed to be preserved (it used to be available as a torrent - assuming it is still being seeded, you might be able to download a copy if you really want it - but it ain't small).
I think there just isn't much of a desire among most people to be "creative" with their layouts. Most people use social media like an appliance, they care about the networking and communication and are satisfied as long as that works.
It is though a good example of "fun and weird" and a little sad it was left out as social media grew. I get why, but still feels like that character missing is a loss of some kind.
Essentially with mass adoption it got increasingly lowest common denominator.
Still sad that the two couldn't live side by side, a standard experience with a customization one.
I get why it wouldn't just if you were making a product now with two different experiences and one would take a lot more maintenance.
Still.... everyone's facebook or twitter account or whatever looks the same. Feels to me like we lost a lot of personality.
The internet was a lot smaller and inhabited by curious nerds - to find similar fun and weirdness, just find a community today that shares those properties. Packet radio, infosec, crypto, gaming, music production, etc. - there's plenty of weird and fun to be found if you look for it.
In fact, it's something I really appreciate here on HN, the tone of discussions is rather pleasant and on topic and it's very rare to see people intentionally driving it into the ground, although in contrast to something like a Facebook group it's a lot less personal.
It was actually in September 2013 when it started ... or was it September 1993 ...? Uh, oh, how time flies, never mind.
But then you add the internet, and all these radically bad thinkers find each other and their ideas almost seem normal amongst their type. They not only normalize bad thinking, but they also push for even more radically bad thinking in an effort to out-do each other. End result, you end up with a vociferous contingent of town idiots who don't realize they are town idiots because they only listen to fellow town idiots. Add advertising companies who function on a metrics-first approach, and those town idiots dictate how companies act.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07
We need more people to be loud in the center.
Unfortunately, politicization is inevitable when double standards exist in moderation. If you're going to have rules, they need to be applied evenly. We've seen that several of the internet giants are incredibly inconsistent in their approaches to banning content or users from the two sides of the political spectrum. Nowhere seems to be safe, including HN.
When I was growing up, my father was a diplomat for the US Foreign Service. He was a small-d democrat. His best friend was a small-r republican. They both greatly valued each other's thoughts and opinions, and each allowed the other to sway their positions across convivial dinner-table discussion. I know such approaches are possible because I saw it on a regular basis, and I would like it if we could get back to said approach.
Uh, that's not what those mean, unless your father was a monarchist and his friend a believer in dictatorships?
"Small-p Partyname" is used to differentiate the actual word that the party's name is from the proper noun. A small-c conservative is someone who holds conservative beliefs, regardless of whether they support a Conservative party.
Could you give some examples?
Dave Rubin(https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/24/17883330/d...)
Jordan Peterson(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCGewQc9ktA)
And so on. But are these meaningful examples? I would argue both yes and no. No, because it's difficult to argue that the people calling them out are not a minority of activists who are just pushing their own political agenda.
Yes, because even if it's a minority viewpoint, it's effective - people apathetic to the given issue are likely to take the word of the activists as gospel, which leads to deplatforming.
A very visible example of the effectiveness of this tactic is Charles Murray and The Bell Curve. Regardless of the validity of more sophisticated criticism of his work, he has been effectively denounced as a racist and deplatformed.
This also leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where speakers presenting their ideas find themselves shunned by group X, and supported by group anti-X. As X step up silencing/deplatforming efforts, either the speaker fades into obscurity, or receives enough support from anti-X to continue their work, but now they can reliably be demonized via guilt by association(Jordan Peterson and the NBC news piece is an example).
>Charles Murray
Is a member of a right-wing think tank and the serious criticism of his work often alleges him of using scientific racism. Is it a far stretch to say that a proponent of scientific racism is himself a racist? Is it wrong to denounce people on such matters? Perhaps the critique can stretch beyond the mere empirical validity of the results and into the philosophy of what the authors are arguing. These methodological issues are in the purview of critical theory too.
>his also leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where speakers presenting their ideas find themselves shunned by group X, and supported by group anti-X.
I'm skeptical of the idea that the only reason why such people are supported by anti-X is because they have been shunned by X.
None of you are in the center.
Just a bit of perspective for you.
There are a lot of "left" policies that are unthinkable and unspeakable at a national discourse level.
That's not accurate. And there are Americans who are very far to the left. Anybody making blanket statements starting with "all Americans" or "no Americans" is guilty of generalization.
When was the last time you found yourself questioning capitalism in the USA? That tends to be the center in Europe, and is unthinkable by the general public and national discourse in media in the USA.
Obviously, I am not defending generalizations and recognize extremist political factions exist in the USA. I am not going to get into a semantic battle about what someone else said when the general idea is there and was just expressed poorly, and the poor semantics are used to somehow disprove the actual idea.
You might have missed this since you've been living in Europe, but questioning capitalism is extremely popular in the United States ever since 2016. In fact, many European countries are far more secure in the turn-of-the-21st-century neoliberal consensus than the United States is.
Most Canadians steadfastly believe in health care for all, and they'll defend that. They might quibble a tiny bit about the edge like "Should there be any private health care at all?".
In Europe, in many cases, the farthest right parties aren't even as far right as the Democrats in the US. Standard government policies are complete heresy to discourse in the US.
Try talking about Unions in the US. Even in California, that bastion of the Left on the Leftest of coasts. At which point, you're likely going "Yeah, but who worries about Unions in this day and age?", which is exactly what I mean. The rest of the developed world does. A lot.
It's not a generalization, the window of allowable discourse does not encompass much of the spectrum in the US.
> Most Canadians steadfastly believe in health care for all, and they'll defend that.
Setting up a Canada-style single payer health care system is well within the window of allowable discourse in the USA.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Healt...
The Obamacare reforms brought us about 3/4 of the way to a German-style multiple-payer universal health care system, and those were widely supported as well (enough to be passed into law!). A majority of Americans consistently support at least some type of health care reform that approaches universal coverage: https://www.kff.org/health-reform/poll-finding/kff-health-tr...
> In Europe, in many cases, the farthest right parties aren't even as far right as the Democrats in the US. Standard government policies are complete heresy to discourse in the US.
The last presidential campaign included a debate between the Democratic candidates where both candidates effusively praised the policies of Denmark, which one candidate identified as “socialist”. The Prime Minister of Denmark replied, “Denmark is a market economy”. https://www.thelocal.dk/20151101/danish-pm-in-us-denmark-is-...
> It's not a generalization, the window of allowable discourse does not encompass much of the spectrum in the US.
Bullshit. Half of the country is falling over itself trying to turn the US into a replica of Europe or Canada.
If anything, it’s the opposite—only in the United States is a full, wide spectrum of allowable discourse present. Not only can you find lots of Americans who support virtually any policy commonplace in Europe, but you can find many more who hold views unthinkable or at least unsayable in Europe.
* US judicial precedent establishes a constitutional right to abortion on demand early in pregnancies, and some states, including most recently New York, extend this right to any point before childbirth. Most European countries only allow abortion in the first or sometimes the second trimester.
* The United States also recognizes a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, which is not at all recognized in Italy, Greece, Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Switzerland, and Northern Ireland.
* US corporate taxes and regulations are within the European norm. The Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index (https://www.heritage.org/index/) (which defines "economic freedom" as embracing the right-wing economic policies the Heritage Foundation tends to advocate for) rank Switzerland, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Iceland above the United States while ranking the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, and Luxembourg within one point of the US rating.
* In terms of civil liberties, the US is virtually unique in recognizing an absolute right against self-incrimination and an exclusionary rule of evidence, where evidence collected in contravention of anyone's civil rights is admissible in court.
* One of the biggest controversies in recent American politics is whether to overturn the constitutional standard of jus soli birthright citizenship--the notion that any human being born on American soil is unconditionally an American citizen. No European country has this policy at all, let alone enshrined in a written constitution.
* The US does not have mandatory military service. However, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Norway, and Switzerland all do.
* Unlike many European countries, the US has a virtually complete lack of media censorship by the government.
* Austria, France, Belgium, Germany, and Bulgaria have all outlawed face coverings, while Switzerland has banned the construction of minarets. France prohibits the wearing or display of "conspicuous religious symbols" in schools, a law targeted at hijab-wearing Muslims. The United States has no equivalent laws, and any such laws would almost certainly be ruled unconstitutional.
With the left vs right message the up vs down battle has been mostly forgotten.
Also, could you please stop posting rude comments?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Instead, we know that there's been great effort to purposely troll and manufacture dissent for political and other purposes. It's really just coming into view as a sustained, organized, and scaled effort but, looking at the tactics on display, it's easy to believe that it's likely been going on much longer.
So, this trashing of the Internet has been deliberate and effective. Hence, the wastelands that YouTube comments, Twitter, FB, et. al. have become.
So what we've now got is weird, but certainly not fun.
In other forums I think it's easier to detect that you've been shadow banned, and that the reason only certain people are responding to you is that they're the only ones who can see your rants.
Someone with anorexia or another illness that destabilizes your perspective may find support in an online community. But they can also seek out and find communities that catalyze the destabilization.
Today people with stupid ideas are the ones who get most practice in rhetorics. And practice makes you good.
As a result you find very specific kinds of stupid. If you know Nassim Talebs IYI (intellectual yet idiot) there exist supermutants of that phenomenon. For example I just argued with self proclaimed Marxist who managed to have opinions of fascists straight from 40's. He had absolutely delusional view of multitude of things like not believing in industrial revolution, or that machines could outproduce people when making bulk materials. Yet he could muster huge array of minutiae from history, usually correct and supporting whatever weird point he was making. This dude actually was rhetorically decent and very passionate about.. I don't really know what.
Such individuals are far from stupid despite their stupid ideas and they seem to be able to shut down intelligent discussion on niche boards. Specifically because nothing seems to stick: they are not trolls, not really malevolent, not really belonging to any definite camp. Just really twisted, bored and eager to engage others.
Is this really a bad thing? Do fascists become less objectionable with time? I'd say they still hold the same abhorrent ideas as they did in the 40s.
>not believing in industrial revolution
As a Marxist myself, that's an odd thing for a Marxist to be saying, but Marx himself does not use that term, so there could be some confusion there - we should be careful with terminology, since they can and do convey particular histories and prejudices and ideologies.
>or that machines could outproduce people when making bulk materials
That's absurd, since Marx makes exactly the opposite point in the first 3 paragraphs of Capital.
Now before you categorise me as twisted, bored and eager to engage others, I'd like to do it first - I really am bored, and at least eager to engage others. When I see a post on a topic I'm relatively familiar with (in this case Marx) I feel the need to comment on it. Now I pledged that I would do that less, but I felt a kind of draw to reply to your comment. Why, I'm not even sure. Perhaps to correct the record on a topic I feel passionately about. But I hope you don't see me as shutting down intelligent discussion, anyway.
Since getting into philosophy I've started to become skeptical of calling people stupid if I don't have any grounds to disagree with them, even if Taleb would group such people, ideas we often think are bad or false at first sight can actually be very reasonable once we peer under the ideology.
What does "politicising" mean, and how do you know their motives? If you mean what I think you mean, i.e. women for example standing up for their right to be included in historically male-led organizations (say, a SDR club), I must admit skepticism - perhaps what you are witnessing isn't "doing something for attention," but instead "demanding to be treated as an equal?"
Example right here. For better or worse, some people will try to make everything about their pet issues. It doesn't really matter if their motives are good when every single discussion gets dragged into the 2010's version of Godwin's Law.
The OP gave no example, so I had to make a guess. In my experience, people that complain about "groups getting politicized" generally mean "a minority joined and was upset when we weren't inclusive."
Perhaps I should have simply left it at the question, but the internet is a frustrating place to have dialogues like that - clarifying every tiny point before running out of space for a counter argument.
Or I maybe just lost my internet innocence, seeing Big Game come in and decide on a whim to toss in the bin the place where I spent most of my after school time. Also where I learned how to un-ban myself by editing the right registry key. :D
Can you help me understand your argument by giving examples of what this means? What is "politicising" and what communities have you seened ruined by "some minority of users politicising it for attention?"
Twitter (and to a lesser extent, Tumblr).
> Given the misogynistic reputation that the community has, I think it would be good for people to go out of our way to send a message or say something about how her coming out is a positive thing.
Que the comments being about this inflammatory statement and not about what the post was meant to be about, and for good reason. People that criticised OP were met with angry replies and stuff like this:
> Lotsa male white fragility all over this thread.
2 hours later another user made a solid post highlighting nothing but her, her achievements and detailing just how influential she has been and still is for the community, the comments were nothing but praise, positivity and celebration.
IMO a pretty good example of something being politicised for no reason and directly being a detriment to the community.
I've been a member here since 2008, 10 odd years! It has been quite consistent, and an almost daily visit for me since joining. I don't know how they do it but I am glad that they do.
This does not mean that there aren't wonderful things available in today's web environment, too. There is no one to blame other than the natural evolution of a system. But something was lost, and it is ok to miss it.
Now that UUCP time has come and gone, I wonder if Usenet might have returned to its once former glory. It would be a really good place for technical conversation.
It's a decent ready-to-go forum. I only used it for the clojure groups, but then the clj community discovered slack. All that useful topically categorized awesomeness now must be mined from worthless slack logs.
Speaking just for myself, here, but this has not been my experience. In my opinion, that interest in the early internet was a niche was essentially orthogonal to what it offered. It just so happened that the mindset of folks who would be attracted to the early offerings was a small portion of the overall population. But it wasn't the fact that the group was comparatively small that was what was interesting.
But it's a different feeling than it was before, because of how things work. And some of that works against the process of forming smaller, tight-knit communities than how it used to be. And it's ok to lament loss.
Does that make more sense?
Is that a regression, though? I mean the state pre-ES was basically that the unwashed masses weren't able to use a special service for their more-refined betters.
To me, it's essentially the difference between a country club and a public park. Certainly, the country club is better maintained and more pleasant for its members than a public park. But there's, at minimum, a strong case to be made that a park that all may use is a greater social good than a country club limited to a few.
https://ineedcoffee.com/the-coffee-house-a-history/
They rapidly became a place where people from all walks of life could, and did, come for lively discussion. And their rapid increase in popularity caused them to collapse from their own success.
Early access to the internet was, by definition, limited to people who were on academic or military networks. But by the time BBS culture came about, it was the thrill of finding like-minded folks from wherever they might be- it was not a culture based on exclusion per se, like what you would find at a country club.
"All walks of life" is a polite fiction. The September in "Eternal September", after all, refers to university intake. "Wherever they might be" is a bit of a cop-out, because they weren't really "wherever", they were in other universities.
It wasn't a coffee shop, it was a strongly walled garden which only very specific groups of people could reasonably access.
Yes, but it was the introduction of easy-to-use 3D printers which actually, rather than theoretically, democratised it. As it was with AOL and Usenet.
[edit]- I found an article from 1987 talking about how amazingly fast (and cheap) the new 2400 baud modems were. I had to chuckle, as I still remember going from 300 (slow enough that your reading speed was baud-limited) to 1200 (wow! I can barely keep up!) 2400 and above was a speed that seemed almost decadent.
http://www.technofileonline.com/texts/2400modem88.html
But the online services were really freaking pricey.
Here's a price list of online services from the 80s.
Compuserve was $11 an hour.
https://imgur.com/a/zdoZj
http://i53.tinypic.com/2janfrd.jpg
http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=1...
Can't both sides be correct? There is certainly a host of good feelings one gets when they're a part of something that is exclusive. (Not saying it's morally right, just making an observation.) Whether those feelings are altruistic or not is besides the point. From that person's point of view, they no longer have those good feelings when their club is no longer exclusive.
From the view of the larger public, the ends justify the means as the happiness of all is larger than the loss of happiness of the few. But for those few, it's still worse.
Global Climate Change is just one big Tragedy of the Commons.
new ~lands have:
That said, the duration of this state is probably quantifiable. Everything has these traits at first, until human stay for a while, then organization naturally takes place, taking the virginial beauty off at the same time.I've read that some antique cultures believed in burning things to the ground. I wonder if that's not a useful thing.
http://thefirstbannerad.com/
Less room for fun, more room for tracking and click through rates.
Do you have any advice on finding it?
It's a difficult problem to solve.
• Discourages long-running discussions by burying (and ultimately locking) older content
• Discourages coversation in favour of fire-and-forget comments by making it impractical to continue where you left off
• Gamification of content (not quite as bad as some sites that grant extra privileges for scores, though)
• Numerically larger groups can bury content they would prefer others not see
E.g. a typical comparison between forums and reddit: A hobby forum often has a "I just bought X" megathread or two, where people post new things they've bought and want to share their excitement about, but that don't warrant a full thread. On hobby subreddits, a large amount of the threads can be "I just bought the thing everyone always recommends and everyone has seen 20 times this week, can't wait to use it!". Similarly, what would have been a single post on an old thread in a forum needs to be it's own thread on reddit, loosing context and making search harder (even if people try to link other relevant threads). Which in turn leads to more repeat questions etc.
For me, as with HN, I don't like the inherent stress of commenting on submissions before they fall off the front page. The earlier one comments, the higher the chances of getting eyeballs/responses. After that short ~24 hour window, people may still read the comments, but submitting new comments seems futile.
As opposed to older "style" forums, even today, threads often stay open, allowing people to post months or years later to revive "dead" threads.
I'm sure this approach also eases the moderation burden, and I'm pretty impressed overall with how dang handles things. So maybe it is a simple workload necessity. It does strike me that HN could be quite a bit more if these two restrictions were loosed.
How? I can't even search for shit anymore without being drowned in results that have nothing to do with what I searched for, but are kinda-sorta similar and get visited a lot more often.
> MySpace showed the world that if you make powerful and complicated tools (like coding) accessible to anyone, people are smart enough to figure out how to use them.
My own experience with MySpace was that every page I landed on looked like a dumpster fire. I can't recall a single person who exhibited competence in using the tools MySpace gave you. Everything was always poor contrast with a cockeyed layout.
Reading this, I finally get what people mean when they say "But Snapchat is supposed to have an unintuitive UI".
I was big into editing Myspace HTML back in the day. There were simply so many possibilities. The design was an extension of your style, howrver crude and unfinished it might have been.
Anyone tiktok-ing around couldn't care less about MySpace and the codeblog rant.
The real fun is, that you can make the internet fun. So the codeblog's shoot was a nice PR stunt, but that's it.
That Glitch is not as popular as My Space was tells something about what people that use internet want; and shows that the internet is still fun and weird for people that like fun and weird.
But back then, Geocities was popular and loads of people had heard of it. I have never heard of Glitch. It seems like there's become a re-division between "people who like to tinker" and "literally everyone else". On the one hand that's great but it kind of feels like everything is AOL again now.
The last vestige of fun, weird and popular is probably Tumblr, which everyone agrees has the absolute worst user interface. But you can theme your Tumblr page to your absolute heart's desire.
These days people have to focus more on the content because the presentation is so locked down. This may be for the better, but it can definitely feel antiseptic and corporate. The sense of fun is lost.
Facebook's clean design was what I actually wanted. Not some autoplay crap music.
In fact, back in the day, everything in Facebook was a search. I could click on your residence or your class/section and see everyone else in it. It was awesome and useful.
It also started out simple and therefore there was little to make it cluttered.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...
...Bro, do you even code?
Honestly, I can't fathom how you could make such a statement. Granted, most people can't express themselves through code - but that doesn't mean in general you can't.
Does it, though? Google used to give search results, now it gives Google Search Results™ and most navigation is dictated by what appears in social media feeds. The behemoths are able to enforce a sense of legitimacy in their own products while marginalizing any threats to their dominance. If they really can't stop a rising star that is pulling away users by squashing or copying them then it is no issue to throw some money at the problem and buy them out.
The big appeal of the early internet was that anyone could make something neat with simple HTML shenanigans, and learn to code by hacking the HTML templates to their needs. Many coders got their start by hacking Neopets storefronts. (there were actual coding puzzles on Neopets too for their events!)
Well, we've only been at this for a little while, and we don't even have a way to follow other people or invite your friends yet. :) Rest assured, we're planning to keep going. And probably with fewer Tila Tequilas, of either the MySpace or neo-nazi variety.
Between the sanitized Facebook and the siloing of people into apps, there's fewer obvious social on-ramps to coding on the internet, especially now that so much is mediated by apps.
That said, social platforms not allowing users to express themselves through canvas and styles could be a matter of consistency and usability, while the myspace pages were a form of expression; they were certainly a pain to use and navigate through.
Stop just a minute there. Who says that random people copy pasting CSS and HTML they don't understand is even a good thing? Let's be clear, 99% of people don't understand that stuff, it's just copy pasting.
If you want a glitter blog, then launch a blog with that option. But letting people do it themselves just adds risk to themselves they'll never understand.
Edit: to be clear, if you said pasting <script>alert(911)</script> can be used to call the cops from your computer, then 99% of people would assume that's what it did until they tried it. 99% of people are not coders and it might as well be a foreign language they are pasting into a Google Translate to see what it means. If it happened to contain JS, well, too late. See the warnings in the FB JS console for a reminder that people are gullible and will copy paste anything they are told to.
I think you are remembering. In the blog screenshot of myspace, when it says "Javascript is not allowed", it was acting as "a sign, not a cop" [0]. Most websites were riddled with security flaws, to the point that you'll find there wasn't really any comprehensive listing of major vulnerabilities in websites because people didn't really understand that an XSS was a problem until someone actually used it in an attack. This example from 2005 shows that their security to prevent JS was sorely lacking.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)
Or, at least there's been far fewer incidents of that blind trust spectacularly blowing up than the pitchfork mobs about to come after this comment might lead you to expect. Perhaps you might say that npm users at least understand the risks we take on when we do it, but I still don't think most npm users give it all that much thought...
Having been on BBSes and the internet since the mid 80s I’m as sad and nostalgic about it as anyone but you can’t turn back the clock. Instead we need to fight today’s battle—big tech company hegemony.
We — the programmers, designers, product people — collectively decided that users don't deserve the right to code in everyday products. Users are too stupid. They'd break stuff. Coding is too complicated for ordinary people. Besides, we can just do the coding...so why does it matter?
As a programmer, let me say that when I've switched over to the role of user: As for our bedside manner, we programmers xxxxcould stand to improve a bit! (Not all. But on average.) Remember to treat users as people you're supposed to serve, not as an underclass that needs to be kept in line.
I miss the days where people who wanted to have an online presence could create a website, and it was actually a comparatively good experience.
Facebook is the defacto standard now, and you have to do things their way. Yes it is by far the easiest way for most people to share their photos and thoughts if they want their friends to see them. Unless they are twitterers or whatever.
But I really wish the internet had continued to progress as....it could have.
Maybe the slick presentations put people in a headspace, but that on its own is the start of the slippery slope of not being original because then everything has to be streamlined to those expectations, and productions aren't recognized unless they have these features.
It will probably take another leap before the internet moves past this, where presentations aren't videos with one view and one soundtrack focused on particular personality types, where text and charts aren't pictures but rather mixable data used to render arbitrary views. I guess ironically if Flash had taken over the Web in the early days we might be closer to that vision now since it was more the focus to create an interactive work rather than using a desktop application to generate a video, or the generally harder slog to create interactives in Web technologies.
Creating a tightly circumscribed environment in which "glitter" is one of your built-in affordances is hardly the same thing. It's the difference between discovering rocket jumping in Doom and having rocket jumping become an intentional mechanic in Quake. The latter might still be fun, but it's no longer weird (and certainly not fun because it is weird).
I do disagree that "coding is now a privilege" or at least that it's more a privilege because of the demise of MySpace. It's easier than ever to learn how to program; it just takes time and motivation. The only thing that's harder is figuring out which technologies you actually need to learn to realize your vision (because there are so many more ways of doing things than there were in 2006); however, people are also generally nicer now than in 2006 (when I would ask people for help, they often would expect me to have read certain textbooks or know C before they would send me the link on standing up a LAMP stack). The toxic bits of StackOverflow culture were just normal--if you didn't already know the answer, you didn't deserve to know it.
Anyway, that's my 5 minute stream of recollection.
My other favorite response was when you would google a question, then you find a forum where someone says to google the question
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[1] Via the submit button at the top.