This isn't fun anymore (2017)
therandymon.com
therandymon.com
In an internet filled with advertising, tracking, toxicity and trolls, HN is a relief.
The design is simple, fast and functional. The community does a tremendous job of legislating itself. The content is incredibly valuable.
Hacker News reminds me of the internet I grew up loving, not the thing it has become.
Much as I rail against the overly pedantic nature of many, many comments here, this place is a veritable treasure trove compared to Reddit.
On Reddit, every single fucking thread gets derailed by shitty puns, basement-tier humour or a one-liner with all the nuance of a tweet. Doesn't matter how sombre a topic, some dickhead is going to make an oh-so-clever quip and legions of fellow dickheads will line up to suck his dick and upvote it to the top.
Even when there are substantive comments, the replies to those comments rarely make for useful reading.
"Take my upvote and fuck off"
"Nice"
"Mom's spaghetti"
"/r/Suicidebywords" on a comment about dick sizes
... and on and on
Not to mention the fact that Reddit's recent algorithms upvote the shittiest content to the front page to begin with. I mean, /r/dankmemes? /r/memeeconomy? /r/wholesome memes? Fuck outta here with that shit.
There are exceptions, of course. /r/financialindependence comes to mind. But overall, it's become an out of control shitshow that I visit ever less frequently.
So yeah, thank god for HN.
The Reddit of today is about posting the "funniest" screenshots from Twitter, things like blackpeopletwitter, whitepeopletwitter, murderedbywords and so on.
It's easy to say that Reddit has no discussions of merit when only using examples of subreddits which have no intent to have discussions of merit, and focus primarily on memes and light-hearted content. But it's purposely disingenuous to do so. That's usually what people seem to do.
But compare the quality of discussion between Hacker News and the programming subreddits from which stories are usually reposted, or the heavily moderated expert subs like /r/askahistorian, and see if HN really still stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of quality. In my experience, with the minor exception that HN is allergic to any sort of humor, the experience is about the same.
Totally agree about the no humour thing on HN though.
Once you get rid of the default subscriptions, the experience becomes way more enjoyable. Smaller subreddits generate less garbage and tend to be moderated better. Even better, you're less likely to see ads-disguised-as-content like you do on /r/pics and /r/aww. No one posts in /r/woodworking or /r/PrintSF because they want to whore some karma. /r/asoiaf has some wonderfully nuanced (if not repetitive due to the lack of new source material) discussions. And so on.
Overall, though, I think the state of /r/AskReddit gives the best summary of reddit's downfall. When I started going on reddit in 2009, the threads there were often interesting, and you didn't have to tag something "serious" to get serious replies. Several years ago, it began to be the case that if you didn't tag something serious, then, well, you would get thousands of comments of _literally_ the same joke. And that's default reddit -- thousands of comments of literally the same joke.
Maybe "They" are tracking me just as assiduously as him, and desperately trying to get their ads projected onto my retinas, but I never see any online ads at all. Hence, I never see targeted ads.
If I were ever to turn off UMatrix, I probably would be shocked. But why would I do that?
So my main complaint about The Web These Days is that everything works badly, when it works at all. Amazon search can never bring up what I want to buy, even when I know it exactly. Ebay, likewise. Google cannot find anything that might be vaguely connected to a Product they would rather I were searching for instead.
Google Maps was going all to hell until recently, but appears to have recovered, some, and arrested the slide.
I only read part of the article but as far as I got the author seemed to feel he would not be able to resist the blandishments of the advertiser/spies.
The day your child asks you why youtube keeps giving him ads for diabetes medication and you have to face your still unresolved feelings about your mother's death and explain that he'll probably one day have to have daily injections and a few toes amputated and maybe deal with kidney failure is the day you'll probably feel the same as the author of this article.
It doesn't matter how many filter buttons they provide if no products that even vaguely match show up.
Used to be there was a list of "people who looked for that bought one of these things", but that is gone.
What a fucking joke. You and I both know there's no escape, here; we're trapped here forever, and things will always only get worse and they will never get better, and there isn't a god-damned thing we can do about it.
I must set the jacket free.
Before that I used to wonder whether they were listening in; or it were merely coincidence and our brain just connects the dots where it shouldn't.
It's just that advertisers are absolutely fantastic at guessing what you might want, even if you have never ever actually looked at a product yourself. Maybe you were talking to your friends about something, and sure, you never searched for it, but your friend did while connected to your wifi - now your ip address is forever associated with that search, even if you yourself have never searched for it. Then when you suddenly get an ad for this product it feels like google must be listening to you.
I had this conversation with my mum few weeks ago - she was absolutely adamant that Google must be spying on her, because she spoke to me about getting a roomba on the phone, she has never searched for it, and yet she's getting ads for a roomba everywhere. They MUST be listening to her. Except that I reminded her that a week earlier I sent her an amazon link to a roomba, which she clicked and therefore is forever branded as someone who is looking for roombas. No conspiracy required, she simply forgot she has actually looked at a roomba-related website.
It's just...if they were really listening, it would have implications in both power and data usage, there would be a smoking gun somewhere - and there just isn't. Advertisers can figure out what you want even without listening to what you say.
They are listening, all the time.
No, I don't trust Google either, but it's probably just chance. If I called a million people and said, "you should take that trip to Estonia, can I help you book a flight?" most people would just hang up on me but one person would think I read their mind from across the country.
I'm beginning to think people just never liked the old web to begin with because they had to put real thought into contributing.
That’s the stage we’ll enter as soon as an entire internet’s worth of content becomes easily transferable.
That’s when all your private information from 2019 (your medical history, gmail messages, bank details, your search and browsing and shopping history, your private photos, etc) will leak to the public.
It’s just a question of time because any morsel of data only needs to leak once to be henceforth online forever. It will be a complete nightmare.
Is there any party out there trusted to wield this much power to decide what's "advertising" or "tracking"? Given that modern technology is all about running programs on the Internet. And assuming this could grow into something big, and won't just wither or die like myriad of networks that were out there.
.nojs/.nocookie TLDs could be a fun idea, though. Doesn't need any trusted third party to govern, just a bit of browser vendors cooperation (so, a slim chance).
I expect that advertisers won't go there because it contradicts modern beliefs in targeted advertising and how behavioral data obtained by tracking is worth everything.
And it's virtually impossible to distinguish between paid-for "native" advertising and honest product recommendation.
Not using the internet isn't a real option anymore.
"...I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine,
aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with.
I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a
program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git)
that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me.
Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see
the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first,
then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror,
which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation)."
His beliefs about the inherently non-free nature of the web and his fears about surveillance still make it infeasible for him to consume the web directly, unless it's with someone else's browser.