Hacker News Reader

I have been doing internet things since the early 2000s. I learned HTML and FTP and many other technologies back then precisely to say something online. I disagree that things are less weird now.

Things are more weird. Where there was one weird place, there are now thousands. Even if only 1% of today’s sites are “weird” that’s bigger than all of the internet of 1995 combined. Rising tide lifts all ships.

Want to talk on a BBS? Head on over to SDF. They got you covered. IRC is still alive and kicking, though now with far greater capabilities. GitHub. Think about what people used to have before GitHub. I uploaded things to SourceForge back when it was one of the few choices. Oof. Think about the kind of weird shit you can find on GitHub/GitLab/etc. today.

The thing is that the apparent problem is that non-nerds are now allowed online. The horror. I have found plenty of strange, weird, niche, 1337, whatever communities now and they are made better by the fact that you don’t always have to have a magnetized needle and a steady hand to use them. All you gotta do to find them is to look just beyond Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Hell, some subreddits are microcosms onto themselves.

But this nostalgia for the “good old days” when you couldn’t have a web page in Russian and Korean at the same time is just that, nostalgia. What has actually been lost that we used to have but don’t today?

I never said anything about "good old days" give me a choice between 1995 internet and 2019 internet and I'll take 2019 in a heartbeat.

Wikipedia alone would make that choice easy.

Throw in that I can get an answer to some obscure error code in some library to talk to an old piece of hardware in <30s and I'm completely sold.

I was just describing my experience between then and now.

> The thing is that the apparent problem is that non-nerds are now allowed online.

Now you are just projecting, I never said modern internet was worse and I definitely didn't say anything about non-nerds been a problem, the internet is a larger part of my mums life (nearly house bound due to arthritis) than it is mine and that's a good thing.

It's great for tech research, but if you search for anything else, it's all spam/commercial sites.

In what domain do you find spam to be overwhelmingly present?

I can be really hard to find "hot singles in your area" nowadays.

Fitness, health, DIY, investing to name a few I see regularly.

That’s fair. My response was partially to the general theme of the thread, and your comment described quite well the 1995 state of things.

My comment about the non-nerds being the apparent problem is not that I actually think that. It’s that this sentiment often comes up. But reality is that we have way more nerds online now than before.

And overall the whole article is basically an advert for a new blogging system. Which may or may not be fun to use, but pining for the days when XSS was a desired feature.

> Things are more weird. Where there was one weird place, there are now thousands. Even if only 1% of today’s sites are “weird” that’s bigger than all of the internet of 1995 combined. Rising tide lifts all ships.

Yes, this is the counterpoint to TFA. Sure, it's a lot harder to find "weird" stuff now. Especially because it tends to get pushed down in search results. But once you find something that's "weird" in your preferred way, there are often links to lots more of it.

Also, you'll find lots more "weird" on Tor onion sites, I2P and Freenet. There are a few reasons for that, I think. One is relative lack of censorship. Also, a lot of content is more or less standalone, generated by users using simple tools, on VPS or shared hosting. And there are constraints imposed by high latency and limited bandwidth. All of that is like the old Web.

So anyway, TFA is correct, if we're talking about the Web ("internet") as a whole. But not if we're talking about the absolute amount of “weird” content.

> The thing is that the apparent problem is that non-nerds are now allowed online.

Eternal September is forever.

Also a testament to the sustainability of usefulness of having a business model that isn't directly about monetization, which means it's probably really hard to copy.

HN is a PR project for an accelerator/venture capital firm. Since its purpose is to make ycombinator look awesome and generate leads for them (providing indirect monetary value), we all get a fun place to hang out and discuss stuff so they can project that image, but I have no doubt that without that fairly unique situation it would quickly devolve into some variation of what we commonly see with social networks that have to find a way to pay for the services they provide.

The technical side of HN isn't insurmountable, the moderation side is harder but the community side is the hard part.

I could build a HN, I could maybe moderate it (though probably not as well as dang and co, they are rather more even handed than me) but getting people to come and use it without attaching it to a VC fund not so much.

If I wanted to make a profit though then things are different.

Good community projects can self fund, lichess is a good example, hundreds of thousands of users, millions of games a day and zero advertisings, scheezy tactics.

Completely funded on donations, even pays the lead developer a liveable salary (though certainly not what he'd earn on the open market working for said scheezy social networks sadly).

I actually wasn't trying to make a point that HN itself is specifically hard to copy, but the more generic idea that having a business model that's not based on monetization is hard, for some of the reasons you noted. I guess a corollary is that HN is therefore hard to copy, but it's not for any real technological issue, as you note.

I also agree it's not impossible, as you point our with lichess, it's just that with the current level of consumer awareness of privacy, I think most people (still) don't realize what they are paying for some competitors that appear free, but are really just monetized through selling personal information, and for some services network effects trump almost all others. A free chess matching service, where being linked with random people of appropriate skill level is a selling point is a lot different than a social network that's built around connecting with friends and family.

AS to being funded on donations, while I think it's wonderful that a project can be funded on donations, I wouldn't want any project I care about to be in this situation unless the donations exceed all operating/staffing costs by a very comfortable margin. There's just not enough leeway for unforeseen problems in a situation like that. Server failure? Severe illness in key personnel? Massive influx of new users that haven't matured in the user lifecycle to consider donating yet? That's such a stressful situation that I can't imagine wanting to live it for more than a few years. Unfortunately, if you can't get enough donations to get past that point (or keep increasing scope until you are at that point no matter the incoming funds), I'm not sure a solution besides monetization in some manner, and the problems and perverse incentives that come along with it. :/

> I was on the internet in the mid-90's (I was 15 in 95 which I think is the year I got on the net, I'd been on BBS's for about 5-6 years before that) and it did used to be much more weird as a percentage of sites than now (though the number of sites was tiny).

I agree with your basic observation but I have a slightly different response:

Most people aren't all that fun or weird, at least not in a way which translates to text or graphical arts or music or anything else you can transmit over the Internet. Most people are the majority, and you'll never find the majority you're currently steeped in to be especially fun or weird. (Example: A great way to make a living as a comedian is to rephrase normality to make people see it as fun and weird. Observational comedy takes a keen eye for the obvious.)

> Most people aren't all that fun or weird, [..]

It took me way too many runs around the sun to finally get that :(.

Maybe they are now self-censoring and therefore are even less fun or weird?

In 1995 been on the net at all made you an outlier which is why I said by percentage though perhaps that wasn't clearly put.

None of my friends had a computer at home and didn't understand anything about them beyond those things we use in school for an hour once a week I was literally the only kid in my year who programmed them as a hobby.

We were not rich or anything but my father (for his faults) was fascinated with them and so I had access years before they became a thing.

They just were not embedded into the fabric of a working class northern town in England the way that they are now.

It's strange been under 40 and remembering three distinct phases in my life, pre-computers in homes, 1 computer in a home (maybe) and now everyone is wandering around with the kind of hardware 15 year old me would have dreamed of in their pocket.

I've been on the leading edge of computer adoption since a child and I still get future shock when I walk through a bus station and literally everyone is starting at a little glass rectangle streaming video wirelessly.

The other thing that still makes me smile is that my mum has three computers in her house, all of them running a linux kernel (Kindle Fire, Chromebook and a desktop running Mint) meaning as a percentage of devices owned she out 'Linuxs' me (I have an Xbox and dual boot for gaming), in 1998 when I was faffing about with RH and getting in trouble for breaking the family PC I wouldn't have seen that coming either.

You're entirely correct that most people just aren't all that fun or weird. Over the last 20 years the internet has become an increasingly commercial and democratised place. In the earlier years the level of technical aptitude necessary to be a content producer online would have filtered out the contributions of all but the more tech-savvy amongst us, who I'd wager tend to be among the more 'fun or weird' people out there. For commercial reasons alone, it's advantageous to all parties involved from those on the infrastructure side, all the way to media companies and manufacturers of consumer goods to make the internet a more accessible place. This has contributed to the internet becoming ever more homogenised, commercial and bland to match the taste of the vast consumer public. 2019 internet is built for the same status quo that the television stations and tabloids of old were made for. Also refer to the 'Eternal September' phenomena on Usenet, that's pretty much what's happened here at a large scale.

During that same period, we were building up the concept of UX and one of the things drilled into people's heads was that 9 times out of 10 (at least), what you are doing is not so unique that you deserve to use a new UI metaphor to present it.

When in doubt, use the same mechanisms to accomplish things that everybody else uses.

That sort of peer pressure is intended to reduce the variability between web sites. I think for better or worse we are seeing the dividends of that effort.

Are you the "Hinkley" who created HL?

More on-topic, you're totally right. I keep a copy of "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines" on my desk and show it to designers sometimes when they want to suggest interaction patterns that are unnecessarily novel. Very handy! haha :)

(nope, I just like the sound of it)

Wow, have you looked up the price of that book now? I don't know what it originally sold at, but today it's $248 and up. You can get the PDF for free, but if you want a hardcopy to keep on your desk, it's not cheap.

Huh for sure? I could see it on Amazon around $20-40. But yeah I got pretty lucky, cost me $5 or $10 or something along with some other Mac programming books from that era. Aww yeah :)

Interesting wording, that reddit "cleaned up the community", and that this caused a decline in the quality of content. I had this worry at the time, and was, under doubt, opposing this decision. Could you say a few words about what specifically changed after this?

I don't personally agree, as far as I know, with any of the communities that were banned, apart from the communities for buying and selling stuff, which no one should really have a problem with. And some of the communities that were banned, I vehemently disagree with, and would probably strongly oppose if they formed a political platform. The "involuntary porn" subreddits were probably breaking the law and in some cases causing great emotional distress. This latter case I think clearly crosses the line, but there were plenty that were in a gray area at worst.

There's something to having free speech readily available for criticism and scrutiny that feels very valuable. These people are around whether you want them to or not, and there's value in being able to scrutinize their views. Also, I feel there's a chilling effect when you've seen examples that saying certain things leads to explulsion.

You've pretty much covered my views.

What was illegal should already have been banned but the removal of non illegal but objectionable (to many) content stuck at the heart of what Reddit was, of course it's their platform and they can do as they please but I often enjoyed debating with people holding diametrically opposite views.

I mean I entirely get why they would do it from a business point of view but it was a stark sea change from what they'd done up to that point.

Throw in all the other odds and ends and Reddit just feels different.

The constant nagging to install their app, the hilariously bad redesign and handling of the redesign etc it just adds up.

Cool. Nice to have this discussion with you. It felt like there was remarkable consensus on reddit while these changes took place, with remarkably few people who took a more principled (in a free speech sense) stance. So I’m glad it’s not just me. I’ve been questioning whether I am in the wrong for not wanting to censor unpopular or heinous opinions.

I wonder if there is a way to combine the weird fun that was geocities/tripod/etc with the connections of a social network and modern ease of updating. Like how you use twitter, but for following webpages about butterflies or a shrine to the 6502 processor.

RSS - (partially) Google killed it.

My first website was about about TNG and why DS9 sucked balls.

Ironic since I now consider DS9 the better series (but TNG still has the truly stand out episodes, I think young me was just oblivious to a lot of the subtler stuff but I digress), it was shockingly bad (and I'd been programming since the 80's, HTML was just weird).

I spent about five years hating the crap out of it and never even considered web development as a career, if you'd have asked me back then I'd have said you'd claw the compiler out of my cold dead hands.

20 odd-years later and I do enterprise web dev (and C#/WPF and Java)

RSS is alive, and for dumb sites there are hacks such as https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/-

You have a trailing - and also neat!.

I love RSS-Bridge. I have a local instance running, and it saves me from having to sign up with Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Also, tt-rss is an excellent reader.

I was interested in tt-rss until I tried it out and there was a problem with the Android app. I checked the forums for a solution...

If you do check out the forums for it you will very quickly see that the developer is a massive asshole.

I wouldn't trust any code that a person like that writes to run on my machine.

I forked tt-rss back in 2005 for my personal use after I tried to submit a few patches that didn't "align well" w/ the developer. I wouldn't go so far as to say "massive asshole", but he did seem to be a challenge to deal with. I decided it wasn't worth the effort to try to contribute back my changes.

I was able to enjoy TNG from the get go. It's one of the few shows where the stories have any depth. Although I did start watching it when I was in my twenties, so that could have been a factor in being able to pick up on the subtler themes

I watched TNG as it aired, that and Quantum Leap where my favourites as a kid at a time when UK TV was four channels and sci-fi was rare.

What you want is ActivityPub: https://activitypub.rocks/

It's the underlying protocol that connects the various federated services in the "Fediverse", (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse) like Mastodon, PeerTube, NextCloud, etc. At root it's just a standardized way for nodes in a network to send messages to each other, though, so you could use it to get those "connections of a social network" you're looking for. And then Mastodon users, say, could get updates/notifications from your site/service/whatever right in their feed.

Tumblr?

This. Weird and fun I exactly how I see Tumblr.

That, sprinkled with a bit of CP on top

Tumblr gave itself up and will be irrelevant soon.

Stumbleupon was a good resource for this.

youall forgot to mention beaker browser.

Bit of a shameless plug... but that's kind of what we're building @ find.xyz.

Here's an example of some weird shit in the dessert. https://find.xyz/map/toto-forever

Also one on the death of RSS since someone mentioned that https://find.xyz/map/what-happened-to-rss

Nice idea!

You've got a typo on https://find.xyz/about : s/beatuful/beautiful/g

Ha. Damn. Thanks :)

Websites have had comments sections since well before social networks took off. Even in the Geocities days, you had "Sign my Guestbook/View my Guestbook". Some truly old-school websites, like Mark Prindle Reviews, included email responses from people who read his work.

Trying to shoehorn social media profile integration into this system will eventually end up influencing the content, and once more it'll be a race to the bottom, with everyone posting stuff only for other people's validation. It shouldn't work that way for the 'weird web'.

> and it did used to be much more weird as a percentage of sites than now

Bingo.

There are still weird sites now. But back then, that's all there were.

back then, nobody needed .onion