Below are some relevant articles I keep going back to that highlight the same phenomenon on the 'decay' of web as a platform (by decay I mean extreme commercialization, excessive bloat, endless tracking and whatnot) made by the linked forum post's author:
Can't help but agree with most of their assertions.
Also, I just noticed that the author of this forum post uses 'internet' in place of what I feel should be 'web/world wide web' (just some pedantry from me tbh).
“Internet” here is appropriate too. Although he’s reminiscing about mid ‘90s websites, most of that was still an extension of the amateur, interest-driven culture (and counter culture) that was prevalent across Usenet, gopher, and ftp sites prior to the web’s domination and conflation with “Internet”
I remember the backlash against unique designs where everyone said they just wanted plain sites, with the information in focus. Now when big parts of internet basically have become standardized and sterile everyone wants these unique designs back.
What everyone misses are the personal, hobbyist, non-commercial websites. This was replaced by things like Facebook, Wikia, Pinterest, Twitter, Medium, which are both constrained and ad-ridden. A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr.
The "every site looking the same" thing is fine, however, and still preferred for commercial sites, government, newspapers, startups, other utilities. In fact most of those could still look more of the same, because visitors rarely care about the differentiation for marketing purposes. You could get away with removing all parallax effects from those sites and nobody would miss them. Same for advertisements: nobody cares for the forced variety of colourful banners in web advertisement.
The sad part is that those websites do exist, but are nigh impossible to stumble upon except in association with a particular context.
For example, small communities around specific interests, and personal sites of authors of specific works.
We really just need a concentrated effort to catalogue and curate them under a single banner. These efforts also do exist, but haven't yet reached critical mass. Probably because policing content is a full-time job.
> A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr.
It will be a sad sad day when/if Tumblr gets shut down.
I really appreciate the fact that users can customize their own pages in many more ways than just changing their profile picture and header image, it gives it a lot more personality than you can get on Instagram/Tumblr/Facebook.
It also has a timelessness that you don't really get on other sites, at least not to the same degree. Posts have timestamps, but on the dashboard they're only visible if you look for them. So most people don't notice if the post they just reblogged was originally posted yesterday -- or seven years ago. This also gets rid of much of the repost issues you see on Reddit and similar sites, since the original post can remain relevant for much longer.
- It has all the tools for newbies (WYSIWYG)
- It has tools for advanced users (HTML editors)
- It has a marketplace for templates for those in-between
- It has the "good" social features (follow, republish)
- It doesn't use too many dark patterns
- It's not a walled garden that blocks or pollutes Google search results, like Facebook or Pinterest
- It has no "algorithm" encouraging people to consume the same bullshit as in Twitter/FB/Youtube
- It encourages people browsing specific blogs instead of doing pointless doom-scrolling
Of course it also has a lot of problems, but I'd say they're mostly social and not related to how the platform is built. On the other hand the same issues happen on Twitter and Facebook, so...
Thing is commercialization made it easier for people to express themselves and actually start using that resource.
Commercialization made it form "only nerds sit in there" to "everyone is on the internet and it is cool", if there would be no commercialization, internet for masses would still be a silly toy.
Just like going to the Mars - it is just a "hobby" for NASA, most of people on Earth are not giving a damn that they just landed another rover. There is no practical way to make money on space travel currently. Find a way to earn money on sending rockets to Mars or Moon, everyone is going to jump into it.
Companies on its own without hype would not go to the internet or digitalize their processes. There is still loads of companies that are not digital. There are loads of stories of how companies started switching to digital last year because of recent events...
> if there would be no commercialization, internet for masses would still be a silly toy.
Sure, but part of the fun of the old internet was that it was a silly toy that people didn't take too seriously, at least most of the time, there were definitely still some flamewars stemming from people taking things way too seriously.
Then maybe it's commercialization I dislike. I loved the silly toy internet. It was a place to get away from the real world. Now it's just a part of the real world.
A lot of things turn lame once real names and money are involved. And that's the fate of most things once they get big enough. It makes sense, but it's still sad.
I agree wholeheartedly, it's the evaporation of genuineness. You know behind most stuff you see now, there's a monetization attempt eyeing at the corner, and since people think web is for mass scale of low hanging fruits .. that's what we get.
Memes, Discord, the “old” Twitter, and either having ad supported sites (as opposed to everything being paid) or having premium sites (as opposed to everything being as supported.
Memes will be killed by some entrepreneuring copyright troll at some point.
In many jurisdictions, memes would either break the copyright laws or at least be in the grey zone. It's only a matter of time before someone exploits this. After one case, the platforms will ban them to avoid the risk of getting sued themselves. The same will probably happen for gaming videos.
The author of the dickbutt (if he/she can be found) might easily sell the rights to their creation to a copyright troll for one million dollars after which my scenario could take place.
You see, if they had the rights, we'd know who it is. You reserve your rights through registration. If we don't know, then there's no way to prove you have the rights.
they will miss not having to use a browsing agent that logs everything you do to your identity/passport and sends it out to the government to keep you in check
Unregulated encryption will be out in the next decade, it's too powerful for us plebes to have. Things will be safer when only the paragons of infosec like big corporations and banks get to use it freely.
>There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always missed. You can't go back without a time-machine.
the point of reminiscing is to steer the current time towards the good points of the past, while trying to navigate around the difficulties experienced previously.
I feel like a lot of those nostalgic posts are made by people who were simply happier when they were younger. And they conflate this general decline in happiness with a perceived decline in quality (of anything, be it the internet, television, music, etc). But in most cases it's just that things change and they no longer fit their desired qualities - they haven't become worse per se.
For a lot of people who are young today the internet the way it's right now (with TikToks, Instagram, Twitter discussions, rants and memes) will be the one, true internet. And in 10-20 years they will say it has changed and how they miss it. This is a cycle as old as time.
That's absolutely the case. It's also them encountering the first X, and then the millionth X. And a bunch of other biases also come into play, like survivorship bias. The good old refrigerator that's chugging along just fine for the twentieth year. It's not like today's shitty refrigerators can ever last this long. What's unseen though is the huge pile of discarded refrigerators on the landfill.
It does seem like an industry-wide conspiracy to make "durable" consumer goods last only as long as their warranties. And also, to make money on replacement parts and complete replacements. The "Just go buy another one"-mentality makes me cringe.
Ugh, not lowest TCO. D: And those mostly pointless features are so fleeting. Just do them in software and modular assemblies. Also, right-to-repair and design for maintainability.
There doesn't need to be mutual exclusion. Views change with a person's life-stage priorities. And, it's easy to lionize the terrible when infant minds see only the best in everything.
Things in certain places, like America, are getting demonstrably shittier over time: the USPS used to work, there weren't mass shootings nearly every day, parks had water fountains, people debated, corporations didn't takeover public spaces as much, real wages were higher, the US made things, there weren't as many prisoners, healthcare costs were lower, and there weren't millions of visibly-homeless people from an unjust economic system.
Yes, but still, thats almost always the case on any new information conduit. Early adopters use it as a novel means of expressing what was not possible with the old means. After adoption, it becomes a commodity, and the pendulum swings again.
I understand a platform cannot be compared to the internet, but I believe the comparison still holds true. Will early snapchat users remember and miss their early experiences 10 years from now?
Positively (ideally) the internet is not a platform, and it can transport anything, not damping future and novel means of expression.
EDIT: But, lets not forget (since I easily went for rational dismissal) Missing something is completely subjective feeling, a valid assertion, and nothing we discuss would have made the author not miss it.
Let's reflect on how difficult it is to fight the endless resources poured on making us engage (and our natural tendency to accept commodities because they are either easy or addicting). I miss napster, I align conceptually with peer to peer interchange, but still, I use spotify. Movies, I still prefer playing directly from bittorrent (even when I know that sequential downloading is harming the swarm).
Ultimately, I just want the network to be neutral and for protocols to never be banned. A neutral network needs not to be subsidized by corporations.
Strange, as this author misses the internet that they remember from the mid-90s and I miss the internet from the days before people like the author even knew what it was.
I miss a high bar for entry that meant most of the people online were at a relatively small collection of universities, tech companies, or government and public service agencies. It was elitist for sure, but sometimes that is not a bad thing and the level of conversation was something we will never see again.
I miss being able to read everything interesting on Usenet over a long lunch sitting in front of a vt220.
It was slow, but you didn't mind because it was all text based. The protocols were open and barely compressed so it was easy to explore and play around with things. A few hours in a wiring closet with a punch-down tool, a crimper, and spools of cable could be used to create magic.
There was no money to be made so no one took it too seriously. There were vast spaces to explore; we didn't know as much as we do now about what is and is not possible (and what can or cannot be solved with technical solutions to what turn out to be meatspace problems) so every crazy idea held a kernel of possibility.
> All these wikis have the same layout and are just dull, devoid of emotion.
Probably he's talking about Wikia (or, by their new name, Fandom), which indeed is pretty much always the same layout as Wikipedia plus a literal shitload of ads.
What killed off the other sites? Mostly the fact that whenever emotions run high (and the more invested people are in a fandom, the worse it gets), you will have a bunch of scriptkiddies or actual capable hackers that will DDoS or hack your site off the Internet. I don't know many people who are willing to deal with this shit for a hobby project, so it is only logical that most of the creators have either left the fandom entirely or migrated their content off to some centralized platform.
Additionally, people on the consuming side were tired of content vanishing into nothingness when its creators died, lost interest or were unable to pay the hosting bills... which led them to seek out centralized platforms, as (as ugly and ad-ridden they may be) at least promised some form of reliability.
Most of those niche stuff sits in Facebook groups, I bet there are quite a lot of naturist/whatver groups there (probably not posting photos but organizing events or discussing stuff), you have to follow right people on fb/tt/yt.
The creativity is there, for me author of that post misses forest for the trees. Web pages are just secondary artifacts. I don't want my favorite band members sitting in the evening messing with HTML I want them to make music.
Counter culture is about people and what they want to express, sometimes it might be important "how", but for a lot of hobbies "how" is not that much important as long as it is clear and easy to do.
This is why I don't miss "old internet", people are crafty and interesting anyway.
> Counter culture is about people and what they want to express, sometimes it might be important "how", but for a lot of hobbies "how" is not that much important as long as it is clear and easy to do.
The danger is that a lot of counter-culture movements aren't exactly welcomed by the major providers. Anything involving sex or sexuality - no matter if nudists, swingers, poly-amory, LGBT, fetish beyond 50SOG-style or sex work - has massive risk of getting booted off the internet, as a result of legal requirements (FOSTA/SESTA, child protection laws), credit card regulations or Evangelical fundamentalist pressure.
Anything involving drugs faces similar risks (I'm actually surprised Erowid hasn't been shut down), as is anything going too far anti-capitalist (see e.g. Pirate Bay, SciHub, but also Occupy Wall Street or u/DeepF.ckingValue being dragged in front of Congress after the $GME shenanigans).
What is the upside of having nudist/sex-workers/poly amory group having millions of followers?
For all of those activities it is best to keep it in small trusted groups of people. If you are really dedicated to that stuff you will find your way. Then is it really a counter culture if it can have millions of followers?
Relying on centralized entities is a danger for the movements themselves, as the nsfw community found out when Tumblr banned all of that virtually overnight. Or when PornHub banned everything not commercial (I do understand that this was due to revenge porn, which PH had ignored for years, but doesn't change the side effects!)
Blame the gatekeepers and the users who made them, not the Web.
Only using FB or TW for content discovery is just the equivalent of starting a browsing session via Yahoo's catalogue — It's just that the ratio of lazy people using the Web has outgrown those who still take the effort of finding the nuggets. At the same time, it has become too easy to publish fluffy spur of the moment content and people craving for upvotes over meaningful discussion. I'm not against giving anyone a voice or leaving it only to the tech-savvy, but I can't say that zero-effort publishing has contributed to the perceived quality and original idea of the Web.
Do I miss the old Web? Yes, but only as much as I miss analogue photography. It's nice to get into that reminiscent mood while flicking through old screenshots made up of spacer gifs, but as I watch the world go by on four screens at a time while ordering groceries on the fifth and paying with my fingerprint, it's kinda nice to see how far we've come.
I actually enjoy today's Internet much more. I'll lay out the reasons:
1) Easy access to many high quality contents. For example HN is a good platform for accessing new knowledge. Note that I say "access", not "learn". Reading HN sometimes give people the false impression that they are learning new knowledge, which usually is not the case. I treat HN as a platform to get a peek at certain new knowledge, but reading books, watching videos and most importantly implementing it by myself, IMO, is the only true way to learn.
2) Fast enough to view high quality videos without any delay. Again this is related to learning new things. It is also important for me because it's one of the few ways that I entertain myself.
3) This might be arguable, but getting knowing a lot of different people from different places is a lot fun. People who comes from different culture usually have different standard of "good", "bad" and other moral judgment and it's fun to read all of those. This was doable 20 years ago but far fewer people were online at the time.
4) It's a lot cheaper. 20 years ago only a company can afford something faster than 1M (back then I had a 56K Modem I think but can't be sure) in my country and it was very expensive even for the modems. Nowadays pretty much everyone has access to some high speed internet. Even if they cannot afford a computer (which is actually a rare case), they have Internet access through mobile phones.
That's fair, but the technological improvements in the network layer that made it faster, more accessible and cheaper are not directly related with the complaints by the author.
On the contrary, I would argue that the content quality is drastically lower because of optimisation for revenue and much less purer motivations.
The video quality is really much much better though. Original video scene is great as the business side of the things is a solved problem. Yet again, it suffers from optimisation for advertisers as less and less things are kosher.
Oh and the movie scene is terrible IMHO as a whole, despite having some amazing movies. Netflix is also optimising and the most optimum content for the business of Netflix is often not that optimum for many people. Not many tall poppies came out of it.
the Internet is now being used by 4 billions people, so it basically mimics humanity
Back in the 80s and 90s you were cherry picking the elite and the intellectuals, the internet of back then was never going to be representative sample of humanity
That's only relevant if the noise gets filtered out. I think there's a lot of evidence that our most prevalent platforms filter content for how much attention it can hold: which is to say, for revenue or less pure motivations. This is probably considered "quality" content, by some incredibly cynical metric of quality, and maybe the adoption of that cynical approach is the underlying change that has occurred on the internet in the last twenty years.
I don’t know about the content argument. Yes it’s true that there is a lot of low quality content out there. And that low quality content drowns out the good stuff. But there are some absolute gems out there - things that didn’t exist 20+ years ago. Khan academy for example is a treasure of amazing free content.
The past internet I remember was one of absolute noise search results and big invisible blobs of SEO text. To find something, you had to know already where to look.
Go back past the search engines, and most knowledge simply wasn't on the internet yet.
Completely disagree, there is probably 100x more content now compared to 10-15 years ago, sure garbage also increased but excellent content is there and internet of today is better overall.
I think, the old internet did not have much original content and we consumed what was available pre-internet but without the scarcity. The original ones were created by privileged people in relatively tiny community.
The current internet content is made for the internet. A lot of great things were made of course but I think the optimisation is diluting it into mediocracy. Every single day it gets more and more optimised for revenue or influence through time dominance. If you pay for it, it is designed to keep you pay for it(not necessarily pay for it and consume it but keep paying. Games are mostly freemium where you pay if you want to enjoy, movie subscription services will pile sh*t in font of you to give you the impression of endless content, optimize scenarios for retention etc.). If it is free, it is designed to pay by proxy(purchase something or give political power to an interest group).
I still believe it's relatively easy to find high quality material, even for amateurs. For example, I can watch live train yard cams nowadays on Youtube (Virtual Railfan on Youtube), and watch people who know what they are doing do live coding. I'm definitely losing myself in a multitude of options but I won't balme it on the accessibility of modern Internet.
20 years ago there were definitely less garbage on the Internet, and less gems as well.
But I definitely agree with the movie part. We still get a few good ones here and there but it's kind of rare nowadays :(
People used to have big desire to meet each other and exchange information. Internet evolution has throttled that desire greatly, we don't have one to one or group conversations any more, not nearly as much as we used to, social media & mainstream access are the culprits.
Counterpoint. It is disappointing to me that most of the "web sites" people interact with now transfer more data on a single page load than an entire operating system and applications from 25 years ago, when you could get "on the internet" with a PC running Windows 3.11 and Trumpet winsock, or Slackware. And, yeah, a lot of that is because of much higher quality media, but a lot of it is advertising and tracking, too. If we did NOT have high bandwidth now, the internet would simply be unusable. And for what? I'm not any better informed these days. Slashdot was the HN of the day, and it's about the same vibe. Videos and podcasts are jokes, taking 100x longer to make the point than simple text. Social media brought everyone to the publishing "party," and that's worked out just as well as you'd think. In fact, I can't think of any way that the internet is fundamentally improved over the past 25 years. In additional fact, I think a lot of what's developed in that time is harming society.
Regarding speaking with lots of cultures, I feel the current platforms have bring out the worst in people. Society has been completely divided in many places and well developed democracies undermined by the current incentives to promote and widely disseminate information which provokes strong reactions. This has been largely made possible by centralisation and consolidation of the internet.
The early internet did #3 much better than today. I'm still a member of a ~50 member forum that's been going for 20 years, and the ability to discuss nuanced topics is much better than it is here, even if the average quality of the persons themselves are much better here.
A key reason this is because of "weirdness budgets". If I independently arrive at a solution and try to communicate that to you, the more work it takes to verify(so I can easily tell you some prime factors, but not say uhh.. UFOs exist) the result and the more different it is from your prior, the less likely it is to succeed.
This is magnified by the n ( n - 1) / 2 cost of communications, where n is the number of people. We all have different norms, and it's nearly impossible to work out where another persons norm is within a single comment, so mostly people surpass your weirdness budget and you ignore them.
This means that we can only meaningfully talk about things that the general public are on the same phase of. This is just another way to state the Overton window. But now that we understand what creates the Overton window, we can attempt to evaluate what we can do to mitigate it.
Now when we evaluate Facebook, reddit, YouTube comments, HN, message boards, BBS, and 1720 Venice coffee shops we can see them for what they are. The more you bump into the same people, the more nuance you can find. Nuance is where the insights really come from. No one can work it out themselves.
Another depressing reality is that when you do find a tight-nit community that is able to create these insights, all you have done is segmented yourself from the general public's Overton window. Now your just another weird LISPer, and the Java programmers that have libraries and drivers behind their projects will run circles around you even though you are correct. Correctness isn't enough.
Admittedly, I miss the “old internet” too, however I have hope we can build it again.
As I see it, there are two main issues to solve:
1) It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages”
, in whatever form they envision?
2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry. Parallel to this shift, people have moved to podcasts, news articles and videos for their daily content. The group of people that consume text is no longer the majority. In many ways, each new social media platform is attempting to recapture an aspect of community/shared experience that has been achieved before. The good platforms extend this reach, the bad suffocate it. A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech.
Regarding 1. When you say "no longer trivial", I would point out that if it isn't now, then it surely never was?
Not using a framework (by which I assume you mean the likes of wordpress or squarespace) is still as much possible today as it ever was. And, the knowledge on how to do so is ever more accessible.
I can see your point that when provided with easy ways to do things, you are limited to design decisions and choices of those frameworks. However, I think the progress of open source has lowered the bar significantly for creating a completely custom platform.
I had a friend with zero programming experience who put up a simple webpage for her small business in 1995 with just a text editor and some photos.
Yes, it was much simpler. And it was encouraged, because most ISPs offered free web page hosting - including a free URL, and email - with an access account.
Wordpress is a nightmare in comparison. And a fully engineered blog stack is far beyond the reach of most users.
You could argue that the modern equivalent is a Facebook page, but of course web pages were fully public. You were in a public space, under your own name, limited only by your willingness to learn some very basic HTML.
It's a completely different experience to being in a privatised space with its own content management tools, which you only have very limited user level access to.
Isn't the anecdote only valid if your friend would somehow be unable to do the same if it were today?
I do get the sentiment that is expressed, but I also think it is wrong. The possibility to create, and the resources with which to do so is astronomically better than it was growing up. Imagine having access to YouTube and the thousands of excellent tutors. Just because convenience can lead to mediocrity, doesn't excuse it.
I agree entirely with your second point. I feel like a lot of the creative energy that had gone into the old web now goes into YouTube and TikTok, for better or worse.
> It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision?
1. Sign up to $5/mo virtual hosting service and choose a domain name.
2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress".
3. Open Wordpress.
4. Write and publish whatever you want, structured however you want.
This is much-much easier than working with Frontpage or Dreamweaver was in the olden days. Connecting to a server via FTP alone was a huge hurdle. Now it's all WYSIWYG in a browser.
Obstacles to self-hosted personal websites are smaller than ever before, but the corpo web has turned everyone from homeowners into hotel guests who have to follow their house rules. It's a cultural problem, not a technical one.
> virtual hosting service and choose a domain name.
Actually, people don't even have to have a domain name for their webpage. But ignoring that - how will people know that this is what they need to do? "I want to create a homepage, I don't know what 'virtual hosting' is. I don't know why I need to be looking for 'services'."
> 2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress".
In their what now click what now?
How are you so sure this is always possible?
Also, what about search engines (cough-Google-cough) under-ranking individual pages in favor of larger, corporate-favored sites?
> how will people know that this is what they need to do?
Why has the tech community at large completely failed to educate people on the basics of something used by billions of people daily and affecting increasingly-important parts of their lives?
Is it because we keep infantilizing them the way you seem to be doing, pretending they are too stupid to learn anything new? Or is it because in an effort to simplify, everyone simplifies to a different way, resulting in even more complexity? Or is it because tech really doesn't care and sucks at explaining anything?
A bit of all three (and probably more) if you ask me
I love how everything about your list is harder and less flexible for non-technical people than what existed in the 90s... while also glossing over non-dev-focused solutions. It's like the famous HN Dropbox dismissal [1].
Buying virtual hosting, domain names and using a control panel to install Wordpress is already harder, pricier and less anonymous than most users had to endure in the 90s. Also, Wordpress doesn't allow you to easily edit the templates the same way Dreamweaver and Frontpage allowed. Those tools were useable by anyone with knowledge about Word. But to customise Wordpress you need deep HTML knowledge and time. Most Wordpress templates are way more bloated than some bespoke HTML made with Dreamweaver.
You could have said Tumblr, or, if you wanna go commercial, Wix or Squarespace, but self-hosted Wordpress is like the worst of both worlds put together...
> 1) It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision?
In the olden days, you were either affiliated with a university or you signed up to Geocities. Nowadays, you can go to WordPress and add your fill of content pages: it's not just a blog. I'm pretty sure the modern web is a win for ease of access to genuine user-controlled pages. Probably you had more control over the skin of a GeoCities site than a free WordPress page, but I'm not sure to what extent or how important that is.
I think the issue here is more that people don't just want to make content - they want to have readers. You're more likely to get and know about your readers if you post on Facebook or Twitter than if you post on WordPress.
> 2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry.
I think this is important. The modern web doesn't provide discoverability to independent content produced in good faith. Either you have to agree to donate it to Facebook or you need to do a lot of work drumming it up. Google become popular because it cared more about the content than the primitive SEO, and the web was small enough you could plausibly use dmoz.org to browse the internet. Now, advanced SEO is better than any search engine algorithm and there's too much godawful content to be excited to read content without some kind of active recommendation.
> A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech.
I recall another article posted here a few weeks ago, where the author argued that centralisation dominates over decentralisation. But the argument in this place (at least till I went to bed) was that because there was technical decentralisation, there was no centralisation.
I don't know which view represents the mainstream view of technical people today, just which view seemed to have the most advocates while I was reading the thread.
What I do know is that it seems hopeless to me to hope that our best and brightest will help decentralise the internet again. I think the Gemini project has it right when they do whatever they can. I wish it were more prosocial though; it mostly consists of isolated gemlogs without the opportunity to reply. (I mean, you can reply, but all you're doing is posting a new page. If the person to whom you are replying doesn't know you from a loaf of bread, it's more practical to just go wash the dishes. If someone wants to correct me, by all means: I'm all ears.)
Btw, I don't want to imply that the Gemini folk aren't the best and brightest: Just that the path to a decentralised internet is the same as the path to free software - wearing the straitjacket and doing the work. And even then, it's easily lost. How much centralised, non-free software do we all use even if we've never installed it!
I think the main problem to solve is interaction without inauthentic action (spam). Centralised systems allow one person to cut off the spammer once, and that stops them from affecting everyone. If you imagine a decentralised gem/weblogging network with a reply facility, then if you write a logpost (on a log hosted on your own computer) and send a trackback to mine (on a log hosted on my own computer), then I probably consider that interesting. But if now a spammer writes a logpost and sends a trackback to yours, you need a way to cancel that. And once you've cancelled them, they can still post to mine! Each spammer will annoy each logposter as many times as they can get around the spam protection: it's an exp...
Most of this is because the people you are talking about don't actually use a computer to access the internet. They use a mobile computer. Mobile computers don't have the networking or energy storage (due to radio usage) capabilities to be able to participate in the internet as an equal. They almost all don't have a routable ipv4 and for those ones that do have ipv6, often it doesn't come with control over ports.
If these people were accessing the internet from a home computer they could just install a simple static webserver and put HTML files, jpegs, gifs, etc in a folder, forward ports on their router, and bam, they're on the web.
If your link wasn't directed to a video that is LOUD AS HELL then your comment would've been fine. Why not redirect to the regular Rickroll video instead of fucking with people's ears?
I miss guestbooks. It was great to see comments from visitors thanking the webmaster; it made it feel like each site had a small community around it. Nowadays such a concept is hidden behind CAPTCHAs or happens on external forums, so feels much more disconnected.
I miss text. It seems now that whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things.
A 10 minutes video with the usual 'subscribe and hit the bell icon', a word from the sponsor, a long winded introduction and then "click on menu, then click on this item, then select the size".
As someone who cannot process video, agreed this is genuinely insulting. To me, the majority of knowledge distillation is quickly becoming like cheap snacking - you get a bit, it leaves you wanting, but is ultimately bad for you.
That's useful, but ultimately you can't search captions in Google/DuckDuckGo if you're trying to find out if the video even has the info you're looking for.
Even more annoying: it's now considered necessary to have a bunch of videos about any major new product or project. Video production is either very expensive, very time consuming, or both, so it's a new "tax" that you have to pay to look serious.
Sadly, YouTube doesn't offer speeds like 1.1x, 1.2x, I often find some YouTubers talking just slow enough to stress me out but too fast for 1.25x speed. It's worse when 2 people are having a conversation and one of them is 1.5x faster than the other, so any fix for the slow person would break the fast person.
The sequence seems to have been something like: (1) Advertisers: "We'll pay you $2 for a video ad, $1 for an image ad, and $0.20 for a text ad." (2) Google: "We should find a way to create more video ad space."
Google changed YouTube monitisation so that videos had to be over a certain length to make money. Short to the point videos mean that the creator gets zip, so padding with unnecessary crap is the way to big bucks.
So it's totally, 100% Google's fault that there is a majority of pointlessly long videos on YouTube
Was going to disagree that it's unfair, but I suppose it arguably is exactly one bit (or ~0.3 orders of magnitude) unfair, since the parties at fault are Google and advertisers jointly, and the parent mentions one out of the two. Not sure how to rigorize that measurement, though.
I almost never watch videos, unless it's the necessary medium for the context (i.e. music teaching or movie analysis), because I _need_ text to learn.
But.
Two weeks ago there was a small video on Discord that crashed the client when you played it. Here's a 8m30s long video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBNQ6tiNcI
tl;dw: they used ffmpeg to stitch 2 videos with a different aspect ratio together, so it crashes chromium. That's the whole explanation, and this guy spends SIX MINUTES of blowing hot air before getting to the point. It's absolutely infuriating, I genuinely felt robbed of my time.
Why are you not skipping the bullshit? I feed most of my youtube addiction through mpv and have configured several key combinations which allow me to quickly bisect the video. These videos are always full of comments like "why did I have to spend 20 minutes on this", while they never take more than 15 to 20 seconds from me.
By the way, with a proper youtube-dl config in place you don't even have to open the browser:
$ mpv 'never gonna give you up'
It the best way to watch youtube by any measure that I can think of right now.
I don't know if it's what OP meant, but I'm imaging starting at the 50% mark, then jumping forward or back 25%, then jumping forward or back 12.5% etc, until you've zeroed in on the nugget of content in the sea of noise.
Might make a good browser plugin. Binary search, but for video. Tweaking the exact ratios might be an interesting problem. I'm thinking (no evidence!) that 30% for a forward jump and 15% for a backward jump might work better. Large jumps forward until you hit something interesting, then small jumps back to find the start.
An old memory just popped up
> The Wadsworth Constant is the idea (and 2011 meme) that one can safely skip past the first 30 percent of any YouTube video without missing any important content.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/the-wadsworth-const...
The funniest part of that meme is that YouTube implemented a (now obviously removed) "wadsworth" query parameter that skipped the first 30% of a video.
I also prefer text to videos, but there are many times when you need to churn through six lousy vids to get the one thing you need.
I use Movist Pro (Mac-only) for videos that work with youtube-dl. Once you set it up it's like magic. I can set keys for any speed or jump size I desire.
I have gotten pretty good at watching fast and jumping around to see if this vid is worth a look, or will cover the information I need. When I'm away from my computer and have to wade through vids on another machine it's like torture.
By the way, the modern internet is way better than the 1995- 2005 version. Everything you could want is there, you just have to learn how to get past the fluff and BS. I have fond memories of 1997 internet because for the first time I could access so much information from home, but I would never go back.
Honestly? Because I was expecting to hear something interesting at any moment. When I saw the length, I expected to see a technical explanation, a step-by-step how-to, a live example with the ffmpeg CLI. Anything remotely interesting.
What I absolutely did not expect was a 6 minutes long "introduction" out of a 8:30 minutes video. All of that to finally say "it's 2 videos stitched together, like and subscribe"
That’s why I’m curious if it’s possible for creators to make 1-2 sentence videos that are profitable enough for the platform those videos are on that they can pay the creators well.
I never understood why. Look at Snapchat: when it was just 1:1 messages that disappeared people got that. People liked it, used it, tried to get their friends on it, and so-on.
Now it’s instagram, so why not just use instagram?
By moving away from their market differentiator they made themselves replaceable.
A friend of mine who has an youtube channel once explained to me that he had to add more content to one of his videos which otherwise would end up being too short, since there's a minimum length before youtube can monetize the video. IIRC, the minimum length was something like 8 minutes.
Skip forward rapidly until something interesting is being said.
When it is, skip back a bit to find the start of that segment.
As with others, I make heavy use of mpv to (mostly listen to, occasionally actually watch) video, on YT and elsewhere. It's exceedingly good at pulling media references out of random URLs, though not bulletproof.
Earlier today I had to scan through the downloaded HTML to find, and fix, the audio URL for a This American Life episode covering Reality Winner. Then I rapidly scanned through the downloaded audio looking for the start of the segment I was interested in --- 37 minutes into a 1 hour programme.
Much as you don't have to read an entire book to find the chapter or passage of interest (I'm mostly referring to non-fiction here), you don't need to placidly sit through full audio or video sessions either.
You can, of course, also repeat sections of particular interest.
You’re missing something important: You have built the intuition necessary to pick up on pacing cues so that you can skip ahead and quickly get a sense of where they put the info.
Not everyone understands those cues, and of the ones that understand them not everyone can process them as quickly.
I learned recently that you can make tea from roasted buckwheat. I googled it, and found a seven minute video of a man making tea with his daughters. And I don't mean an artful exposition or something, just full-on Youtube "yo what's up welcome back to the channel so since last time we've been really loving BUCKWHEAT TEA here's how to make it don't forget to LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE" drivel around pouring water on buckwheat.
A weird thing I learned while working on my own YouTube channel is that saying "Like and subscribe" actually does work. As in, you get more likes and subscribers by saying it compared to not saying it. It's like people need to be reminded that they can or should click those buttons.
I could never bring myself to say it at the start of a YouTube video but I added it at the end and saw improvements in the analytics from videos that had the reminder versus not.
I never experimented with it that much. My only test was asking people to like and subscribe versus not.
My intuition would be that you should use the phrasing that is authentic to your channel and voice. Most of my content was reading quotes from government reports, academic research, and news reports and then explaining what I thought about it in a calm monotone. (My vocal inspiration was Sam Harris). At the end of my videos I said "If you enjoyed this video please let me know by clicking the 'Like' button. If you'd like to see more content in a similar style, please subscribe." Which I felt represented the tone and pace of my videos.
On the other hand, if your channel is faster paced, more energetic, focused on being funny etc, then you probably should come up with a wacky or creative way to say "like and subscribe." I don't think anyone is going to subscribe just for how clever your saying is, but it will be more consistent with the tone of the channel. I think the main benefit of saying "Like and subscribe" is just to remind people to do that. Some people will be watching your video and enjoying it but just need an extra push to think "Oh yeah, I should subscribe, I do like these videos."
I wonder if after the current Tik-Tok/YouTube Shorts/other version of video settles down we’ll start to see videos that don’t need to be long utilize this format and that will get pushed into search results.
I agree with this to some degree, I generally digest things better in text. At the same time video can be many times better at teaching skills. Mushroom foraging for example; I have read many books on the subject, but youtube has exponentially improved my skills to a level that just wasn't feasible to reach with books. Home improvement is another example. If you own an older home and come across the DIY jobs that the boomer generation pulled off - you start thanking FSM for how to videos...
To be fair, the reference documentation for 90s GUI programs was also excessively tedious in how it documented every single element and never quite explained how to actually do what you wanted. As prose, it was rather lacking.
Videos containing the same information still somehow manage to be worse, though, no argument about that.
No, not really. (This is the only way an informative answer to this comment can begin.)
If you’re talking about original man pages from volume 1 of the Unix manual (as found on e.g. http://man.cat-v.org/unix_v7), then yes, they indeed make superb reference documentation. However, even their authors recognized that reference documentation alone is not enough, and thus included a collection of (much less streamlined) papers on various parts of the system in volume 2 as a sort of extended introduction and rationale. Reading man pages, even ones as good as the v7 ones, when you want to achieve a specific goal but are not familiar with the system in general, is an absolutely miserable experience. (I imagine it was worse at the time, when OSes were much more diverse.) Man pages are not the be-all and end-all of documentation for the same reason that even the best-written JavaDoc/Doxygen/... reference without standalone prose isn’t.
So, my first caveat is that reference ≠ (comprehensive) introduction, you need both. My second caveat is reference ≠ specification ≠ introduction, thus you actually need all three. When people started to create reimplementations of Unix utilities, it turned out that they were massively underspecified by the man pages. The precise specification is more or less what POSIX is, and it’s significantly less readable than the original man pages even if you also format it as man pages and take out all the extensions. It’s not that original Unix userland lacked specification documents, it’s that their role was served by the source code of the libraries and utilities themselves (for all the copyright problems that it eventually caused). The kernel too, presumably, but people famously thought that wasn’t enough, and thus Lions’s commentary was born.
I mentioned above that the papers from volume 2 also served as a rationale and an annotated bibliography, which is also a good document to have, but probably not as essential as the previous three. I’m also not saying that they all be separate documents: Unix merged the introduction and rationale but separated both from the reference; except for the tutorial, Python manages to merge the introduction and reference for its standard library surprisingly well, but lacks a good specification; the TeXbook tries to be everything at once but is in my opinion not that good at any particular task. What I am saying is that they are all different facets that have to be present in the writing.
My third and final caveat is... Not really a caveat for your statement, but still a problem if you’re a documentation writer: The concise style and general structure of the Unix man pages only works well as long as the individual pieces are simple enough and there is not a lot of them. You can’t write man pages for complex programs; or rather you can, but the format starts to show its limits, as aptly demonstrated by bash(1). It’s probably not a coincidence that Stallman wanted to replace the Spartan man page by the hyperlinked info node. You can say that one oughtn’t make things that are that complex, and I agree, but that’s not the point of view of the documentation writer.
Spam that right arrow on your keyboard to skip through and find the relevant part. I refuse to listen to all the filler drivel that’s designed purely to pad it out behind 10min for the increased algorithm love. Then we’re supposed to sit through sponsor ads when we already pay for YouTube premium. I’m all for patreon and supporting creators but it’s gotten ridiculous. Multiple “sponsor” sections in a single video and endless meta crap irrelevant to the actual video. Don’t forget to like this comment, subscribe, hit that bell, join our amazing discord community, follow is on Twitter for updates, comment below for a chance to win our giveaway… etc.
Honestly I think the downfall began with lack of no-script support. JavaScript is a great addition to add interactivity, but it is an obvious win for commercial interests.
It would be nice if instead of websites being forced to display cookie banners, what if they were forced to support plain HTML/CSS only mode? Not only would it increase privacy and prevent things like Canvas fingerprinting (oh wait, that’s what commercial interests use), it would also put content first.
JavaScript began as a way to add dynamism to HTML which CSS now can handle by itself.
What we need is a web framework that provides good fallback modes.
My challenge to folks: try to use HTML/CSS only to create interesting and dynamic websites which focus on content-first. And give that content good printer-friendly support :)
And for monetization, sell a product on there of some kind. Provide something useful. Don’t hide behind a barrage of ads. There’s always another way!
Or even if there is a text article, it's obscured by cookie consent forms, ads, "subscribe to my newsletter" popups, padded intros and outros, and most likely scraped instructions from elsewhere. It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky with random search results.
> Or even if there is a text article, it's obscured by cookie consent forms, ads, "subscribe to my newsletter" popups, padded intros and outros, and most likely scraped instructions from elsewhere.
The worst are the ones that obviously scrape content from StackOverflow and then reword it.
> It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky with random search results.
This indeed, and DuckDuckGo automates it further with their bang shortcuts like !w for Wikipedia, or !reddit, !ebay, etc.
But even though DuckDuckGo has mostly shaped up to be a good alternative to Google (I rarely use !g anymore), it's vulnerable to SEO tricks in its own right. Searching specific sites helps a lot, but it shouldn't have to be that way.
Worse still, a lot of those videos are simply a content-creator (as opposed to an expert in the subject matter) teaching you how to do something that they learned how to do from another video (possibly by an expert).
Trying to learn how to do household stuff on YouTube is full of comically bad or dangerous advice with millions of views. Thankfully this Old House has uploaded their back catalog and the comment sections of videos usually has rational insight from people claiming to be tradesmen.
So you say, but a lot of times the videos are a Godsend. I will never go back to written recipes (at least for an unfamiliar dish), for instance — why struggle to figure out how much a “dash” is supposed to be or get confused over how exactly to do something when I can just watch it performed?
My issue is that I don’t find it convenient to watch a video at all. For answering simple questions, there are many drawbacks to the format compared to text. I can usually extract necessary information from text in seconds. I might have to turn on a video and wait several minutes to hear the relevant information or spend minutes searching through it. Info in videos is not searchable by keywords or easily copy/pastable, and I may be in an environment where I don’t want to turn the sound up.
I looked around a few days ago and I find it really neat. Its minimalism makes it unsuitable for all the trash that has ruined the modern web as a simple information store. It uses the principle of least capability to create an environment where mere information takes center stage. Not even supporting images means memes can't even take hold, let alone real-time adtech.
The only flaw is that it's still a client/server protocol, which means closed silos and more passive forms of adtech could still invade.
(The modern web is however an acceptable thin client for single page apps that interact with services. I look at HTML5+CSS+JS as the new VT100, a terminal protocol for talking to remote machines.)
The other part of the modern Internet that reminds me of the old Internet is small independent podcasts. I listen to a number of these, and the high information content and lack of bullshit is reminiscent of the web before Facebook and adtech. There's also an implicit principle of least capability in podcasts. It's possible to insert ads, sure, but it's also possible to skip them and it's hard to make it impossible to do that. The medium is non-interactive and almost non-scriptable. There is an effort right now to walled garden podcasts, and I urge everyone who cares to resist it by using podcast apps and aggregators that are not pushing this.
I got really into using gopher and Gemini a few years ago while playing on SDF, but I was never able to find anything that held my interest and I don't think I ended up setting up my own phlog. Maybe my dopamine circuits have been reamed out by years in the attention economy... Every once in a while I think about writing a gopher server that serves content out of a WordPress database...
It’s like nostalgia for old TV shows. You have found memories but then when you watch them again they were really crap. I also remember images rendering line by line, expensive phone bills, crashy browsers, popup storms, going through 15 pages of altavista results before finding something useful, etc
I'm not sure why you're downvoted, whatever there was, it was also abused or shit. Spam everywhere, banners as annoying as ever, the nice insights in forums buried between low-effort one-liners and the trendy extra spacious forum signatures, and you couldn't do much against the flashing banners because adblocking was hit or miss.
It's not like I don't empathize. But one needs to realize that this is a specific thing, it's a human experience, shared across time and culture.
Oh yeah and the popups and the pop-unders can rot in hell. I can't believe how long it took for developers to control the situation.
I just watched Inside [1], where Bo Burnham creates a wonderful, funny, sad and thought-provoking "Special" about our internet culture. Highly recommended.
This is one of my favourite songs now: [2]
It's a bit crazy when I think about how different our generations grow up and it makes me a bit sad that our children will have a completely different understanding of what the internet is. For me it was a place of wonder, freedom and self-expression. It's different today, but even I have problems explaining how it changed. But it definitely lost some if it's playfulness on the way.
If I had to distill four decades of "mass Internet" transformation into one phrase:
Independent creator culture (1980-2000), converted into mass consumer culture (2000-2010), and then back into taxed creator culture within walled ecosystems (2010-2020).
This. Capitalism is pretty good at making a lot of what can be monetized at industrial scales, but without some form of complementing security, it also places distorting incentives to search every activity for ROI possibilities in one form or another.
Mass effect lags individual instance, and ranges are general.
F.ex. YouTube started in 2005, but from my memory the first years were primarily sharing copyrighted commercial material, before they cracked down on that and leaned into monetizing and taxing organic content
I think all of that independent creator culture is still out there, there's just also the mass consumer culture and walled ecosystems on top. It's a relatively insignificant proportion of things now, but big networks seem to be what most people are looking for.
Not all. While commercialization of the creator culture undoubtedly has some benefits, it also kills some of its original "soul".
Someone making funny videos on the internet on their free time without any kind of expectation to make money out of it unavoidably produces different results than the same person making semi-professional videos on Youtube and making living out of it. If the latter is an option, why the hell would the said person do the former? But since the latter option exists, it drives all of the creations to more professional, less quirky direction. It's the same effect that causes all the Hollywood films to have pretty much the same story arc and all the big budget games to feel like copies of each other.
That's an effect, sure. But I think it's more corrosive on the platform side.
If I start a business that makes hosting and sharing videos easier, should I sell it to hobbyists who don't have money, or semi/pros who have lots of money? And how does that affect my feature pipeline and product evolution?
The end result being... hobbyists have minimal, difficult, and (relatively) expensive platforms to enable their work, and semi/pros have well featured and cheap (or free) platforms. And that perpetuates the bifurcation and destruction of pure hobbyists.
> I think all of that independent creator culture is still out there
It absolutely is. You don't even have to go completely old-school and DIY youtube. There is always a way you can surf the current internet weather conditions to achieve some hybrid stance.
For instance, maybe you put some videos on YouTube, but also have deeper posts for each of those on some personal blog that you host on a server in your garage.
With this approach, you can drive traffic from both directions - People who were browsing your blog and want to watch some embedded YT demo, and YouTubers desperate for hard, written technical documentation on how to do something will have link in the description below.
The book "The Master Switch" explains how radio, film and cable TV went through the exact same phases. It's worth a read if you find this transformation interesting.
In retrospect, the old internet had plenty of derisiveness, toward targets like religion or copyright. Many of the loudest voices switched to today's morality movement without skipping a beat.
But to be fair, while it was a cheap wild west pioneer experience for us, it's also because we were drawn to this in the first place. Once it become cheap and accessible enough for most people, it turned into the utilitarian network it is today.
I mean, there was frankly no other way forward. Our kids will either be drawn to the next frontier, or wont be bothered like MOST KIDS when we grew up :D
Maybe things felt better because the internet originally reflected a subset of our population. Before the advent of cheap smartphones and 24/7 connections with a cellular plan, being part of the early internet usually meant you had a well paid job and were educated.
The internet of today hasn't changed much and is still a reflection of it's population. And if we don't like what we see it's because it highlights the worst parts of society as well as the best.
I've been doing a lot of thinking on how the internet has changed humanity since it's inception and watching our gradual change into a more connected and collectivist mentality. I think right now we're all being confronted with the imperfect creatures we are and ultimately I think it's a good thing for how we'll progress from here.
Its still there, its just buried under all the other crap.
As more and more people generate content, more and more bullshit exists. Unfortunately, Google etc. - despite all their big announcements - can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit.
Where's the semantic web that was promised? I wonder if we're still paying for the mistakes that were made with the whole XML stuff ...?
I have been playing with the idea of making good old internet portal. A curated list of links to the good stuff. No FB, medium, Instagram or anything like that.
Just bring back DMOZ, it was by no means perfect but was a great curated directory of the old internet despite SEOs always trying to spam it. Apparently Curlie is trying this but I haven't really looked much into it: https://curlie.org/en
I had the same idea, I think this is the ultimate solution. Would need to be easy to add links and allow moderators to approve submitted websites and provide a good search capability. Would only include quirky websites.
Portals are still sometimes made to make it easier to discover independent content, you aren't the only one concerned about this. However, the problem is that independent creators often stop paying for hosting or domain registration at some point, so any manually created directory eventually abounds with 404s.
I would suspect that even fans of independent content would be turned off by browsing through a large amount of Wayback Machine links, because Archive.org insert their own markup, and often the images in posts don't get archived.
People like using the Wayback Machine when they know that certain content used to exist, but not necessarily to discover new things unfamiliar to them.
There's https://curlie.org , it even links to some old-style websites in its collection. I think there are some other sites with similar ideas too, where you can create groups and share bookmarks ( like https://groups.diigo.com )
> Google etc... can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit.
It's worse than that. They are shoveling bullshit. They turned on the bullshit magnet and lit up the bullshit bat signal. They created a bullshit attention economy and sold bullshit tickets to bullshit artists. Literally everthing about Google and Facebook is creating one opportunity after another to jab you in the eyeballs with ads and/or trap you in a never-ending cycle of "engagement" that has few paths out. It's a trap to monetize every aspect of your interactions with the digital world, to monetize your very attention span. Once you are in, you are at the mercy of a metric assload of computation designed to trap your little rat ass so your eyeballs can be strapped open and ads sold to the highest bidder piped right into your brain. And there are basically zero financial incentives for them to stop or slow down.
Hence the problem. Spam for example has ruined email to the point that only a few large providers control the majority of email flows, if you make them mad, you cant send email. Same thing happening with content.
Yeah, bullshitting was always the easiest way to get people's attention. Specifically if the bullshitters believe their own bullshit, I mean, they're sooooo confident in what they're saying, the gotta be right, right?
Just seems like a human weakness, always believe the person that appears the most confident, no matter what they say. And a bullshitter will say anything that people like because they need positive feedback because they're so convinced that what they have to say is pure greatness, and they don't even realize that they just always say whatever gets the most applause. And man, these people are good in that specific respect (and literally nothing else). They perfected their bullshit to a degree that its really really hard to see through it, at least it will take time. And then the next bullshitter comes along and one's fooled again because fuck they're good.
And yeah now we got a system called social media putting those people on steroids. Its not like that didn't happen every time we invented a new way of communicating. But every fucking time we believe this time it's different and people are better now and all that shit won't happen.
And of course then you get in a competition between those bullshitters, so they have to turn the heat up more and more to beat their fellow bullshitters. And what gets the most heat? Well, hate and fear and division and polarization of course. And now we are where we are and have to deal with fucking QAnon bullshit.
You're right, it's just not that apocalyptic. I think we should be worried, yes, but this can be mitigated with stricter regulation and better public education. And of course engineers choosing to work for respectable companies instead of following the digits on their paychecks.
The beauty of the old internet was that there was no need for filtering, because it was done by the users by choosing which platforms to participate. Instead of many fragmented, special interest platforms we now have a few generic mega-platforms like Facebook and Reddit, which naturally get filled with garbage. In the old web, a place for discussion would have been a small special interest discussion forum with perhaps around a hundred active participants and a few hundred less active ones. The outsiders (i.e. the people who would post garbage) did not participate in the discussion because there was some threshold of participation (finding the website, registering, etc.). Instead they would have their own forum somewhere else with similar dynamics.
I think it's very natural for people to divide into communities of tens or, at most, hundreds of people. The modern web platforms don't respect this at all.
This touches on something a bit different to the linked author which is people thinking the internet is something it is not. During my time at university I didn't initially use the library. Why would I? Everything is on the internet, isn't it? Not by a long shot. Once I went down the rabbit hole of scholarship I was amazed just how much information could not be found online. And this was just one tiny subject I was interested in. A real eye opener.
The thing I really miss about the old Internet are forums. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and other social media sites lack a certain intimacy. Everyone is somewhat hostile by default and there is no incentive to contribute to the community. It's very different and a lot less fulfilling than the Internet forums circa ±2000-2005.
Which is another way of saying part of the problem is the searchengines we use to discover the web. IMO, another piece is that Wordpress and similar engines homogenized design-- it's superior but always unsurprising.
This sentiment of missing an older internet is one reason like like Hacker News. Slash dot was great in the day. Digg was so great in the day. Then the early days of Reddit were great. I’ve been her for over ten years and Hacker News is still good.
So thank you to the team that runs Hacker News and everyone who comments for making it a good place to come to.
I agree. I think HN in the perfect combination of the old internet, with the text-only posts, and the web 2.0 way of doing likes and threaded conversations. And, of course, the moderation keeping it all in check. I'm grateful that I can come here every day.
Includes the very worst part of echo chambering though.
Don’t like someone OR their comment? Just do your part with three other people and it’ll be faded, once it’s faded other people will join in hiding the bad man who said the bad thing - and gone!
No more contrarian opinion, we protected other people! Everyone agrees now. How wonderful.
You can’t crowdsource quality. Comment voting systems only tell you what is popular, not what is high quality. So many sites make this mistake, including HN.
You reminded me of a failed experiment I did a while back with music tags. I still purchase music monthly (Bandcamp when possible), and I always tag music. I have a bunch of multi-value tags including 'instruments' and 'moods'. It works really well with a huge collection. I can quickly find songs similar to the one I'm listening to, or generate playlists.
Anyway, a few years ago I thought I could speed up the tagging process by pulling tags from Last FM and filtering out the shite by only including tags that matched an instrument name or mood. Luckily I backed up before running the script on my whole collection. The data was absolute garbage.
It reminded me of when I went through and ripped my CD collection. I'd estimate that almost a third of the album data was complete trash, and there were a shockingly bad number of spelling errors. I couldn't help but wonder if someone was deliberately poisoning data.
Slashdot tried to solve this problem by making mod points limited and requiring you to give a reason for moderating a comment. Then there was a metamoderation system where you decided if the moderation someone gave was fair or not. If someone consistently doesn't use the moderation system correctly (and the metamoderation system is successful in identifying this), they don't get mod points anymore.
It didn't work perfectly (obviously the site is still highly opinionated in favor of certain things, like Linux and free software), but it also wasn't the smooth-brained hivemind that Reddit comments sections are. I can't think of another site that's even tried to come up with a better moderation system than simple up/down votes. At best, there are some behind-the-scenes algorithms that decide how exactly to prioritize comments based on the voting, but that's derived from popularity as well. An immeasurable side effect of this is that many heterodox comments simply aren't posted at all since people know they're going to be downvoted to oblivion anyway.
If you don't have the ability to vote, you can't influence the content in a positive way either. Some comments are pointless, like some tool making the "and my axe" joke for the millionth time.
Reddit lost its way when they started heavily moderating or banning entire subs that didn't fit with their woke US-centric world view, while rape porn was "fine". I closed my account a while back and stopped visiting the site, but unfortunately, there are so many organisations and FOSS projects that use it in an official capacity that it's unavoidable.
The solution is simple: Use downvotes for rude and disrespectful comments. I am all for moderating a forum for pointless and useless comments. Most downvotes now-a-days are about disagreements. Using downvotes as a tool to push others into conformity is the shittiest part of HN.
I actually have a sort of nice idea about this: make your downvotes' worth be inversely proportional to how many downvotes you give.
A person who gives 100 downvotes per month will have his downvotes count 1/20th as those of a person who downvotes 5 times per month. An incenctive to be really judicious in handing out downvotes and not simply using them to drown out minority opinions.
Only issue here is that you are penalized for activity even if it’s in removing objective garbage. But I like the idea quite a bit. That you take a hit for being a negative ass that downvotes questions you think are beneath you.
In more user-centric (as opposed to content-centric) forums this problem is solved by banning users who repeatedly make low quality posts. One crappy comment here and there is something anyone might make, but the same person posting pointless comments in every thread deserves a ban.
In my experience, your message would get buried or you would get bullied to the point where you leave the forum, nowadays it's done via downvotes. I don't see much of a difference, other than that the new way produces less noise.
They'll also go through your recent history and downvote any comments you've made that are still fresh enough. Downvote culture has some clear drawbacks that I have never seen validated, let alone addressed, by any community mod/admin. Dang responded to me once, but not with validation, and not to my follow up. It's the best I've ever been treated by a mod. I must be a bad person with evil opinions.
HN is not anything like the old internet forums or BBSes.
Content would get moderated but you could still read messages. Even the ones that went against the dogma.
Not at HN, anti-dogma posts get downvoted into oblivion or flagged if they are bad enough. I recently posted a counter-opinion on burnout and was downvoted pretty badly. I didn't flame, and tried to articulate my point well.
HN is composed of the exact microcosm of people who have ruined the internet. It's just an echo chamber where counter-points are nuked. No different than facebook, or anything else. At least /. made you think about using your modpoints to downvote. Now it's free - and for many very pathetic people downvoting is a source of dopamine. It's far easier to drive-by-downvote without having to even articulate a reply as to why. Comparing this to the old BBSes and forums, you at least got a moderator note (or a VERY disparaging note from a user) in your PMs about why you're being moderated. It is wildly frustrating to type something well thought out and be downvoted into oblivion because your stance isn't en-vogue.
While I don't think it is often as bad as some people here try to make it out to be, it's also sad that comments pointing it or mostly dead, which is why I vouched for you.
Because there are to many dead comments that did not deserve that status.
Slashdot indeed exists, but its comment section is complete garbage and the news are less and less about science and technology and more and more about politics and nerd tabloid style journalism ("You wouldn't believe what Linus Torvalds said on the Kernel developer mailing list!").
The internet killed bbses. Bbses were local (or not) more personal, easy to make longterm friends, meetups in malls died with the bbses.
I miss bbses. I resisted the internet switch for as long as possible. I remember the last c64 release..wasn't it monsters of mayham.. the graphics were amazing and the gameplay fast. Sort of like a mario world.
BBS could be elite where you needed references. It could be local family focuses with no swearing. There was a network of bbses who would share posts.. that was cool.
The best thing about bbses. As a SysOp I could start chatting with any user. The person logging in actual used your computer so in real time you could watch what the user was doing. Websites lost that.
Yeah. Phpbb was a huge deal in the early 2000s. Then reddit came along with subreddits and Facebook groups took over. All stuff now happens under the curated moderation of the corporation that owns whatever hobby/interest.
You're omitting a major driver of the exodus from private forums to walled gardens. It's the same driver of many other problems: assholes.
Spammers killed many a forum because it became a full time effort by admins and moderators to remove them. Automated tools, especially early tools, had limited effectiveness. People running a site as a hobby don't want to spend their days removing spam comments.
Assholes also (for many reasons) will DDoS forums. This is another administrative headache for site owners if not a financial headache.
The same driving force saw blogs remove comments for centralized solutions like discus or abandon self-hosted blogs for Medium and the like.
While Facebook and reddit have plenty of spam issues the "owners" and mods of a group/subreddit are different from the site admins. There's a lot less financial risk for someone running a group there than their own server. They also let a wider swath of people run a group rather than only those that are interested in a niche topic, have the technical skills to effectively run a forums, and the money to pay for it all.
Sadly, you are probably right. For better or worse, I keep thinking that invite only forum is the way go to maintain a decent level of 'interesting conversations'. HN still has them, but it is getting harder to filter through.
I think that that will work in the short term, but unless you're very proactive about recruiting new blood your userbase is just going to dwindle away.
It's true that HN has gotten more crowded with more noise, but it is still the best there is. I won't be going anywhere.
I am constantly amazed at the thoughtful comments from people who are informed on a subject and take their time to layout a cogent argument. This makes it worthwhile to spend some time scanning more and more other stuff. I am getting to be quite a speed reader in this place.
HN will be just fine as long as Dang (and the other guy) spend so much energy here.
Many discussions here turn argumentative but still retain their civility. Many posters will apologize and further clarify their ideas if anyone complains for the slightest reason. While not every discussion is of this level, there are many that are. The forums that I have personally followed as they went to hell showed very little of this even in their heyday.
We also have our own form of Kryptonite, the HN front page list of discussions. Many of the people that get kicks stirring up trouble would not understand or care to read this stuff.
This orange website is truly a fascinating place. We reminisce about the old, less commercialized internet while rubbing shoulders with the people who made it the way it is today.
And we (software professionals) are the ones with the power to fix it! It seems obvious but the answer is to just stop working on products/companies that are making the Internet worse!
“Ads are annoying and intrusive!” posts the HN commenter whose next Jira ticket at work is to integrate a new ad SDK into their product.
I’ve quit jobs that I believed were making the world a worse place. Software Engineers supposedly are in demand and have the power to pick their projects and companies. Be part of the solution then, and not part of the problem.
I'm not personally a software professional, but to me it seems that the problem is economical. Centralization and walled gardens happen because they are a way to couple the internet platforms to the economic system. I think that if done "nicely", much of the software and internet tech exist in market failure corner of the economy. It's not like there aren't many federalized/decentralized/community driven and open source projects in existence, it's just that no-one wants to fund and/or market them so that they often become non-viable in the long run.
> And we (software professionals) are the ones with the power to fix it! It seems obvious but the answer is to just stop working on products/companies that are making the Internet worse!
I'm not convinced. We don't work in defense contracting but that industry seems to be doing fine without us.
The problem is the bulk of the demand is at the places with all the money, and those places mostly make the ads, show the ads, or serve companies that make or serve the ads.
Facebook was cool before it allowed to post images and the same goes for reddit. Once the multimedia content was allowed, the incentives changed, the crowd changed and things started to go downhill..
Take a look at HN, no images or videos, so it tends to bring more of the literate crowd.
For me, HN suffers in the comparison to Slashdot, because HN is an example of the arguably overmoderated internet of today. Slashdot had a vibrant culture of troll posting. It wasn’t just dumb one-line slurs or whatever, which no one would want to see. Rather, it was often longform text crafted to a downright literary quality, to the point where many Slashdot regulars would choose to browse their discussion threads at -1 to see those posts. Some of those troll posts ("BSD is dying", etc.) became part of the subculture, it helped create a real feeling of community around shared cultural references.
Yes, on HN one can toggle "showdead", but that is rather hidden away in one's user preferences, so very few people do it. Anyone creating an original troll post might also get a chewing out from dang for trying. In my view, this makes HN more similar to Facebook or Reddit that have very heavy-handed moderation compared to Web 1.0.
On the contrary, I feel that "troll culture" is (along with commercialization) one of the things that has ruined the net. It's basically a form of bullying, and over the years, as bullies do, they've steadily escalated in their trolling.
Harmless pranks from the 4chan crowd morphed into harassment campaigns like Gamergate and Pizzagate, then to 1/6 [edit: the storming of the US Capitol].
Anyone disingenuously complaining that their "freedom of speech" is under attack because they or their hero got booted off Facebook, Twitter, or some small forum, needs to learn to distinguish between private website operators and the government.
> Anyone disingenuously complaining that their "freedom of speech" is under attack
"Freedom of speech" is a philosophical concept, not a legal principle. You seem to have it confused with the US-specific "First Amendment", which is the one that only applies to the government.
I personally see a big problem with social media banning trans-people (Facebook), or declaring that the whole LGBT crowd is inappropriate (Livejournal, Tumblr). I think it's a problem when scientists sharing Covid-19 information get banned for being ahead of the official CDC/FDA guidance (Twitter)
Maybe the solution isn't legal, but I still think it's bad that we have a massive media apparatus that can wipe out any voices it disagrees with, and which is fairly eager to use that against people like me.
Good points. Scale and centralization make the world of Facebook et. al. a much thornier problem. They've become Too Big To Fail™, with all that entails. Not to mention antitrust issues, but that's a digression in itself.
I see some hope in federated systems, and, for that matter, old-school forums that have survived. Usenet still sputters along, but it's not what it was before spammers ruined it.
Definitely agree, HN has been downvoting too much lately and it used to be the case that contrarian views were rarely downvoted, and it was reserved for rude comments or baseless allegations, personal attacks, etc. Today, HN sucks just like any other major discussion board. Conformism is real and downvotes are a tool used to silence and discredit real opinions and insights - although they might be uncomfortable and challenges your long held views - that's exactly the thing that I love about the old internet.
HN is held hostage by people with a particular ideology and conformity, not just political, but across the board.
What the hell happened to Slashdot? I was on it from 1997 until about 2010ish, and now it is pretty ugly.
I think /. cratered due to poor moderation. It's just toxic. Digg is now like Axios for people who think link I do, so I check it daily. And reddit is, well, since the Digg/Reddit wars, its just become all-consuming and too noisy for me.
I'm guessing HN has remained civil because paid mods--who strive to be objective--really do make a difference.
On HN with its dang moderation that is often praised, I have noticed a tendency to ascribe Slashdot's fall to poor moderation. That wasn't actually how things happened, though.
Slashdot's decline started in the years around 2004 because of a site redesign that was taken very badly by the community, and the sale of the site to new owners who began to make all kinds of annoying changes with a view to monetizing. A lot of longtime users bailed out. It was only due to this loss of the productive participants that the site seemed to be taken over by low-quality posting.
I remember the site UI change, but I was mostly grumbling because it looked even more 1990's post-redesign. I didn't realize that cause people to leave en masse. I'm surprised UI was more important than discussion, esp. when the UI change wasn't really that dramatic, IMHO.
The UI changes weren't especially popular, but I don't think they were the cause of a mass exodus. I think it's more that Reddit was gaining in popularity. Slashdot posts had to go through their "editors," who were kind of laughingstocks who regularly let dumb mistakes through, reposted old articles, and regularly posted low-quality, flamebaity articles and thinly disguised advertisements. People put up with it since the articles were largely an excuse for a discussion topic. But then Reddit bypassed this and let people submit things directly. And the quality of Reddit posts and comments was a lot higher since it drew a more cerebral crowd in those early days, which made it more of a threat to Slashdot than the more mainstream Digg (which it also replaced ultimately).
The old internet had a filtering function where, because it was harder to use, people had to have some interest or skill to use it. So as a result, I think the proportion of people “online” had similar interest so more content was relevant and made by similar people.
Now everyone is online with more diverse interests and capabilities.
Not quite. Companies decided to monetize the internet, and because they want to earn all the money in the world, they want as many people as possible to use the internet. So they dumb it down to make it "easier to use".
I think that most of the filtering happened because different communities operated on different platforms rather than a single huge one like Reddit or Facebook.
A small, old time discussion forum for a specific interest in my (rather small) language had only perhaps a hundred active participants and another few hundred casual posters. In that sort of environment it is actually possible for the actives to get to know each other and have occasional live meetings, which builds a much better community. The threshold of participation is a lot higher since a new participant would first have to find the forum and then go through the registration process, both of which filter out people who were not actually that interested in the topic.
In Reddit or Facebook, any "community" (the word in quotations because I don't think they actually are very communal) for even a mildly popular topic gets filled with thousands and thousands of posts from thousands or millions of casual participants. The quality of the posts get very low, it becomes impossible for anyone to read all of them and personalities of the participants don't matter at all.
I think it's a good point. Also everything being in the same place, easy to link or retweet means the small weirdo community will invariably see outside people coming to make fun of them or explain them that they're bad people who deserve to burn on hell.
Yep, this is something I noticed as well. Reddit calls its subreddits communities, but most communities are not about the people but about the content. As you can only have nuanced conversation when you repeatedly run into the same people, the only subreddits able to withstand conversation are niche or heavily moderated like AskHistorians.
What this means is that if you want good conversation on Keyboards, it better be about mechanical. Good conversation on coffee or want a new pair of headphones? Better be into audiophile equipment. There's no room for generalists who just want good enough. Overnight WallStreetBets went from an interesting community of people willing to gamble far more than I to a pile of garbage.
I'm beginning to think that Dunbar's number and the associated tribal splits are something that we should factor into our community building, and not try to work around through metrics and algorithms.
So HN does this aspect correct, by grouping by interest of a certain type of person, but even on HN as more people show up and post the same problems will become evident.
There are subreddits pretty much dedicated to generalist hardware that does things "well enough". Reddit users recognise that not everyone has a large budget to play with, such as teenagers who have to scrounge together a setup with a few dollars and a handful of pocket lint.
I agree. It hasn't just ruined the internet, though. The internet has ruined them. Back in the day we didn't have any illusions about what the internet was. When you connected to a website you were literally just reading information from some random dude's computer. Nowadays there are older people who think the internet is finally lifting a veil on everything because anyone can say anything and mainstream media censors everything (ie. conspiracy theorists), and younger people who don't know anything except the internet and don't realise that there is so much stuff still out there that isn't online.
Flashing back hard to alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, where a bunch of William Gibson wannabes would write for each other as an audience, set within a "virtual bar" known as the Chatsubo.
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[ 8.7 ms ] story [ 402 ms ] thread* https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/
* https://danluu.com/web-bloat/
* https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/the-world-wide-web-is-d...
Can't help but agree with most of their assertions.
Also, I just noticed that the author of this forum post uses 'internet' in place of what I feel should be 'web/world wide web' (just some pedantry from me tbh).
What everyone misses are the personal, hobbyist, non-commercial websites. This was replaced by things like Facebook, Wikia, Pinterest, Twitter, Medium, which are both constrained and ad-ridden. A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr.
The "every site looking the same" thing is fine, however, and still preferred for commercial sites, government, newspapers, startups, other utilities. In fact most of those could still look more of the same, because visitors rarely care about the differentiation for marketing purposes. You could get away with removing all parallax effects from those sites and nobody would miss them. Same for advertisements: nobody cares for the forced variety of colourful banners in web advertisement.
For example, small communities around specific interests, and personal sites of authors of specific works.
We really just need a concentrated effort to catalogue and curate them under a single banner. These efforts also do exist, but haven't yet reached critical mass. Probably because policing content is a full-time job.
It will be a sad sad day when/if Tumblr gets shut down. I really appreciate the fact that users can customize their own pages in many more ways than just changing their profile picture and header image, it gives it a lot more personality than you can get on Instagram/Tumblr/Facebook.
It also has a timelessness that you don't really get on other sites, at least not to the same degree. Posts have timestamps, but on the dashboard they're only visible if you look for them. So most people don't notice if the post they just reblogged was originally posted yesterday -- or seven years ago. This also gets rid of much of the repost issues you see on Reddit and similar sites, since the original post can remain relevant for much longer.
Commercialization made it form "only nerds sit in there" to "everyone is on the internet and it is cool", if there would be no commercialization, internet for masses would still be a silly toy.
Just like going to the Mars - it is just a "hobby" for NASA, most of people on Earth are not giving a damn that they just landed another rover. There is no practical way to make money on space travel currently. Find a way to earn money on sending rockets to Mars or Moon, everyone is going to jump into it.
Companies on its own without hype would not go to the internet or digitalize their processes. There is still loads of companies that are not digital. There are loads of stories of how companies started switching to digital last year because of recent events...
Sure, but part of the fun of the old internet was that it was a silly toy that people didn't take too seriously, at least most of the time, there were definitely still some flamewars stemming from people taking things way too seriously.
A lot of things turn lame once real names and money are involved. And that's the fate of most things once they get big enough. It makes sense, but it's still sad.
Keeping it as a toy for selected ones would be really selfish.
There is still a lot of place for "not real world" in here.
Yes, it certainly did make it easier for people to leave turds in the communal pool.
We did not mean standardize to big picture smiling people, carousels to more pictures and with just one sentence.
I wonder what they will miss.
In many jurisdictions, memes would either break the copyright laws or at least be in the grey zone. It's only a matter of time before someone exploits this. After one case, the platforms will ban them to avoid the risk of getting sued themselves. The same will probably happen for gaming videos.
Or - Fagoomazon might censor it.
Being able to log in without providing you national ID number. And being able to run a public-facing server without a permit.
"I miss old [X]."
There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always missed. You can't go back without a time-machine.
the point of reminiscing is to steer the current time towards the good points of the past, while trying to navigate around the difficulties experienced previously.
For a lot of people who are young today the internet the way it's right now (with TikToks, Instagram, Twitter discussions, rants and memes) will be the one, true internet. And in 10-20 years they will say it has changed and how they miss it. This is a cycle as old as time.
It does seem like an industry-wide conspiracy to make "durable" consumer goods last only as long as their warranties. And also, to make money on replacement parts and complete replacements. The "Just go buy another one"-mentality makes me cringe.
Things in certain places, like America, are getting demonstrably shittier over time: the USPS used to work, there weren't mass shootings nearly every day, parks had water fountains, people debated, corporations didn't takeover public spaces as much, real wages were higher, the US made things, there weren't as many prisoners, healthcare costs were lower, and there weren't millions of visibly-homeless people from an unjust economic system.
I understand a platform cannot be compared to the internet, but I believe the comparison still holds true. Will early snapchat users remember and miss their early experiences 10 years from now?
Positively (ideally) the internet is not a platform, and it can transport anything, not damping future and novel means of expression.
EDIT: But, lets not forget (since I easily went for rational dismissal) Missing something is completely subjective feeling, a valid assertion, and nothing we discuss would have made the author not miss it.
Let's reflect on how difficult it is to fight the endless resources poured on making us engage (and our natural tendency to accept commodities because they are either easy or addicting). I miss napster, I align conceptually with peer to peer interchange, but still, I use spotify. Movies, I still prefer playing directly from bittorrent (even when I know that sequential downloading is harming the swarm).
Ultimately, I just want the network to be neutral and for protocols to never be banned. A neutral network needs not to be subsidized by corporations.
I miss being able to read everything interesting on Usenet over a long lunch sitting in front of a vt220.
It was slow, but you didn't mind because it was all text based. The protocols were open and barely compressed so it was easy to explore and play around with things. A few hours in a wiring closet with a punch-down tool, a crimper, and spools of cable could be used to create magic.
There was no money to be made so no one took it too seriously. There were vast spaces to explore; we didn't know as much as we do now about what is and is not possible (and what can or cannot be solved with technical solutions to what turn out to be meatspace problems) so every crazy idea held a kernel of possibility.
Probably he's talking about Wikia (or, by their new name, Fandom), which indeed is pretty much always the same layout as Wikipedia plus a literal shitload of ads.
What killed off the other sites? Mostly the fact that whenever emotions run high (and the more invested people are in a fandom, the worse it gets), you will have a bunch of scriptkiddies or actual capable hackers that will DDoS or hack your site off the Internet. I don't know many people who are willing to deal with this shit for a hobby project, so it is only logical that most of the creators have either left the fandom entirely or migrated their content off to some centralized platform.
Additionally, people on the consuming side were tired of content vanishing into nothingness when its creators died, lost interest or were unable to pay the hosting bills... which led them to seek out centralized platforms, as (as ugly and ad-ridden they may be) at least promised some form of reliability.
Most of those niche stuff sits in Facebook groups, I bet there are quite a lot of naturist/whatver groups there (probably not posting photos but organizing events or discussing stuff), you have to follow right people on fb/tt/yt.
The creativity is there, for me author of that post misses forest for the trees. Web pages are just secondary artifacts. I don't want my favorite band members sitting in the evening messing with HTML I want them to make music.
Counter culture is about people and what they want to express, sometimes it might be important "how", but for a lot of hobbies "how" is not that much important as long as it is clear and easy to do.
This is why I don't miss "old internet", people are crafty and interesting anyway.
The danger is that a lot of counter-culture movements aren't exactly welcomed by the major providers. Anything involving sex or sexuality - no matter if nudists, swingers, poly-amory, LGBT, fetish beyond 50SOG-style or sex work - has massive risk of getting booted off the internet, as a result of legal requirements (FOSTA/SESTA, child protection laws), credit card regulations or Evangelical fundamentalist pressure.
Anything involving drugs faces similar risks (I'm actually surprised Erowid hasn't been shut down), as is anything going too far anti-capitalist (see e.g. Pirate Bay, SciHub, but also Occupy Wall Street or u/DeepF.ckingValue being dragged in front of Congress after the $GME shenanigans).
What is the upside of having nudist/sex-workers/poly amory group having millions of followers?
For all of those activities it is best to keep it in small trusted groups of people. If you are really dedicated to that stuff you will find your way. Then is it really a counter culture if it can have millions of followers?
Only using FB or TW for content discovery is just the equivalent of starting a browsing session via Yahoo's catalogue — It's just that the ratio of lazy people using the Web has outgrown those who still take the effort of finding the nuggets. At the same time, it has become too easy to publish fluffy spur of the moment content and people craving for upvotes over meaningful discussion. I'm not against giving anyone a voice or leaving it only to the tech-savvy, but I can't say that zero-effort publishing has contributed to the perceived quality and original idea of the Web.
Do I miss the old Web? Yes, but only as much as I miss analogue photography. It's nice to get into that reminiscent mood while flicking through old screenshots made up of spacer gifs, but as I watch the world go by on four screens at a time while ordering groceries on the fifth and paying with my fingerprint, it's kinda nice to see how far we've come.
1) Easy access to many high quality contents. For example HN is a good platform for accessing new knowledge. Note that I say "access", not "learn". Reading HN sometimes give people the false impression that they are learning new knowledge, which usually is not the case. I treat HN as a platform to get a peek at certain new knowledge, but reading books, watching videos and most importantly implementing it by myself, IMO, is the only true way to learn.
2) Fast enough to view high quality videos without any delay. Again this is related to learning new things. It is also important for me because it's one of the few ways that I entertain myself.
3) This might be arguable, but getting knowing a lot of different people from different places is a lot fun. People who comes from different culture usually have different standard of "good", "bad" and other moral judgment and it's fun to read all of those. This was doable 20 years ago but far fewer people were online at the time.
4) It's a lot cheaper. 20 years ago only a company can afford something faster than 1M (back then I had a 56K Modem I think but can't be sure) in my country and it was very expensive even for the modems. Nowadays pretty much everyone has access to some high speed internet. Even if they cannot afford a computer (which is actually a rare case), they have Internet access through mobile phones.
We can have one thing without losing the other.
On the contrary, I would argue that the content quality is drastically lower because of optimisation for revenue and much less purer motivations.
The video quality is really much much better though. Original video scene is great as the business side of the things is a solved problem. Yet again, it suffers from optimisation for advertisers as less and less things are kosher.
Oh and the movie scene is terrible IMHO as a whole, despite having some amazing movies. Netflix is also optimising and the most optimum content for the business of Netflix is often not that optimum for many people. Not many tall poppies came out of it.
It's funny how a pop singer made a song about our optimised happy lives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um7pMggPnug
I think the signal to noise ratio has decreased, but that doesn't mean there's less signal; there's just a lot more noise.
Back in the 80s and 90s you were cherry picking the elite and the intellectuals, the internet of back then was never going to be representative sample of humanity
Go back past the search engines, and most knowledge simply wasn't on the internet yet.
The current internet content is made for the internet. A lot of great things were made of course but I think the optimisation is diluting it into mediocracy. Every single day it gets more and more optimised for revenue or influence through time dominance. If you pay for it, it is designed to keep you pay for it(not necessarily pay for it and consume it but keep paying. Games are mostly freemium where you pay if you want to enjoy, movie subscription services will pile sh*t in font of you to give you the impression of endless content, optimize scenarios for retention etc.). If it is free, it is designed to pay by proxy(purchase something or give political power to an interest group).
20 years ago there were definitely less garbage on the Internet, and less gems as well.
But I definitely agree with the movie part. We still get a few good ones here and there but it's kind of rare nowadays :(
People used to have big desire to meet each other and exchange information. Internet evolution has throttled that desire greatly, we don't have one to one or group conversations any more, not nearly as much as we used to, social media & mainstream access are the culprits.
But the quality of even photos have been downgraded since phones.
A key reason this is because of "weirdness budgets". If I independently arrive at a solution and try to communicate that to you, the more work it takes to verify(so I can easily tell you some prime factors, but not say uhh.. UFOs exist) the result and the more different it is from your prior, the less likely it is to succeed.
This is magnified by the n ( n - 1) / 2 cost of communications, where n is the number of people. We all have different norms, and it's nearly impossible to work out where another persons norm is within a single comment, so mostly people surpass your weirdness budget and you ignore them.
This means that we can only meaningfully talk about things that the general public are on the same phase of. This is just another way to state the Overton window. But now that we understand what creates the Overton window, we can attempt to evaluate what we can do to mitigate it.
Now when we evaluate Facebook, reddit, YouTube comments, HN, message boards, BBS, and 1720 Venice coffee shops we can see them for what they are. The more you bump into the same people, the more nuance you can find. Nuance is where the insights really come from. No one can work it out themselves.
Another depressing reality is that when you do find a tight-nit community that is able to create these insights, all you have done is segmented yourself from the general public's Overton window. Now your just another weird LISPer, and the Java programmers that have libraries and drivers behind their projects will run circles around you even though you are correct. Correctness isn't enough.
As I see it, there are two main issues to solve:
1) It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision?
2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry. Parallel to this shift, people have moved to podcasts, news articles and videos for their daily content. The group of people that consume text is no longer the majority. In many ways, each new social media platform is attempting to recapture an aspect of community/shared experience that has been achieved before. The good platforms extend this reach, the bad suffocate it. A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech.
Not using a framework (by which I assume you mean the likes of wordpress or squarespace) is still as much possible today as it ever was. And, the knowledge on how to do so is ever more accessible.
I can see your point that when provided with easy ways to do things, you are limited to design decisions and choices of those frameworks. However, I think the progress of open source has lowered the bar significantly for creating a completely custom platform.
Yes, it was much simpler. And it was encouraged, because most ISPs offered free web page hosting - including a free URL, and email - with an access account.
Wordpress is a nightmare in comparison. And a fully engineered blog stack is far beyond the reach of most users.
You could argue that the modern equivalent is a Facebook page, but of course web pages were fully public. You were in a public space, under your own name, limited only by your willingness to learn some very basic HTML.
It's a completely different experience to being in a privatised space with its own content management tools, which you only have very limited user level access to.
I do get the sentiment that is expressed, but I also think it is wrong. The possibility to create, and the resources with which to do so is astronomically better than it was growing up. Imagine having access to YouTube and the thousands of excellent tutors. Just because convenience can lead to mediocrity, doesn't excuse it.
1. Sign up to $5/mo virtual hosting service and choose a domain name.
2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress".
3. Open Wordpress.
4. Write and publish whatever you want, structured however you want.
This is much-much easier than working with Frontpage or Dreamweaver was in the olden days. Connecting to a server via FTP alone was a huge hurdle. Now it's all WYSIWYG in a browser.
Obstacles to self-hosted personal websites are smaller than ever before, but the corpo web has turned everyone from homeowners into hotel guests who have to follow their house rules. It's a cultural problem, not a technical one.
You already lost most people here.
> virtual hosting service and choose a domain name.
Actually, people don't even have to have a domain name for their webpage. But ignoring that - how will people know that this is what they need to do? "I want to create a homepage, I don't know what 'virtual hosting' is. I don't know why I need to be looking for 'services'."
> 2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress".
In their what now click what now?
How are you so sure this is always possible?
Also, what about search engines (cough-Google-cough) under-ranking individual pages in favor of larger, corporate-favored sites?
Why has the tech community at large completely failed to educate people on the basics of something used by billions of people daily and affecting increasingly-important parts of their lives?
Is it because we keep infantilizing them the way you seem to be doing, pretending they are too stupid to learn anything new? Or is it because in an effort to simplify, everyone simplifies to a different way, resulting in even more complexity? Or is it because tech really doesn't care and sucks at explaining anything?
A bit of all three (and probably more) if you ask me
Buying virtual hosting, domain names and using a control panel to install Wordpress is already harder, pricier and less anonymous than most users had to endure in the 90s. Also, Wordpress doesn't allow you to easily edit the templates the same way Dreamweaver and Frontpage allowed. Those tools were useable by anyone with knowledge about Word. But to customise Wordpress you need deep HTML knowledge and time. Most Wordpress templates are way more bloated than some bespoke HTML made with Dreamweaver.
You could have said Tumblr, or, if you wanna go commercial, Wix or Squarespace, but self-hosted Wordpress is like the worst of both worlds put together...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Wix/SquareSpace, and I am sure a dozen other options will make this 1 step for you if you are willing to pay a small premium.
In the olden days, you were either affiliated with a university or you signed up to Geocities. Nowadays, you can go to WordPress and add your fill of content pages: it's not just a blog. I'm pretty sure the modern web is a win for ease of access to genuine user-controlled pages. Probably you had more control over the skin of a GeoCities site than a free WordPress page, but I'm not sure to what extent or how important that is.
I think the issue here is more that people don't just want to make content - they want to have readers. You're more likely to get and know about your readers if you post on Facebook or Twitter than if you post on WordPress.
> 2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry.
I think this is important. The modern web doesn't provide discoverability to independent content produced in good faith. Either you have to agree to donate it to Facebook or you need to do a lot of work drumming it up. Google become popular because it cared more about the content than the primitive SEO, and the web was small enough you could plausibly use dmoz.org to browse the internet. Now, advanced SEO is better than any search engine algorithm and there's too much godawful content to be excited to read content without some kind of active recommendation.
> A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech.
I recall another article posted here a few weeks ago, where the author argued that centralisation dominates over decentralisation. But the argument in this place (at least till I went to bed) was that because there was technical decentralisation, there was no centralisation.
I don't know which view represents the mainstream view of technical people today, just which view seemed to have the most advocates while I was reading the thread.
What I do know is that it seems hopeless to me to hope that our best and brightest will help decentralise the internet again. I think the Gemini project has it right when they do whatever they can. I wish it were more prosocial though; it mostly consists of isolated gemlogs without the opportunity to reply. (I mean, you can reply, but all you're doing is posting a new page. If the person to whom you are replying doesn't know you from a loaf of bread, it's more practical to just go wash the dishes. If someone wants to correct me, by all means: I'm all ears.)
Btw, I don't want to imply that the Gemini folk aren't the best and brightest: Just that the path to a decentralised internet is the same as the path to free software - wearing the straitjacket and doing the work. And even then, it's easily lost. How much centralised, non-free software do we all use even if we've never installed it!
I think the main problem to solve is interaction without inauthentic action (spam). Centralised systems allow one person to cut off the spammer once, and that stops them from affecting everyone. If you imagine a decentralised gem/weblogging network with a reply facility, then if you write a logpost (on a log hosted on your own computer) and send a trackback to mine (on a log hosted on my own computer), then I probably consider that interesting. But if now a spammer writes a logpost and sends a trackback to yours, you need a way to cancel that. And once you've cancelled them, they can still post to mine! Each spammer will annoy each logposter as many times as they can get around the spam protection: it's an exp...
If these people were accessing the internet from a home computer they could just install a simple static webserver and put HTML files, jpegs, gifs, etc in a folder, forward ports on their router, and bam, they're on the web.
Buy Viagra ONLINE NOW !! Best viagra sildenafil pills medication 100% safe reliable online shop.
Edit: I guess this ironic post may be indistinguishable from actual spam
Also, hit counters were rad.
https://stuff.mit.edu/doc/counter-howto.html still works! I still use it alongside an old php guestbook script on my personal homepage.
A 10 minutes video with the usual 'subscribe and hit the bell icon', a word from the sponsor, a long winded introduction and then "click on menu, then click on this item, then select the size".
Plus it sucks trying to copy code to reuse
Which such tools do you recommend?
https://superuser.com/questions/927523/how-to-download-only-...
The sequence seems to have been something like: (1) Advertisers: "We'll pay you $2 for a video ad, $1 for an image ad, and $0.20 for a text ad." (2) Google: "We should find a way to create more video ad space."
So it's totally, 100% Google's fault that there is a majority of pointlessly long videos on YouTube
Was going to disagree that it's unfair, but I suppose it arguably is exactly one bit (or ~0.3 orders of magnitude) unfair, since the parties at fault are Google and advertisers jointly, and the parent mentions one out of the two. Not sure how to rigorize that measurement, though.
But.
Two weeks ago there was a small video on Discord that crashed the client when you played it. Here's a 8m30s long video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBNQ6tiNcI
tl;dw: they used ffmpeg to stitch 2 videos with a different aspect ratio together, so it crashes chromium. That's the whole explanation, and this guy spends SIX MINUTES of blowing hot air before getting to the point. It's absolutely infuriating, I genuinely felt robbed of my time.
By the way, with a proper youtube-dl config in place you don't even have to open the browser:
It the best way to watch youtube by any measure that I can think of right now.Might make a good browser plugin. Binary search, but for video. Tweaking the exact ratios might be an interesting problem. I'm thinking (no evidence!) that 30% for a forward jump and 15% for a backward jump might work better. Large jumps forward until you hit something interesting, then small jumps back to find the start.
The funniest part of that meme is that YouTube implemented a (now obviously removed) "wadsworth" query parameter that skipped the first 30% of a video.
I use Movist Pro (Mac-only) for videos that work with youtube-dl. Once you set it up it's like magic. I can set keys for any speed or jump size I desire.
I have gotten pretty good at watching fast and jumping around to see if this vid is worth a look, or will cover the information I need. When I'm away from my computer and have to wade through vids on another machine it's like torture.
By the way, the modern internet is way better than the 1995- 2005 version. Everything you could want is there, you just have to learn how to get past the fluff and BS. I have fond memories of 1997 internet because for the first time I could access so much information from home, but I would never go back.
Honestly? Because I was expecting to hear something interesting at any moment. When I saw the length, I expected to see a technical explanation, a step-by-step how-to, a live example with the ffmpeg CLI. Anything remotely interesting.
What I absolutely did not expect was a 6 minutes long "introduction" out of a 8:30 minutes video. All of that to finally say "it's 2 videos stitched together, like and subscribe"
Honestly, my heart wants it to be true.
That’s why I’m curious if it’s possible for creators to make 1-2 sentence videos that are profitable enough for the platform those videos are on that they can pay the creators well.
Imgur includes a fair bit of video with roughly a 60s cap.
Monetisation seems mostly to be based around branding / influencing.
Now it’s instagram, so why not just use instagram?
By moving away from their market differentiator they made themselves replaceable.
A friend of mine who has an youtube channel once explained to me that he had to add more content to one of his videos which otherwise would end up being too short, since there's a minimum length before youtube can monetize the video. IIRC, the minimum length was something like 8 minutes.
When it is, skip back a bit to find the start of that segment.
As with others, I make heavy use of mpv to (mostly listen to, occasionally actually watch) video, on YT and elsewhere. It's exceedingly good at pulling media references out of random URLs, though not bulletproof.
Earlier today I had to scan through the downloaded HTML to find, and fix, the audio URL for a This American Life episode covering Reality Winner. Then I rapidly scanned through the downloaded audio looking for the start of the segment I was interested in --- 37 minutes into a 1 hour programme.
Much as you don't have to read an entire book to find the chapter or passage of interest (I'm mostly referring to non-fiction here), you don't need to placidly sit through full audio or video sessions either.
You can, of course, also repeat sections of particular interest.
Not everyone understands those cues, and of the ones that understand them not everyone can process them as quickly.
I could never bring myself to say it at the start of a YouTube video but I added it at the end and saw improvements in the analytics from videos that had the reminder versus not.
My intuition would be that you should use the phrasing that is authentic to your channel and voice. Most of my content was reading quotes from government reports, academic research, and news reports and then explaining what I thought about it in a calm monotone. (My vocal inspiration was Sam Harris). At the end of my videos I said "If you enjoyed this video please let me know by clicking the 'Like' button. If you'd like to see more content in a similar style, please subscribe." Which I felt represented the tone and pace of my videos.
On the other hand, if your channel is faster paced, more energetic, focused on being funny etc, then you probably should come up with a wacky or creative way to say "like and subscribe." I don't think anyone is going to subscribe just for how clever your saying is, but it will be more consistent with the tone of the channel. I think the main benefit of saying "Like and subscribe" is just to remind people to do that. Some people will be watching your video and enjoying it but just need an extra push to think "Oh yeah, I should subscribe, I do like these videos."
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
Do you have link to that video? It sounds more (read: at all) interesting than the one you linked.
Videos containing the same information still somehow manage to be worse, though, no argument about that.
If you’re talking about original man pages from volume 1 of the Unix manual (as found on e.g. http://man.cat-v.org/unix_v7), then yes, they indeed make superb reference documentation. However, even their authors recognized that reference documentation alone is not enough, and thus included a collection of (much less streamlined) papers on various parts of the system in volume 2 as a sort of extended introduction and rationale. Reading man pages, even ones as good as the v7 ones, when you want to achieve a specific goal but are not familiar with the system in general, is an absolutely miserable experience. (I imagine it was worse at the time, when OSes were much more diverse.) Man pages are not the be-all and end-all of documentation for the same reason that even the best-written JavaDoc/Doxygen/... reference without standalone prose isn’t.
So, my first caveat is that reference ≠ (comprehensive) introduction, you need both. My second caveat is reference ≠ specification ≠ introduction, thus you actually need all three. When people started to create reimplementations of Unix utilities, it turned out that they were massively underspecified by the man pages. The precise specification is more or less what POSIX is, and it’s significantly less readable than the original man pages even if you also format it as man pages and take out all the extensions. It’s not that original Unix userland lacked specification documents, it’s that their role was served by the source code of the libraries and utilities themselves (for all the copyright problems that it eventually caused). The kernel too, presumably, but people famously thought that wasn’t enough, and thus Lions’s commentary was born.
I mentioned above that the papers from volume 2 also served as a rationale and an annotated bibliography, which is also a good document to have, but probably not as essential as the previous three. I’m also not saying that they all be separate documents: Unix merged the introduction and rationale but separated both from the reference; except for the tutorial, Python manages to merge the introduction and reference for its standard library surprisingly well, but lacks a good specification; the TeXbook tries to be everything at once but is in my opinion not that good at any particular task. What I am saying is that they are all different facets that have to be present in the writing.
My third and final caveat is... Not really a caveat for your statement, but still a problem if you’re a documentation writer: The concise style and general structure of the Unix man pages only works well as long as the individual pieces are simple enough and there is not a lot of them. You can’t write man pages for complex programs; or rather you can, but the format starts to show its limits, as aptly demonstrated by bash(1). It’s probably not a coincidence that Stallman wanted to replace the Spartan man page by the hyperlinked info node. You can say that one oughtn’t make things that are that complex, and I agree, but that’s not the point of view of the documentation writer.
And - hey! If the only solution was in a video snap off a quick blog post! You can even link the video and maybe it’ll help someone in the future.
Modern web has become less and less “write” and more “read” and that contributes to the downfall imo.
Videos were super useful for fixing my toilet.
It would be nice if instead of websites being forced to display cookie banners, what if they were forced to support plain HTML/CSS only mode? Not only would it increase privacy and prevent things like Canvas fingerprinting (oh wait, that’s what commercial interests use), it would also put content first.
JavaScript began as a way to add dynamism to HTML which CSS now can handle by itself.
What we need is a web framework that provides good fallback modes.
My challenge to folks: try to use HTML/CSS only to create interesting and dynamic websites which focus on content-first. And give that content good printer-friendly support :)
And for monetization, sell a product on there of some kind. Provide something useful. Don’t hide behind a barrage of ads. There’s always another way!
For example: Put in the URL for that vid (or share-sheet it to the app), and it instantly returns “Click on menu > Item, then select size”
The worst are the ones that obviously scrape content from StackOverflow and then reword it.
> It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky with random search results.
This indeed, and DuckDuckGo automates it further with their bang shortcuts like !w for Wikipedia, or !reddit, !ebay, etc.
But even though DuckDuckGo has mostly shaped up to be a good alternative to Google (I rarely use !g anymore), it's vulnerable to SEO tricks in its own right. Searching specific sites helps a lot, but it shouldn't have to be that way.
You can usually pull the transcript/subtitles, without watching the video.
https://gemini.circumlunar.space
I looked around a few days ago and I find it really neat. Its minimalism makes it unsuitable for all the trash that has ruined the modern web as a simple information store. It uses the principle of least capability to create an environment where mere information takes center stage. Not even supporting images means memes can't even take hold, let alone real-time adtech.
The only flaw is that it's still a client/server protocol, which means closed silos and more passive forms of adtech could still invade.
(The modern web is however an acceptable thin client for single page apps that interact with services. I look at HTML5+CSS+JS as the new VT100, a terminal protocol for talking to remote machines.)
The other part of the modern Internet that reminds me of the old Internet is small independent podcasts. I listen to a number of these, and the high information content and lack of bullshit is reminiscent of the web before Facebook and adtech. There's also an implicit principle of least capability in podcasts. It's possible to insert ads, sure, but it's also possible to skip them and it's hard to make it impossible to do that. The medium is non-interactive and almost non-scriptable. There is an effort right now to walled garden podcasts, and I urge everyone who cares to resist it by using podcast apps and aggregators that are not pushing this.
It's not like I don't empathize. But one needs to realize that this is a specific thing, it's a human experience, shared across time and culture.
Oh yeah and the popups and the pop-unders can rot in hell. I can't believe how long it took for developers to control the situation.
This is one of my favourite songs now: [2]
It's a bit crazy when I think about how different our generations grow up and it makes me a bit sad that our children will have a completely different understanding of what the internet is. For me it was a place of wonder, freedom and self-expression. It's different today, but even I have problems explaining how it changed. But it definitely lost some if it's playfulness on the way.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14544192/
[2] https://youtu.be/k1BneeJTDcU
Independent creator culture (1980-2000), converted into mass consumer culture (2000-2010), and then back into taxed creator culture within walled ecosystems (2010-2020).
F.ex. YouTube started in 2005, but from my memory the first years were primarily sharing copyrighted commercial material, before they cracked down on that and leaned into monetizing and taxing organic content
Someone making funny videos on the internet on their free time without any kind of expectation to make money out of it unavoidably produces different results than the same person making semi-professional videos on Youtube and making living out of it. If the latter is an option, why the hell would the said person do the former? But since the latter option exists, it drives all of the creations to more professional, less quirky direction. It's the same effect that causes all the Hollywood films to have pretty much the same story arc and all the big budget games to feel like copies of each other.
If I start a business that makes hosting and sharing videos easier, should I sell it to hobbyists who don't have money, or semi/pros who have lots of money? And how does that affect my feature pipeline and product evolution?
The end result being... hobbyists have minimal, difficult, and (relatively) expensive platforms to enable their work, and semi/pros have well featured and cheap (or free) platforms. And that perpetuates the bifurcation and destruction of pure hobbyists.
It absolutely is. You don't even have to go completely old-school and DIY youtube. There is always a way you can surf the current internet weather conditions to achieve some hybrid stance.
For instance, maybe you put some videos on YouTube, but also have deeper posts for each of those on some personal blog that you host on a server in your garage.
With this approach, you can drive traffic from both directions - People who were browsing your blog and want to watch some embedded YT demo, and YouTubers desperate for hard, written technical documentation on how to do something will have link in the description below.
Climate change has produced their own religious zealots.
I mean, there was frankly no other way forward. Our kids will either be drawn to the next frontier, or wont be bothered like MOST KIDS when we grew up :D
Kids seem to be having fun on TikTok. The obvious issue is I wouldn't call it a place of freedom.
The internet of today hasn't changed much and is still a reflection of it's population. And if we don't like what we see it's because it highlights the worst parts of society as well as the best.
I've been doing a lot of thinking on how the internet has changed humanity since it's inception and watching our gradual change into a more connected and collectivist mentality. I think right now we're all being confronted with the imperfect creatures we are and ultimately I think it's a good thing for how we'll progress from here.
As more and more people generate content, more and more bullshit exists. Unfortunately, Google etc. - despite all their big announcements - can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit.
Where's the semantic web that was promised? I wonder if we're still paying for the mistakes that were made with the whole XML stuff ...?
Just have to read up on the history of Yahoo and watch that last season of Halt & Catch Fire. ;-)
People like using the Wayback Machine when they know that certain content used to exist, but not necessarily to discover new things unfamiliar to them.
* Basic HTML only, no Javascript
* No user interaction (comments, etc.)
* Gets updated occasionally but not all the time, perhaps a few times a year
It's worse than that. They are shoveling bullshit. They turned on the bullshit magnet and lit up the bullshit bat signal. They created a bullshit attention economy and sold bullshit tickets to bullshit artists. Literally everthing about Google and Facebook is creating one opportunity after another to jab you in the eyeballs with ads and/or trap you in a never-ending cycle of "engagement" that has few paths out. It's a trap to monetize every aspect of your interactions with the digital world, to monetize your very attention span. Once you are in, you are at the mercy of a metric assload of computation designed to trap your little rat ass so your eyeballs can be strapped open and ads sold to the highest bidder piped right into your brain. And there are basically zero financial incentives for them to stop or slow down.
Just seems like a human weakness, always believe the person that appears the most confident, no matter what they say. And a bullshitter will say anything that people like because they need positive feedback because they're so convinced that what they have to say is pure greatness, and they don't even realize that they just always say whatever gets the most applause. And man, these people are good in that specific respect (and literally nothing else). They perfected their bullshit to a degree that its really really hard to see through it, at least it will take time. And then the next bullshitter comes along and one's fooled again because fuck they're good.
And yeah now we got a system called social media putting those people on steroids. Its not like that didn't happen every time we invented a new way of communicating. But every fucking time we believe this time it's different and people are better now and all that shit won't happen.
And of course then you get in a competition between those bullshitters, so they have to turn the heat up more and more to beat their fellow bullshitters. And what gets the most heat? Well, hate and fear and division and polarization of course. And now we are where we are and have to deal with fucking QAnon bullshit.
You're right, it's just not that apocalyptic. I think we should be worried, yes, but this can be mitigated with stricter regulation and better public education. And of course engineers choosing to work for respectable companies instead of following the digits on their paychecks.
I think it's very natural for people to divide into communities of tens or, at most, hundreds of people. The modern web platforms don't respect this at all.
https://millionshort.com
The thing I really miss about the old Internet are forums. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and other social media sites lack a certain intimacy. Everyone is somewhat hostile by default and there is no incentive to contribute to the community. It's very different and a lot less fulfilling than the Internet forums circa ±2000-2005.
So thank you to the team that runs Hacker News and everyone who comments for making it a good place to come to.
Don’t like someone OR their comment? Just do your part with three other people and it’ll be faded, once it’s faded other people will join in hiding the bad man who said the bad thing - and gone!
No more contrarian opinion, we protected other people! Everyone agrees now. How wonderful.
I agree, downvote-based discussions invariably lead to echo chambers / monocultures. See the dumpster fire that are reddit comments.
At least on old-time forums there was no such bullshit (except post count :)).
Anyway, a few years ago I thought I could speed up the tagging process by pulling tags from Last FM and filtering out the shite by only including tags that matched an instrument name or mood. Luckily I backed up before running the script on my whole collection. The data was absolute garbage.
It didn't work perfectly (obviously the site is still highly opinionated in favor of certain things, like Linux and free software), but it also wasn't the smooth-brained hivemind that Reddit comments sections are. I can't think of another site that's even tried to come up with a better moderation system than simple up/down votes. At best, there are some behind-the-scenes algorithms that decide how exactly to prioritize comments based on the voting, but that's derived from popularity as well. An immeasurable side effect of this is that many heterodox comments simply aren't posted at all since people know they're going to be downvoted to oblivion anyway.
Reddit lost its way when they started heavily moderating or banning entire subs that didn't fit with their woke US-centric world view, while rape porn was "fine". I closed my account a while back and stopped visiting the site, but unfortunately, there are so many organisations and FOSS projects that use it in an official capacity that it's unavoidable.
A person who gives 100 downvotes per month will have his downvotes count 1/20th as those of a person who downvotes 5 times per month. An incenctive to be really judicious in handing out downvotes and not simply using them to drown out minority opinions.
Content would get moderated but you could still read messages. Even the ones that went against the dogma.
Not at HN, anti-dogma posts get downvoted into oblivion or flagged if they are bad enough. I recently posted a counter-opinion on burnout and was downvoted pretty badly. I didn't flame, and tried to articulate my point well.
HN is composed of the exact microcosm of people who have ruined the internet. It's just an echo chamber where counter-points are nuked. No different than facebook, or anything else. At least /. made you think about using your modpoints to downvote. Now it's free - and for many very pathetic people downvoting is a source of dopamine. It's far easier to drive-by-downvote without having to even articulate a reply as to why. Comparing this to the old BBSes and forums, you at least got a moderator note (or a VERY disparaging note from a user) in your PMs about why you're being moderated. It is wildly frustrating to type something well thought out and be downvoted into oblivion because your stance isn't en-vogue.
I run one myself, because I want more of them to exist.
I miss bbses. I resisted the internet switch for as long as possible. I remember the last c64 release..wasn't it monsters of mayham.. the graphics were amazing and the gameplay fast. Sort of like a mario world.
BBS could be elite where you needed references. It could be local family focuses with no swearing. There was a network of bbses who would share posts.. that was cool.
The best thing about bbses. As a SysOp I could start chatting with any user. The person logging in actual used your computer so in real time you could watch what the user was doing. Websites lost that.
We lost the “local” based internet groups and we only really have “subject” based groupings anymore.
Spammers killed many a forum because it became a full time effort by admins and moderators to remove them. Automated tools, especially early tools, had limited effectiveness. People running a site as a hobby don't want to spend their days removing spam comments.
Assholes also (for many reasons) will DDoS forums. This is another administrative headache for site owners if not a financial headache.
The same driving force saw blogs remove comments for centralized solutions like discus or abandon self-hosted blogs for Medium and the like.
While Facebook and reddit have plenty of spam issues the "owners" and mods of a group/subreddit are different from the site admins. There's a lot less financial risk for someone running a group there than their own server. They also let a wider swath of people run a group rather than only those that are interested in a niche topic, have the technical skills to effectively run a forums, and the money to pay for it all.
I am constantly amazed at the thoughtful comments from people who are informed on a subject and take their time to layout a cogent argument. This makes it worthwhile to spend some time scanning more and more other stuff. I am getting to be quite a speed reader in this place.
HN will be just fine as long as Dang (and the other guy) spend so much energy here.
We also have our own form of Kryptonite, the HN front page list of discussions. Many of the people that get kicks stirring up trouble would not understand or care to read this stuff.
“Ads are annoying and intrusive!” posts the HN commenter whose next Jira ticket at work is to integrate a new ad SDK into their product.
I’ve quit jobs that I believed were making the world a worse place. Software Engineers supposedly are in demand and have the power to pick their projects and companies. Be part of the solution then, and not part of the problem.
I'm not convinced. We don't work in defense contracting but that industry seems to be doing fine without us.
Take a look at HN, no images or videos, so it tends to bring more of the literate crowd.
Yes, on HN one can toggle "showdead", but that is rather hidden away in one's user preferences, so very few people do it. Anyone creating an original troll post might also get a chewing out from dang for trying. In my view, this makes HN more similar to Facebook or Reddit that have very heavy-handed moderation compared to Web 1.0.
Harmless pranks from the 4chan crowd morphed into harassment campaigns like Gamergate and Pizzagate, then to 1/6 [edit: the storming of the US Capitol].
Anyone disingenuously complaining that their "freedom of speech" is under attack because they or their hero got booted off Facebook, Twitter, or some small forum, needs to learn to distinguish between private website operators and the government.
"Freedom of speech" is a philosophical concept, not a legal principle. You seem to have it confused with the US-specific "First Amendment", which is the one that only applies to the government.
I personally see a big problem with social media banning trans-people (Facebook), or declaring that the whole LGBT crowd is inappropriate (Livejournal, Tumblr). I think it's a problem when scientists sharing Covid-19 information get banned for being ahead of the official CDC/FDA guidance (Twitter)
Maybe the solution isn't legal, but I still think it's bad that we have a massive media apparatus that can wipe out any voices it disagrees with, and which is fairly eager to use that against people like me.
I see some hope in federated systems, and, for that matter, old-school forums that have survived. Usenet still sputters along, but it's not what it was before spammers ruined it.
HN is held hostage by people with a particular ideology and conformity, not just political, but across the board.
I think /. cratered due to poor moderation. It's just toxic. Digg is now like Axios for people who think link I do, so I check it daily. And reddit is, well, since the Digg/Reddit wars, its just become all-consuming and too noisy for me.
I'm guessing HN has remained civil because paid mods--who strive to be objective--really do make a difference.
Slashdot's decline started in the years around 2004 because of a site redesign that was taken very badly by the community, and the sale of the site to new owners who began to make all kinds of annoying changes with a view to monetizing. A lot of longtime users bailed out. It was only due to this loss of the productive participants that the site seemed to be taken over by low-quality posting.
I still visit /., but it just isn't what it used to be. If anything, the trolls are even more vile than they were back then.
The old internet had a filtering function where, because it was harder to use, people had to have some interest or skill to use it. So as a result, I think the proportion of people “online” had similar interest so more content was relevant and made by similar people.
Now everyone is online with more diverse interests and capabilities.
You are just describing the same thing as OP said
And it is not even a matter of direct monetization, but growth into monetization
So yeah, OP is correct
A small, old time discussion forum for a specific interest in my (rather small) language had only perhaps a hundred active participants and another few hundred casual posters. In that sort of environment it is actually possible for the actives to get to know each other and have occasional live meetings, which builds a much better community. The threshold of participation is a lot higher since a new participant would first have to find the forum and then go through the registration process, both of which filter out people who were not actually that interested in the topic.
In Reddit or Facebook, any "community" (the word in quotations because I don't think they actually are very communal) for even a mildly popular topic gets filled with thousands and thousands of posts from thousands or millions of casual participants. The quality of the posts get very low, it becomes impossible for anyone to read all of them and personalities of the participants don't matter at all.
What this means is that if you want good conversation on Keyboards, it better be about mechanical. Good conversation on coffee or want a new pair of headphones? Better be into audiophile equipment. There's no room for generalists who just want good enough. Overnight WallStreetBets went from an interesting community of people willing to gamble far more than I to a pile of garbage.
I'm beginning to think that Dunbar's number and the associated tribal splits are something that we should factor into our community building, and not try to work around through metrics and algorithms.
So HN does this aspect correct, by grouping by interest of a certain type of person, but even on HN as more people show up and post the same problems will become evident.