I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
sffworld.com
sffworld.com
I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate. Every new friendship was thrilling, every new skill opened up infinite horizons, every nook and cranny felt like somewhere I could belong. But life moves on. I'm more than half-way through my career, perhaps not the one I was expecting. I didn't marry the girl I met on IRC. I don't have strong opinions about Radiohead anymore. I find people, however delightful and kooky they are, quite tiring having got to know 10,000 of them at this point.
I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to. And I'm pretty sure older generations frowning upon it all is part of the rush anyway.
I wanted to suggest a kind of alternative for discussion. I think there was something magical about the early web in that it offered a new way of interacting with the world that did not previously exist. It was difficult or impossible to find people that shared my interests (etc) before it, and usually that meant to just kept a large part of myself internal. I agree we have also changed, and there’s nostalgia involved, and that the internet does exist still the way we remember and even ion more ways we don’t appreciate but our kids will.
However i think there is also a bit of frustration that that initial burst of excitement did not continue to develop. When i read on HN and realize just how many people there are like me, or that there’s people that are also way too into disc golf, acoustic guitar, or any other semi niche activity i wonder why it is so hard to make more regular connections and interactions with them. Posting semi anonymously to HN with people i may never speak with again is a HUGE improvement over life before it, but it’s still a very limited experience. With facebook and reddit we have imho suboptimal platforms that have captured much of this magic and perhaps stunned their growth. I don’t mean to be pessimistic and the current internet is absolutely improved on uncountable ways from the one we remember. I suspect a bit of the frustration is some people’s inner belief that we could have something even better and somehow we are stuck.
That hit me in the truth. I feel like that a lot: if I know these people exist, and care deeply about the things I care about, why am I not building lasting friendships with them?
And then I realize that it's not a flaw in the medium but in myself. I lack the confidence and determination to go form those connections. I could write to any of those people and say, hey, I'm coming through Cincinnati, and would love to see your project/talk with you over coffee about your research/drink beer and yell about liberty. But I don't, and that isn't the internet's fault.
The first time it was weird, I was going to meet this girl on irc about some forum drama, and it felt even more silly telling customs. But we had a fun night and I realised that people have weird fringe interests and that there is literally dozens of us.
It’s never too late
I find the biggest problem is the lack of time to dedicate to it. Specifically, in my order of priorities it comes in behind a lot of other more important things that I don't have enough time for as it is.
I've noticed this has become a far more important equation with age, how I allocate time. When I was ~16-24 years old I burned up enormous amounts of time doing stupid shit. Time seemed inexpensive, plentiful, unlimited. And of course typically when you're young you have fewer responsibilities anyway. Now I'm far more certain about what matters and what doesn't in terms of ordering how I burn up what remains of my lifetime. As you get older you learn all of this, you learn what matters for yourself, and properly you allocate time accordingly.
Sometimes I think I'm getting grumpier as I get older, but it's not actually that at all. I dislike doing things I don't want to do more as I've gotten older, because I've acquired a far greater understanding of the value of time. How fast it seems to zip by, how scarce it is, how little of it we get relatively speaking. Stupid things that rob me of time, are a far greater annoyance with that understanding, that appreciation. When you're young, you can think you understand the value of your time; when you're older, you feel it in your bones, you walk around wearing the expense of time across decades.
Watching time vanish when you're 18, you don't think much about it. Time is infinite as far as you're concerned. Watching time vanish when you're 40 gets a lot more concerning. You become very aware of how quickly a decade seems to slip by. Blink, a decade goes by, you're 50; blink, blink, you're dead.
Your body also starts to deteriorate in accelerating fashion after anywhere from your mid 30s to your mid 40s, depending. You begin to notice that at 40 as well. Your memory isn't as sharp as it was at 20. You don't recover from damage as quickly. The physical aspect just reminds you that much more of the clock and how you're allocating your time. You can hear the little rusting springs in your telomeres as they keep getting shorter.
Chat rooms don't matter so much when you're 40 and you've spent a collective year or two of your earlier life hanging out in chat rooms (webchat broadcasting system, IRC et al.), bullshitting with people. You've got N years remaining to do things that really, really matter to you, and then you're going to die. And you're going to be dead forever. More chat rooms, to chat about things that you've chatted about 497 times in the past? No. Fuck no. On to the next, something more valuable, something more interesting, a new experience perhaps.
I too mentally miss the good 'ol days of being 18 and hanging out on IRC chatting about things that seemed super fascinating to me at the time. It's one part fantasy, one part longing to be young again, to feel young again (it's the reversal of the experience dulling concept of repetition, that people long for; every time you do something, it fades, exactly the same way many drugs do; repetitive experiences fade in the same way; we long toward the past in part due to that sensation of everything being vigorously new, exactly as drug addicts always miss the early addiction when the high was far better, before repetition eroded it).
We long for the early Internet / Web, because we've done so much Internet'ing, and every time you do it, it fades. It's not the old Internet that people actually miss. The problem is the experience repetition dulling everything, and that can't be rolled back; people miss the glorious experience of a new big world to explore online for the first time, that excitement. You can tell that that's the case, because people half my age experience the same sensation of missing what to them is the 'old' Internet (eg when they first started hanging out on Minecraft socializing online, or similar). Same concept, same longing, different Interwebs, same dulling over time due to experience repetition. Young people today will be longing for the exciting early days of TikTok, when they were doing dumb dance clones and it was stupid and silly and they'll miss the hell out of it, because it was all so new to them; like I might have missed hanging out on ICQ in its early days. And when those young people are 40, they'll still be able to go online and create short videos of themselves doing dumb dances, but they won't really want to, the repetitive experience effect will have dulled it all, it will no longer be new and exciting, and that can't be fixed, the life experience queue moves in one direction.
If you're fortunate, you get to decide what the meaning, the purpose, of your life is. The purpose of my life will always be to seek out new experiences, pursue new things that I find interesting. And that means not burning much more of my life in chat rooms, I already did plenty of that.
The last surprise is when you come
gradually to realize that nothing
surprises you any more.
http://phroxy.z3bra.org/bitreich.org:70/0/con/2020/rec/energ...
isn't the internet's fault
An argument could be made on a tinder-ization of intellectual discussion. That is, it’s so easy to move on to the next stimulating discussion online that you are less willing to invest in chancy RL interaction.
I don't think the average person at the end of the 18th century was having significant, long lasting, publishable correspondences.
It's interesting to me that you expect to have the kinds of experiences Jefferson and Madison did, instead of those the local butcher did. Don't know who you are, but maybe Nassim Taleb just hasn't gotten around to responding to your letters yet? :)
As for me, just like the local butcher of the 18th century, i mostly interact with my family and friends, have a few hobbies no one else really cares about, etc.
I remember arguing with a high school teacher that 50 years in the future countries as we knew them would no longer exist. People would cluster online based on shared interests and goals.
That was 30 years ago. I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest it ain't happening the way I thought it would.
And that, I think, was the handle— that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
I might as well say that I know that this isn't true because they don't know what the Internet could be... all they know is the centralized cloud.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-talks-buy-discord-m...
So what if it was hard to read with 20 blinking GIFs and an autoplaying music player, it was YOURS.
The worst things about Facecrook are not it's monopoly, ok that's the worst, but I rather dislike that blue boring nav bar, 5000 friend limits (their graph DB can only handle that many or what's the bottleneck? cheap bustards!) and the generally lame mainstream design of the whole building. Like, who approved "pokes"? Even Friendster was hipper than Facehooked.
Thank you for writing that. I also expressed the same sentiment a few months ago about getting older distorting my perception of tech's evolution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897792
Now look at the window of the MacPro 2013 to 2020. And it felt like nothing. How long has Windows 10 been a thing? Feels like only yesterday we finally moved all production off of Linux 2.6
Time really telescopes
2000 to 2010 felt like a huge jump, and it was -- you had the explosion of broadband, enabling huge MMOs like WoW which was a life-absorbing phenomenon for me, and computers and GPUs went from scrawny, green-board things to beefy, pro-sumer luxuries blazing with LEDs. Fat client IMs and social media redefined how we connected to people online.
Compared to that, 2010 to 2020 feels like an inertial flatline. We dropped Skype for Discord, which is the best IM since WLM (yet still inferior in many ways lol), GPUs have gotten beefier since they're purely parallel compute machines (and yet nearly 70% of people still have a 1080p display according to the Steam Hardware Survey[0], a resolution that was readily available on LCDs 13 years ago!). Motherboards have more LEDs than before, and look more and more like exotic alien space cities, which is awesome. SSDs have gotten... slightly bigger. Ray tracing and VR, which seem like the only major innovations of the decade, are both kind of here, but only kind of, and not enough for a WoW equivalent or genre to capitalize on. The games we play or their graphics haven't changed significantly. I started using Linux and learned exponentially more about tech than in the prior decade, and I now play those samey games on an open source OS, and that's cool. :p Crypto came, and a lot of security lessons have been learned in the tech world. That's nice. But it feels like bacteria filling out the blank spots of a petri dish that's stopped expanding.
Computer advances follow network bandwidth increases. Network upload bandwidth has been stagnant for almost 20 years.
Give everybody symmetrical gigabit and watch the sparks fly.
Here are a couple of the best things that I think the internet provides, both of which have been around basically since its inception:
1. Instant communication ie. email and instant messaging
2. Free sharing of knowledge ie. scholarly articles, and yes, Wikipedia
If you have an Android phone and have ever used the Google news feed (from AMP), then you've seen what I think are the worst parts of the internet today. As far as I know it's grown more and more prolific over the years:
I'm talking about content that's created solely as a vehicle for advertising. It's either speculation (which may provide some value) or simply "reporting" on information that has changed hands many times. In other words, while the original source might be available on the internet, you will never find it because it's been re-reported by ten thousand other sources that all want a slice of the ad revenue.
Proliferation of misinformation, both accidental and intentional, goes along with the above, though there are other opportunities for this as well (like social media).
There are countless pros and cons that I don't even know about of come in contact with, but I would agree on the whole with the idea that the internet is a poorer tool for good than it was, at least 15 years ago, and probably 20 as well.
https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/9999-in-10000-mobile-apps-...
Looks like he added this detail later - it's easier to increase the quality of information like this with text, than with video.
Some people add VO later (jarring); Khan Academy re-does videos (breaking references between, confusingly). Most youtubers don't do either.
Videos often have paid product placement, unacknowledged. It's very effective promotion, because it feels grass-roots.
I’m thankful for the internet and the career it’s given me. There’s plenty of room for improvement, but all the same, it’s pretty great.
> Way more, in absolute terms, than when I started.
Is it? How can you tell? I would expect there to be more... but also it's less encouraging to do all that work, and people not be able to find it...
In 2005 I published one of the Internet's earliest articles on the "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon"[1], also known as Frequency Illusion. In the intervening 15 years, thousands of sites have linked to my article, so you would think it would rank really well.
Instead, my article is barely on the first page of Google's search results. Above mine are more recent copycat articles, few of them containing any meaningful details beyond what I included in mine. Some of them are so similar that they are clearly just lazy rewrites of my article (similar jokes, etc). They appear to be ranked higher than mine solely due to being more recent, and presumably some SEO shenanigans.
This is not the only example--far from it--but it's one of the clearest.
[1]: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomeno...
The top results (including youtubers) gave the right answer, but the wrong reasons. You have to get down to the 5th (Sheldon Brown's) for expertise (it's "precession"). Sheldon passed away a few years ago, and now his site has ads - a limitation of personal websites.
> a "correctly" crafted query (read: the querymy parents would ask, not the query I would ask)
Can you elaborate please; an example?
Maybe you mean a grammatically correct sentence, which good for finding answers on forums, but I'm more interested in an expert's whole site.
Note that correct terminology is half the battle for searching, perhaps much more!
But where? The venues where that happened are gone. You can have a public discussion with 100.000 eyeballs, but not the kind of more intimate, local environment that were earlier boards and chat rooms.
Edit: Plus the oldschool, geeky stuff like BBS, usenet, mailing lists, IRC etc... that still exist but are usually limited to technical people and subjects.
This is especially important for introverts like me, that if they have to put their real name on something, for example a comment on Facebook, they think about it 100 times, while being anonymous they are more inclined to share things with strangers. You don't have to worry about what people thinks about you, or about prejudice that people have based on your age, your social life, your job, because nobody knows who you really are. The only thing that matters is your contribute to the discussion. I still remember discussions that I made with people that I only recognize by a username, and they were so interesting, much more interesting than everything you can find on Facebook.
In the old days you were told to never share your real name on the internet, to always pick up usernames, nowadays companies forces you to register with your real identity, Facebook can even ask you to provide a photo of your ID, and YouTube won't let you watch content for over 18 if you don't identity yourself. There are even countries that would like to force internet companies to ask for the identity of the people!
In the old days internet was a place where an introvert that didn't know how to relate with other people in real life could have escaped to share it's interests with other people freely and without any anxiety. Nowadays it's no longer like this, unfortunately. Forums are desert, nobody still uses IRC, and everything is a Facebook group or something like that on a social media platform where I don't want to sign up. Even websites in the old days had comment sections, nowadays you want to comment? Do it on Facebook. There are only a few exception of course (one of this is this website, that I like a lot for exactly this reason).
The only website that still maintains the old web philosophy, and the only social media that I use, is Reddit, that still doesn't require you to register with your real identity. But I fear that it will not last for long...
Also in the old internet there was a spirit of collaboration and community that I never saw in the modern web. You were a newbie in something, for example using Linux? Sign up to a forum, or ask on IRC, and people would have helped you, helped solving the problem, for free, only for the gratification on doing so. And most of the time even the person helping you to solve the problem learned something new in the process! It was fun for everyone. Nowadays even on the few forum that remained, go and ask a newbie question, and they will tell you "just search on Google", make fun of your ignorance, or something like that.
That sense of community is there with discord, you gotta use that.
> That sense of community is there with discord, you gotta use that.
Not in that sense. Discord is mainly a platform where you do voice chats. It has four disadvantages:
* not everyone wants to talk, for whatever reason, being introvert, not knowing the language so well to have a conversation, not having a microphone on the computer, and a ton of other reason
* a forum is public on the internet, someone that is not subscribed to the forum that has a similar problem could read it and find the solution, everyone could register and ask something. Discord servers are not.
* forums are textual content, that is preserved in the years. Sometime I have a problem with some old hardware or software and I find my answer in a response in a forum from 15 years ago. It's something that is indexed by search engines, of course even if forums were public, you cannot index voice chats.
* the forum had an asynchronous nature, as most of the old web had (take the email, for example). It means that I can start a discussion, and then go back to it when I have time. In the old days I used to check my forums at most once or twice a day, on the evening, check the thread I was following, maybe respond or simply read. Discord is synchronous, either you participate now or you don't.
Also when people say "use a discord", they are really referring to a text chat discord. It's the new IRC, with all of its good and bad parts. Almost nobody is using audio chat.
Discord's audio chat is mostly used in small groups of 3+ for parties in multiplayer games where quick audio communication helps a lot. It's the new teamspeak / ventrilio.
Here is a couple examples of community discords:
https://discord.com/invite/buildapc
https://discord.com/invite/obsproject
There has been a general response to withdraw into more private & semi-private communities although, as a response against the internet outrage mob that could ruin a person's life. That is a big shame.
I don’t know if this is true, but personally I wasn’t even aware Discord had voice chat support until I read your message.
Yup. "Today's IRC" — the place for kids to idle around and make friends — isn't Discord; it's Minecraft. (Not that weird; Minecraft is a low-stakes graphical MUD, and MUDs have always served double-purpose as chatrooms.)
And "today's GeoCities pages" — shrines for an individual's personality, beliefs, and curated tastes — are now sprawling multimedia affairs split between a Twitch/YouTube streaming channel for community-engaged events; an Instagram/Snapchat for live stories/high-engagement lifelogging; a Discord/subreddit for async community engagement; and a Wordpress/Tumblr site with a comissioned custom theme to hold evergreen reference stuff, longform supplemental materials for videos, etc. (And maybe a Squarespace/Shopify/Redbubble store, too, if there's anything to sell; or a Bandcamp/Patreon, if the published online material is itself the thing to be sold.)
(Tangent: the number of different pieces of "heavy infrastructure" Internet plumbing required to make the modern approach to a "shrine of personality" work, should be a hint as to why people don't just make plain websites any more. They want to interact more with their audiences/fans/communities, and with higher fidelity, than a plain website / comments section / forum can offer; even more than a heavily-built-up Sandstorm.io instance could offer.)
Minecraft doesn't have that same constant flow of novel game-elements to match the number of hours people invest into it; and so most play in Minecraft is a lower-key "post-game" kind of engagement with evergreen mechanics — the same "maintenance" kind of play that you see in e.g. Animal Crossing, together with the "practice" kind of play you see in the speedrun community. That kind of gameplay is extremely amenable to being interrupted for socialization. It's like gardening in a community garden.
(Analogy for socially-mediated entertainment for the pre-MMO-era kids: it's like getting together with your friends with a bunch of individual LEGO sets you got for your birthday to construct them all; vs. getting together with your friends to play with the same big old tub of random assorted LEGO bricks you've had for years. Building the sets favors engagement with the novelty of the work, over social engagement with your friends. Building from a tub almost forces social engagement with your friends, as that's the mechanism through which any consensus arises as to what you're going to be spending your time doing.)
Many multiplayer online games played today have a heritage that comes from the MUDs. Minecraft is certainly one of them and fills a similar niche, though to categorize it as a MUD seems strange, unless any multiplayer virtual world with an ROG-like element is also a MUD.
"You know why America was so great to you when you were 12? BECAUSE YOU WERE 12!"
The landscape is very different; I'd argue society is not in a better position as a result.
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?
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:
$ mpv 'never gonna give you up'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not the old internet you miss, it's some of the things that were in the old internet. The same things could be in the internet today. It's not the old internet you're looking for. Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.
The old internet was only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget...The magic is only in what the internet says, how it stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
The old internet showed pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.
* 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).
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.
Like my uncle who is an old car enthusiast who thinks ambassador was the greatest car ever made in India yet if you are really objective about it was truly a bad car (wrt milege, comfort, safety, design, etc).
I feel the same reading the comments here. Really don't miss anything about the old internet, especially the era of VSNL which was a downtime provider with some internet in between. Everything is much more amazing now. Want to learn anything from programming to chemistry there are hundreds of freely "animated" tutorials. God how easy my studies would be with the wealth of easy instant knowledge we have now. Add to that the amount of crazy content created everyday for every niche, it is just amazing (you just need to know where to look).
E.g. I just found out about two channels recently called Captain disillusionment and Great scott on youtube and I've learned so much about two really different things, things which I didn't even know I was even interested in.
I kid, but it does seem a function of age. I've always seen a dividing line between people whose fondest memories are in the past, versus how much they look forward to making new memories.
I am right in the middle right now, and trying not to let it swing too far into curmudgeonness.
My newest car is late 2000's and that's also around when I stopped subscribing to new stuff and adding new things to my home media library. I look at my parents who are kind of culturally stuck in the 60s-70s, and then see myself getting more and more stuck in 90s-00s. Happens to us all I guess.
You could say that you 'miss the old _____' and apply it to almost everything in life and you will feel nostalgia for it, even to the point of looking for a way to get back to it and once you are trying it, you become meh and get back to the new thing, as you realize that it changed for good
This happens repetitively to me and my friends with tech/videogames, we are randomly chatting about how good it was some game (i.e) and we decide to try it again, some 20 minutes into it we are already pretending we are having fun when in reality we are bored/hating it
We might miss litle things, but it's quite hard to actually give a good reason to get back to something 'old' besides just nostalgia
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.
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.
Profit motivated web presences want views, they want attention, they need nine 9s uptime, need to be able to do monetary transactions absolutely securely, and they want to be an application not a document. They live and die on the eternal wave of walled garden's recommendation engines because that's the network effect and that's where money flows. It doesn't matter if this means extremely high barriers to entry because money solves everything.
Individuals' websites are freeform presentations about the things that person is interested in. They are the backyard gardens of the mind and the most important thing is lowering the friction from thought to posting. There's no need to get tons of traffic instantly (or ever), they're mostly time insensitive.
The old web (and other protocols) still exist but they're much harder to find because they are not constantly updated. The time sensitive search engines deprioritize the static sites or even drop them after a handful of years.
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 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.
As result, you now need micro-internets to have a culture. An example of one was YouTube near when it started. And you see the same issue repeated there as YouTube grew from a city to a world itself. There was a lot of controversy around the YouTube year in review videos YouTube released in recent years, because everyone felt misrepresented. That's because YouTube now contained too many cultures to represent in one video. It, like the internet, no longer contains a culture because there are too many people using it for too many reasons.
Let's look at cars as an analogy. When cars were first invented, the only people who owned/used cars were enthusiasts. There was a barrier of entry (technical knowledge and interest/passion) that selected a subset of the population to create a culture. As cars became easier to use, that "selective membrane" disappeared, so there was no longer a culture associated with car ownership. Similarly, as the internet has become easier to use for not technical, not passionate people (in part due to websites like Google, Facebook, etc.), there is no longer a selective barrier separating internet-users from everyone else, and hence there is not, and can never again be, an "internet culture".
I’m cuttently soldering a rs-232 to wifi modem (https://subethasoftware.com/2018/02/28/wire-up-your-own-rs-2...) to get my amigas back online. Pimiga is nice but too far from that 1:1 experience. Lots of telnet BBS out there.
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.
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.
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...
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 exponential problem. With a centralised system, once you've cancelled them, they are much more likely to encounter difficulty trying to trackback to my log: it's a linear problem - or even less.
The other issues are probably surmountable - it shouldn't be impossible to create a decentralised network of posts and replies and threads that can be viewed together. It probably starts with something more like RSS than Usenet.
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.
Anyway -- I think, despite HTML + CSS + VPS services still existing, the alternatives —- the Well-Styled & Gridded Squarespace sorts, and the plug-n-play platforms like Twitter/Facebook —- are so easy to use that we've come to have disproportionately more cleaned up, mall-like spaces than not. I think.
About a month ago, I did a Show HN for https://mmm.page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424) that was my (small) attempt at creating a platform/tool to help people more easily create these spaces. It's still in alpha, but the Discord (link on homepage) is quickly growing with ppl who have this same frustration.
I have a feeling we'll see more and more counter-2010s-platforms platforms emerging over the next few years... platforms that try to correct our overcorrection toward cleanliness and order and optimization and profit, etc. etc.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS/iPadOS)#Of_All-...
To clarify, I didn't wrote the article https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/i-miss-the-old-intern.... A guy named Jonathan Scott Griffin wrote it. I tried to find him because I want to send him a message that I have posted his article on HN. I found his medium profile https://medium.com/about-me-stories/about-me-jonathan-scott-... (not sure if it's him).
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.
- 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
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.
The sort of nerdy/obsessive detail is still there, it's just kinda centralised on a fairly bland website. Your opinion on if this is an improvement or not depends on your affinity for animated GIFs I guess :)
The Geocities style stuff still exists, it is just the discovery is harder now as you will find the Wikipedia page first and then probably stop reading.
Things like webrings we're kinda cool for discoverability.
I Miss the Old Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402518 - Oct 2019 (306 comments)
Tell HN: I miss the old internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552 - June 2018 (221 comments)
There should be more portal sites, just links to quality content. Used to be many of those, too.
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?
> If you've never had to configure a sendmail.conf you've had it easy.
Been there, done that. Even with the usual .mc files and m4, once I had to dive deep into the rabbit hole of sendmail.conf to figure out what was going wrong.
Nowadays, I just use Postfix. :)
I hate to be the guy to bring up crypto since it never ends well on HN, but I believe that if the internet had had a "payment layer" that rewards early users from the start it would've turned out very differently.
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.
I like hand written html pages / don't like css.
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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.
We shuttled ideas between life and the internet, (let's look up how to make fireworks! Let's find girls online at other universities!) but money was much more difficult or impossible to transfer. We used to send a check to an ISP like several other mild media such as telephone and cable. Now we burn through electricity to verify our payments.
And not everyone was on the internet. It wasn't easy or immediately rewarding. No slick salesman put a phone into your hand for $50 and gave any dickwad keys to the universe. You had to put some effort into it and earn your place there. You had to put together a number of pieces of information from other experts, persistently asking questions and taking chances. It was a nifty club with other lucky, brave, dedicated, skilled people. We considered ourselves grateful and (more or less) treated it with respect, vs taking for granted that the space would never offend us and conquering territory for ourselves (social media) and filling it with lies for our own selfish ends (fake news).
Now everyone is there (...Here!) all the time. It's like living in a subway station. Yes you can have fun there, but surely it's better to be outdoors mostly and re-enter as desired.
It was not unlike an intimate relationship's honeymoon, versus living together and suddenly required to have a productive partnership and responsibility. Sure, it's fulfilling for many people, but the carefree, easy days are over. Yes, you can still go to html5zombo.com, but don't stay too long! Your bills are in that other tab. And the camera in your child's pre-school in the other. And you've got to finalize your purchases or the Amazon delivery window closes. And you've got to research everything finance related. And double-check all the news because lies abound. And don't forget to maintain appearances on linkedin. And keep learning, because everyone else is learning and they'll learn more than you. And your school is analyzing your child's every breath and keystroke.
That phone screen and browser window are the new eyes through which you're looking at the world. We have left the world behind and now nature becomes the 30-60 minutes of unknown amusement and delight we dream of rather than our proper home. Try to count how many half hours go by this week in which you a. are awake and b. don't touch the internet. It's not the internet we miss, it's its subordinate relation to the real world we miss.
You might remember this one: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/gratefuldead/shakedownstreet...
"Maybe you had too much too fast. Maybe you had too much too fast. Or just over played your part.
Nothin' shakin' on Shakedown Street. Used to be the heart of town. Don't tell me this town ain't got no heart. You just gotta poke around."
Also, back then when it was allowed to have more imaginative names we were also able to have actually meaningful arguments online. Now you have to be in the line of "non-entity_#83591" without any opinions on anything to not offend anyone, and mostly voicing a different opinion results in a veritable s*tstorm that has no relevance to the topic that was discussed. SJWs and white-knighting simps... /sigh.
This causes one of two effects: old timers leave communities because it's just the same repetitive threads over and over, and communities become dominated by newbies; or, worse, old timers develop lexicons of inside jokes and memes, and the community becomes impenetrable to newcomers who might otherwise have a lot to offer.
"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.