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Comment by gary_0 | Hacker News Reader

My first thought is that stuff like this always leads to yet another "content churn" iteration, where even more user-authored stuff drops off the Internet, leaving behind an even more desolate wasteland of SEO spam and dead links.

We've lost so much already... the old Flash content, the GeoCities pages, the forums fallen under Facebook's iron curtain, the archives of obscure culture erased by copyright lawyers. The lit windows of the Internet that went dark, one by one, only to be replaced by gaudy commercial signage.

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As I get older I get more circumspect about loss. Loss is the default - an expression of the universality of decay. Almost all information from almost all of human history has been lost.

There is a long list of extinction events in natural history[0], some smaller, some larger. In every case, millions of years of 'progress' were wiped out along with trillions of individual lives. And yet here we are! If it weren't for those past disasters, we would not be here.

It does seem wasteful to lose so much, at first. But then when you put it in context, you realize it's not as bad as other fates that have, can and probably will befall us. Plus, the alternative is far worse: dreadful "stable dystopias" like 1984 and Brave New World, which afford no exit from within, by construction, can only be stopped in this way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events

Luckily these types of dystopias are only stable in fiction. Lets hope future ones will destabilise faster than the e.g. soviet union did (after 70 or so years of existence), though.

Everything accelerates when you have Internet.

> dystopias

> soviet union

what about the american imperialism covering much of the globe today? this world is a deep dystopia for a very large amount of people already... (and growing)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

With the current state of affairs, I wouldn't be surprised if the American intelligence community world order collapses within the decade, either from within or from international pressure.

For all the many flaws that the USA has[0] there is a massive difference between the cultural imperialism of megacorporations and hard-power imperialism of, say, invading Vietnam.

For all that Facebook and Google and the NSA know so much about us that they’d make the Stasi drool with envy, they’re not the Stasi.

For all that Facebook is getting blamed for enabling and distributing the rhetoric that led to the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, that persecution predates the birth of Zuckerberg, and Facebook didn’t have any triggers to pull or boots to put on the ground.

[0] and as a non-American, I’d add to the Tribune list with things that most Americans I’ve spoken with do not even acknowledge, and of those who do acknowledge them, most favour.

> there is a massive difference between the cultural imperialism of megacorporations and hard-power imperialism of, say, invading Vietnam.

True, but one cannot exist without the other. How would the US invade Vietnam (or Afghanistan) without industries to manufacture weapons and surveillance tools? How can they pillage all their resources without predatory industry collaborating with the occupier?

> For all that Facebook and Google and the NSA know so much about us that they’d make the Stasi drool with envy, they’re not the Stasi.

I guess the major difference is the Stasi was working for a single Nation State, whereas the 3 entities you named perform political-repression-as-a-service for many governments around the planet. The Stasi was pretty bad for east germany but they held no power elsewhere: now every political police on earth is equipped with stasi-like superpowers thanks to Silicon Valley.

> that persecution predates the birth of Zuckerberg, and Facebook didn’t have any triggers to pull or boots to put on the ground.

True, but Facebook had a choice: from what i read it was founded as a stalking/girl-rating site by geeky sociopaths, which is already pretty dark. But when they early on censored breastfeeding women and torrent links while letting nazi/misogynist content go rampant was a very political choice in favor of very violent ideologies, and they should be held accountable (not talking about the US judicial system which is just as bad if not even worse).

> I guess the major difference is the Stasi was working for a single Nation State, whereas the 3 entities you named perform political-repression-as-a-service for many governments around the planet

The NSA? No, I don’t think they’re for-hire.

And the others aren’t in the business of political repression: none are known for kidnapping people and driving them around in an unmarked van for intimidation. Perhaps the NSA also kidnaps people, but I don’t remember Snowden mentioning it.

> True, but Facebook had a choice…

All of which reflects badly on the business and its leadership, and yet is very very different to an actual repressive regime.

You do get that repressive regimes will take a family and order their parents to decide which child lives and which child dies, right?

Even though I agree with you that Facebook going “freedom of speech for everything except the defining characteristic of mammals” is a bad thing, that’s peanuts in comparison.

> The NSA? No, I don’t think they’re for-hire.

The United States of America, always an ally and at service to friendly right-wing politicians from around the world.

"What was the sense at the time of the degree to which the United States was involving itself in undermining Allende’s government?

MS: I think most people knew, and part of this was because a scandal broke in 1972 that the Chilean subsidiary of ITT had lobbied the CIA to intervene and fund different renegade military factions in Chile to try to keep Allende out of office during that brief two-month window between when he was elected in September of 1970 and when he would be sworn in, in November 1970.

So it was fairly common knowledge that, despite the public declarations by the White House that they were neutral toward Chile or that they had no official oppositional stance to him, behind the scenes, the CIA as well as the White House were actively opposed to Allende."

source: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/salvador-allende-chile-coup-p...

great recent docu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0

> The NSA? No, I don’t think they’re for-hire.

I didn't say "for hire" specifically. But they certainly pass intel to friends as part of the 5 eyes & other intelligence agreements, as well as on specific operations, such as in Rojava or in Ukraine.

Also worth mentioning although i can't find the link right now: ex-3letter-agency workers who started working for a private company contracted by saudi intelligence services who were employed for political repression (although the job was advertised as hunting down terrorists).

> And the others aren’t in the business of political repression: none are known for kidnapping people and driving them around in an unmarked van for intimidation.

And yet the DHS does just that, both for deportations [0] and political repression [1].

> Perhaps the NSA also kidnaps people, but I don’t remember Snowden mentioning it.

Snowden wasn't concerned by kidnapping: he was really afraid the NSA would drone the entire neighborhood he was hiding in (which is arguably worse), like USA police who not so long ago (1985) bombed an entire neighborhood (destroying 65 houses) and killed 5 children for the sake of political repression. [2]

But kidnapping is definitely a thing though maybe not by NSA: see CIA black sites and the inhumane treatment of detainees post-9/11 (waterboarding, etc).

> You do get that repressive regimes will take a family and order their parents to decide which child lives and which child dies, right?

I appreciate the distinction. From my political activities, I'm acquainted with many political refugees, some of whom have been tortured while others had family members imprisoned/disappeared/executed.

But it's worth noting that our "democratic" (cough cough) governments have a strong history of doing that too, and only recently have they stopped because they've improved the subtlety of their counter-insurrection techniques. Still, there's plenty of people framed by State services [3], plenty of political prisoners [4], people mutilated by police forces or outright executed...

Some people would even argue that dictatorship/fascism is the logical byproduct of liberal democracy and its (supposedly enlightened) centralized control and enforcement structures. What if Trump had been reelected (or worse, had successfully seized power), do you think you would have kept your social comfort very long?

The same problems apply in France where i reside, where a new form of anti-muslim nazism is rising (thanks to the media oligarchy spreading FUD). The last time the nazis seized power, we had genocide after genocide, even long after WWII ended (see also, french genocide in Algeria and the 1961 Vel d'Hiv sweep).

[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/13/dhs-migrants-guatemala-...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/17/portland-pr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/30/black-panthe...

I don't have a citation handy but think most would agree the global median standard of living / life expectancy / quality of life is substantially better than it was 100 years ago. Ofc that's not necessarily predictive, but it is consistent with the belief that history's long arc does indeed bends toward justice.

> it is consistent with the belief that history's long arc does indeed bends toward justice.

Then why do inequalities keep rising according to most metrics? Just because the poor fare relatively better (which is debatable depending on which metrics you take) doesn't mean justice is rising.

Maybe substitute "improvement" for "justice"? I'd rather be in the bottom 5% than the middle 50, given better health and comfort in absolute terms. That doesn't excuse injustice and inequality(!) but the absolutes matter, esp. given the context of parent's "things are just bad and getting worse" comment.

> That doesn't excuse injustice and inequality(!) but the absolutes matter, esp. given the context of parent's "things are just bad and getting worse" comment.

You make a very good point! Yet the metrics you measure also matter. For example, it's fair to say that in terms of "free time" or "environmental pollution" things have absolutely gotten worse over the past centuries.

I definitely think it's possible that some communities/States collapsed in the past due to local climatic changes or environmental pollution (for example desertification due to over-exploitation of wood, or water pollution due to rejects from metal workshops falling into the single available source).

But in the past this was the exception not the norm. A few weeks back on HN frontpage there was a survey of hundreds of water sources worldwide, only two of which were unpolluted by medicine (the study did not consider other forms of pollution), and some time later was a study about 1/3 of the world population drinking lead-polluted water.

In that sense, everything is fucked up because even if your local community respects the environment, you can be sure there's a damn industry upstream polluting everything, or a neighboring chemical agriculture field killing the insects that keep your own food sources available, polluting the water sources...

I don't think the "are we faring better?" question can be answered in binary terms, but i think the "negative" side of things is shocking enough that it requires no less than an actual revolution to fix: as long as the people fucking things up for everyone else will profit from it, nothing good can come out of the system.

Well put. Mostly agreed.

Revisiting your provocative comments, I agree w/ much of it but not that there is less "free time" now than in centuries past. On the contrary -- for the vast majority of people, most waking hours were actively spent on subsistence and survival until very recently in human history.

> for the vast majority of people, most waking hours were actively spent on subsistence and survival until very recently in human history.

have you been to India or another country with a similar wealth disparity in the global south?

> for the vast majority of people, most waking hours were actively spent on subsistence and survival

Disclaimer: i'm not well-versed in anthropology/history, but this has been studied and debated by scholars [0]

If you've ever been to the countryside, you'll notice that everything feels slower. The fast, ever-working "lifestyle" we know today apparently originated in with early capitalism/industrualism and was itself subject to stark opposition (for example from the luddites, who contrary to popular belief were not anti-tech but rather early anti-capitalists).

When that new rhythm was expanded to all areas of life with mass-industrialization in the 18th/19th century, thinkers of the time pointed the absurdity to replace legal slavery with what they called "wage slavery". [1]

[0] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

This is a great point to which I don't really have an answer, just a question. Why do we define justice as everyone having the same (or roughly the same within certain thresholds)? I mean, I can totally see that everyone having more or less the same is a good thing. But that is not necessarily a just thing.

A related point is why are we seeing equality as something desirable? We don't even question it anymore. This is a rather new development in the last 400 years or so and came about after Europeans arrived at America and started interacting with the natives, which had this equality concept much more advanced than what was common in Europe at the time. This also leads to the recognition of differences between people. What does it mean for us to be equal? I run slower than you, should I carry the urgent message over the mountains because we're equal?

Sorry to just add questions, but I think they are important questions people don't usually ask.

"A related point is why are we seeing equality as something desirable?"

Should everyone be equal before the law? Is it possible if half the population can't afford a lawyer?

Should everyone's vote count? How does Democracy survive when a small group of people own half the country?

That's but one version of equality.

Equality under the law (both your examples may arguably fall here), but we also have equality of opportunity, equality of outcome, equality by mean reduction.

I personally agree that equality under the law is indeed desirable but some other types aren't.

Which ones are good and which aren't should be made explicit.

Then we can talk about how to increase the good equalities and reduce the bad ones.

They don't exist in isolation, once inequality in capital gets large enough, it is impossible to accomplish equality of opportunity, or of anything at all between:

1- a child of a billionaire that had private tutoring and connections

2 - a child that grew up in poverty and was malnurished, didn't recieve proper education or attention from parents because they were working two jobs or perished in some kind of tragedy

Yeah, as you show, full equality is unreachable. Even without the capital differences. Some people will have traumas or accidents or just bad genetics that will end up in inequalities.

The thing is to have a destination, a goal. Which equalities are worth fighting for?

> Why do we define justice as everyone having the same

Envy. But it is not a new feature of human nature. So my question is: Why is it only now (for about the last 100 years) such a popular and successful ideology? What has changed?

Is it mass media? Or is it not a new thing at all, but things happen at a bigger scale? Meaning, before you'd maybe get envy bursts that'd devastate a village or a tribe, and that'd be it, now you get it at the country and planet level?

I'd say it's more than that. Culture has changed and morphed into something where we feel we are entitled to a lot, just because we exist. I don't think our culture a few hundred years ago was like that. Did we see revolts in the medieval Europe because the king had too much? Not for that exact reason, as far as I know. Each king wanted more, for sure, but not the peasants, who didn't have much nor expected to have much ever.

Compare that to the American dream where literally everybody has the ability to get rich (in theory, but the point is that now the "peasants" in general want to get rich).

> Each king wanted more, for sure, but not the peasants, who didn't have much nor expected to have much ever.

This is a projection. Revolts are as old as power and inequalities. For the most well-known/well-studied of those, see this wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peasant_revolts

(it's important to understand that most revolts are silently crushed and never documented, and that even for those that were documented in their time we did not necessarily keep good track of those documents over the centuries)

Social inequality is listed as one factor among many. Do you know of revolts that were specifically about inequality? The ones I checked from the list were mostly religious, agricultural or nationalistic in nature. The ones I saw that could maybe be about inequality are due to the ruler being obnoxiously unjust or being unable to provide substenance.

I wasn't saying revolts didn't exist, just that they weren't about wanting to be rich.

I've always observed that defenses of the Soviet Empire are essentially just whataboutisms. But this is the first time I am seeing it literally start with the words "what about"

70 years is an entire lifetime. North Korea has survived longer than that even.

Dystopias will all eventually fall. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be replaced with something better.

Was North Korea a dystopia for the entire 70 years or did they at least have a few good decades? Really asking.

I mean, I’m not going to write up a whole diatribe on the topic, but yeah; Kim Il-sung was pretty tyrannical from the outset. You can say it got really bad under Kim Jong-Il, but it was never “good”.

Communism in North Korea started after WW2, so it has 75+ (three quarters of a century - 1946 to today), while communism started in Russia after WW1, but, at least officially, ended with fall of USSR in 1991 - so in there it was for 70+ years (1918 to 1991).

> Communism in North Korea ... 1946 to today

For what it's worth, NK officially distanced itself from communism in 2009:

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSEO253213

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/world/asia/29korea.html

So far.

Both sides - "good" and "evil" - have the technology of this past century and on to utilize. Arguably the interconnectivity and instantaneous communication between any and every human on Earth has its advantages, however the internet can easily be censored once captured - and ideology is ripe around the world which seems to be the precursor to the majority of blind society being led down a dark path to a pit difficult to impossible to escape; if you even realize you're in a pit or not.

>only stable in fiction

And in fairness, Orwell himself was quite optimistic about 1984-world's prospects. IIRC in an appendix he opined that the innate human desire to innovate with language could not be suppressed without losing language entirely, and so humans would (slowly, painfully) eventually find the cracks and destroy the system from within.

You don't necessarily need an extinction event to create political change. People can be convinced by others' ideas.

That's increasingly rare these days.

There's a significant proportion of tribal automatons out there that imbalance the arguments.

All creature will die and all the things will be broken.

Yeah no. That's the logic of someone who is telling you that rain has always been a part of nature and that you should embrace rather than fight it - while they are stealing the tiles from your roof.

What I mean is, on the one hand, you're correct: Loss in some sense is the default state of the universe, there will always be loss and there are far worse things than losing some stuff on the internet.

On the other hand, it feels hypocritical to talk this way about instances of loss that we have control over. The current mass extinction is not simply some natural event that came over is and that we have to accept like Tolkien's Long Goodbye. It's a decidedly unnatural event that we know the causes of very well.

In a similar way, the loss of information on the internet is not "natural" either, it's the result of deliberate business decisions that come from a specific trend of monetization.

You ignored his other point

>Plus, the alternative is far worse: dreadful "stable dystopias" like 1984 and Brave New World, which afford no exit from within, by construction, can only be stopped in this way.

False dychotomy

Archive.org causes North Korea?

- - - -

Seriously though, I actually think that the effects of mass digital information on society are going to be very, uh, interesting going forward.

I wonder about the people whose parents have been documenting their lives on FB since they were born, or the kids who have never spent more than a few hours away from their smart phones.

I think it is called "sharenting" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharenting

just an utterly daft opinion.

you cannot fight entropy, you can only feed it

> In a similar way, the loss of information on the internet is not "natural" either, it's the result of deliberate business decisions that come from a specific trend of monetization.

It is the default. To keep information around "forever" you need people working on it forever. Current storage mediums don't even last 100 years. Browsers change, technologies get dropped (flash), people stop paying for websites (geocities). Bandwith isn't free. If you want to preserve anything you have to make an actual effort, put energy in. Things decay by nature.

I agree. Separately....

I never know if the following sort of pedantry is welcome or unwelcome. I can only say that I would want it.

I think you're using "circumspect" incorrectly. My understanding is that it means to only speak or act with caution, not rashly, because one has looked around (spect: look, circum: around). Usually used to describe speaking discreetly, so as not to offend.

And my read of your comment overall is that you are more resigned to loss.

Edit: oh darn I almost missed the opportunity to use myself as the example usage: "I tried to be circumspect writing this comment."

For what it’s worth, it may be pedantic, but as a non-native English speaker, it’s things like these that are incredibly valuable: it’s not often that people correct you on this level of “pedantry”, so you’ll never learn.

As such, thank you for this.

I partially agree: everything is ephemeral. Humans have an obsession of holding on to all things. We hoard at the civilizational level.

That’s not to say we should roll over and let everything be lost like tears in rain.

I suppose there is always archive.org and wikipedia, but the more we rely on those to keep old content around the more worried I get about single points of failure. I remember when I first went online in the 90’s the vision of the internet was decentralized content, where information would never go away once it was pushed online. The reality is that the internet is now a decentralized network of central depots, with information rarely jumping between those central depots, and with old layers of content shedding off the edge of those depots and falling into the abyss.

Gatekeeping is essential to the modern web. Content is valuable and/or dangerous and therefore (b)locked away instead of freely copied. Some exceptions exist, of course, but we are very far from that 90’s vision.

> locked away instead of freely copied

Remember the slogan "information wants to be free"? I haven't heard that one in a while. Seems like once the Internet was profitable enough, everyone wanted their slice of the pie after all. Happens to every generation, I suppose.

The slogan was always cut short. Here's the entire thing:

"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away."

Well, it's even slightly more complicated than that but you can read the details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

Deep thinkers were always aware of these tensions. Cyberpunk writers in the 90s and even 80s correctly predicted a lot of what is going on right now, namely the use of technology to cover reality in gaudy advertisements (that could look back at you), as well as corporations gaining powers that used to be associated with nation states (for example, policing speech). People just hoped it would not turn out like this... I still have a feeling that it didn't have to.

I sometimes wonder how much those things were “predicted” and how much it was a case of the people with lots of money having read the same books we did and being primed toward those outcomes.

I mean, we all read Snow Crash when we were teenagers and now the ones who grew up to be billionaires are all excited to build the Metaverse. Did Snow Crash “predict” that? Or is this just another (perhaps somewhat extreme) form of fandom?

Similarly, would there be as many scientists trying to figure out how to make a “warp” drive if Star Trek hadn’t popularised the concept? And if/when they eventually succeed in making warp drives practical, will we say that Star Trek “predicted” it?

It feels like there should be a better term for “making a fictional concept compelling enough that it is forced into reality by fans of the fictional work.” But I don’t know what that term would be.

>“making a fictional concept compelling enough that it is forced into reality by fans of the fictional work.”

visionary ?

“reality distortion field”-er ?

inspiring ?

Oo, yeah; "inspired" is precisely the word I was looking for! (I'm a little embarrassed I couldn't draw it to mind by myself!)

I'm much happier with saying (for example) "Star Trek inspired the modern warp drive" (I mean, if/when a real-world practical warp drive exists) than "Star Trek predicted the modern warp drive".

Doesn't imply that Star Trek actually invented the thing, but does assign at least a certain causal link to it; not mere prognostication of it like "predicted" implies.

The notion that scientists wouldn't try to make cutting edge drives without seeing Star Trek is absurd. Similarly, VR and other Metaverse-related concepts are a somewhat natural thing to try once tech advances.

Thinking this requires some heavy anti-multiple discovery beliefs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

You're going to have a hard time pointing to utopian novels from the same period.

It's not that something closer to utopia was never possible. A lot of CS from the 70s was explicitly utopian. Even the Jobs "bicycle for the mind" idea was far more utopian than "Let's create a monopolistic monoculture with adtech and noise."

For some reason the cyberpunk writers chose not to imagine it or promote it.

Warp drive is similar. It seeded the idea of FTL in the popular consciousness and made it something almost everyone has heard of. Without that, it might have remained an abstract curiosity.

In Propaganda, Bernays says that instead of preaching at the public you need to dramatise the behaviours and beliefs you want to see the public adopt. The ad industry is based on this, but of course it runs through fiction and other media too.

Star Trek is one of the few attempts to dramatise a utopian future. Everything else is a wasteland of darkness.

And it has certainly had an effect.

It's not over yet.

We're cheering and/or allowing stepping stones moving us in those directions, without realizing the long-term implications for the web. (Controversial list incoming) Things like: HTTPS everywhere, SSL, DOH, certificate pinning, trusted-computing, DRM, CDNs, proxies have disappeared, single HTML rendering engine, subscription (SAAS) models, moving all desktop programs into the browser, extinction of caching, etc.

I have lost much of the content I created and published in the early 90s and 2000s, and mourn it in a way because my memory is failing and I wish to learn what has changed in my own life. But you're right.

The one piece that I really miss, is a detailed walkthrough of some really esoteric XSLT code. It was a long, well-demonstrated piece that I published on WebmasterWorld (I think they are still around).

It was done around twenty years ago (no less than eighteen).

It’s absolutely worthless (XSLT -shudder), but I was quite proud of it.

Despite how ugly xslt may look, and how little it's used, I think it actually solved a problem in parsing xml on streams (xslt 3.0 I think?) in a way that really isn't that simple (or used often) in any standard languages. I have done quite a few xml parsing scripts in python/Julia/etc, but despite xpaths on dom being so much easier to write, the OOM problems are abundant.

XSLT I think had some good ideas for making xml parsing more performant while avoiding some of the major issues that crop up when processing huge amounts of data.

The fundamental problem with the Web is that archival was never part of its job. You send HTTP queries to the server and it answers. If somebody switches that server off, all that information is gone. Even just updating the server will inevitably destroy the content. You can try to preserve it with well named URLs, mirror it and such, but it's a lossy process. There was never a mechanism to keep URLs working long term and even if an URL still works, you can't tell if the content is still the same that was there back when the Link was created.

As bad as the modern centralization is in a lot of other ways, I actually quite like the way Youtube works. Every video gets a unique id, a permanent URL and is immutable (with some exceptions). That means most videos from the very early days of Youtube are still around and accessible, while most of the Web of that time is long gone.

The Web really could need a more robust way to publish content, just throwing stuff on a server really isn't cutting it.

I wonder if Web3 will help to solve this? (Being decentralized)

It’s on the blockchain forever!

...as long as someone finds it worth paying the costs of continuing to run the blockchain, and the people who run 51% of it don’t decide to wipe out or change anything, and...

'Archival' is an adjective. The gerund 'archiving' works nicely and is grammatical.

It's a substantive. It fits here fine.

You may have a point. I'm going to go reevaluate my entire worldview for a bit.

EDIT: nope, still not buying it. I can only make it work by analogy with bury->burial, archive->archival, and there's not enough there.

Wiktionary gives a larger (but still not comprehensive) list:

(forming nouns, especially of verbal action.): arousal, arrival, bestowal, betrothal, denial, disposal, proposal, rental, rival, reversal, removal, subdual, submittal, transmittal

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-al#English

That said, substantivization of adjectives is common. Even adjective is itself a word that was originally an adjective, but has been substantivized into a noun. It's a well-known linguistic process:

"Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(word_formation)

This process has become especially common in Modern English as inflexional endings have been abandoned and speakers rely almost entirely on word order to deduce parts of speech. Converting a word from one part of speech to another simply involves putting it into the proper place in the sequence. However, substantivization of adjectives is not exclusive to English (in Latin, for example, you can slap practically any adjective into the neuter and use it as a noun, whence we receive such words as animal and dual).

Language in general is very flexible.

>I remember when I first went online in the 90’s the vision of the internet was decentralized content, where information would never go away once it was pushed online.

This is incredibly bizarre, I can't imagine where this "vision" came from. Storage was extremely limited and bandwidth was expensive back then; things were being deleted constantly. The first web forum I participated in (in 1996) only had the last week's worth of messages available, the older ones were permanently deleted. Back then if you were using Yahoo Mail or Hotmail you had to constantly delete your old emails because you'd run out of space. I would download stuff and then run out of hard drive space, so it would just be deleted and lost forever - nobody could afford more hard drive space.

Wikipedia ends up having so many dead references when you try to fact check it.

As you alluded to, unfortunately we aren't even left with gaudy corporatism. It's just an SEO shitshow now. For certain searches, Google is basically useless. It's the same fucking content copy pasted across 15 results.

It feels like there is a nieche opening up.

With SEO copy content being useless to anyone but the provider and Google and the tech giants coming slowly but surely under scrutiny from lawmakers, it seems like there might be an opening to develop a more open web (commercially speaking) especially in those countries and regions that lost the "Big Tech" race.

I know HN isn't a fan of regulations but I think FAANG and friends overplayed their hands and the screws are slowly tightening.

I have to do weird tricks when searching for dll problems to throw off those long lists of fix my pc spam sites. This is for fairly obscure third party dlls. They just round up all the names and create a spam page for each dll. Then probably black hat them to the top.

What kind of tricks do you do?

Not the OP, but search for some of the exported methods can sometimes bring up details.

Normally add something technical and related that I expect to be mentioned in a stackoverflow style forum but not in a spam.

You made me think… just search stackoveflow should be step 1. Roll out Google if desperate.

I've noticed this is starting to happen with Github issues too. Scummy websites will scrape issue threads on Github, repackage them into "blog posts" with "comments" and rank higher in SEO.

It just sucks that the solution to getting ranked on google is never "write good content" but rather "optimize for SEO"

"Copyright lawyers" != "Rights-holders"

Say what you like about lawyers, but one thing I think we'll agree on is that they rarely do stuff unless someone else is paying for their time (IAAL fwiw :)

I'm only half joking, because blaming lawyers deflects from the real issue here, which is the fitness-for-purpose of statutory fair use / fair dealing doctrine.

There are quite a few eminent academic lawyers worth reading on this topic, e.g. Boyle, Lessig, Litman, Vaidhyanathan.

The sad reality is that much of what is "lost" wasn't worth keeping. There's a world of difference between being a curator and a hoarder.

You don't remember everything that happens to you. You remember things that are noteworthy for some reason. There is a natural process for the brain to preserve certain memories. The Internet is really no different. Things get preserved largely because they're worth preserving. Things that aren't... don't.

As for forums, IMHO they've largely disappeared because they're a terrible format for maintaining information. I mean how many times have you done a search for "how do you do X?" and the first search result is a forum title asking exactly that... with no replies (side note: why doesn't Google downrank these scenarios?).

Or someone asks a question and there are a bunch of irrelevant responses (eg "first!"), outdated information, sidetracks, personal attacks over some long-forgotten beef, etc. A chronological thread is almost never useful for finding information. Pinned comments are just bandaids. Stackoverflow's ranked answer system is better but still has issues with stale information. It also relies on moderation.

As for Facebook, IMHO this whole hiding information in a walled garden I tend to find completely overblown for much the same reasons why forums are mostly useless.

The trend I absolutely hate however is using Discord as the primary repository for, say, an open source project. This is something that is meant to be available yet the discoverability is absolutely horrendous. Even if you're on the right Discord, the search is woefully abysmal.

> You don't remember everything that happens to you. You remember things that are noteworthy for some reason. There is a natural process for the brain to preserve certain memories. The Internet is really no different. Things get preserved largely because they're worth preserving. Things that aren't... don't.

This line of thinking seems insightful. Its flawed, though, in more ways than one. For one thing, it's glib.

There's an attempt to respond to an question of ought by gesturing at what is, as if that settles it. It doesn't, even if the premises are granted. Which brings us to the second thing: they shouldn't be.

People can and do forget things that are worth remembering. People remember things that are inconsequential.

https://archive.org/details/flash_badger

The internet was a magical place back in the day. We were all super excited to contribute to something so transformative. I remember my father excitedly putting up his 3d gifs on his GeoCites page.

Then the corporations came with their legions of desk jockeys, all competing with each other for promotions dependent upon squeezing the internet of every last drop of value.

The internet became less human, just like modern society. Everything about the almighty dollar. Human creativity and freedom be dammed.

We can start Internet 2.0, a HackNet, just for hackers. Create your own DNS server, register non-commercial hacker sites only, create catalogue and decentralized search engine for these servers. Commercial operators will see no value in this parallel network, because google will be unable to index it, so spam problem will gone.

Hmm, not a bad idea. I’ll add that to my feature list for newnet.

I would love to be involved in this

>We can start Internet 2.0

we're already at ipv6 and web3.0 /s

deep/dark web does still exist

> "because google will be unable to index it"

Creating a DNS server is beyond Googles abilities? Why will Google be unable to index it? If you can read the catalogue, they surely can.

> "Commercial operators will see no value in this parallel network"

If people are using it, they will want to put ads on it. Why wouldn't they? And why are 'hackers' separate from 'people who want money for their work' in this scenario?

These servers will not be accessible with normal DNS turned on, so Google may index it technically, but links will not work for normies, because they know nothing about DNS or networks. Technically competent users can switch DNS server, so they will.

Yes, it will be possible to show ads, but ads may link to sites within the parallel DNS system only.

Hackers, who want money for their work, are called security experts.

The arrow of time only goes one way. We can't go back now.

You're ignoring all of the other things that have happened with the internet in order to specifically attack this nebulous idea of "corporations".

You can make exactly the same argument about the influx of new users (Eternal September memes, "then came all of the normies with their friends, all competing to get the most upvotes on their Reddit posts), the bloating of the web ("then came all of the hipster developers"), sexual content, or any one of another half-dozen side-effects of the internet becoming massively more popular than it was in 1990.

If anything, the web has more independent content on it than it did a few decades ago - you just don't see it because you frequent a small number of platforms, you're not investing effort looking for it, and Google's search results are incredibly gamed.

I have hundreds of individual blogs that I've bookmarked through link-following and reading Hacker News frequently, without even trying to amass a collection. If you were to actually spend effort tracking down independent content, then maybe you'd actually find some.

Moreover, the internet never became "less human", because it was never human in the first place. It was a network of computers, a technology - not your neighborhood, or anything resembling a community, because technologies are not communities. Your complaint is basically saying that the median website is more focused on profit than it was a few decades ago - which, aside from the fact that there's no evidence to back it up, is a meaningless complaint equivalent to the Eternal September ones. Sure, even if the median website is more profit-focused - so what? There still far, far more useful information, and interesting people to meet, than there were decades ago - and the internet is available to everyone, as opposed to just those with dial-up (or whatever).

The idea of corporations dominating the internet is not nebulous at all.

Things used to be more ad hoc. People would create their own websites from scratch. There was less centralization. Every website wasn't a boostrap clone.

The pursuit of profit changed things dramatically. As soon as people started making big money on the internet, things changed. FOMO kicked in and the internet became the new gold rush.

Idk man, it seems like you just weren't there at the beginning.

Combat had honor and humanity under the Bushido code. One skilled warrior against another.

Then came guns and cannons, depersonalizing it into a grisly slaughter at the hands of thousands of barely-trained conscripts.

If only we could go back.

Seriously. I mean, it wasn't great, but men had dignity. There's no dignity in getting nuked or mowed down by a machine gun.

They're not being kicked off the web by copyright lawyers. The bloggers still own their copyright. Indeed, copyright is what keeps them being exploited by others.

They're disappearing because they don't want to pay what it costs in time or fees to keep their words around. If you believe enough in this-- and I'm not being sarcastic -- I hope you'll donate the time and servers and bandwidth to offer free hosting for these folks.

Please divert all of your charity spending to archive.org

I'm planning/trying to restart my personal page/blog thing for a while now, and was considering good ole' Wordpress.com for some time, and looked to the plans and so on.

Today's news just removed that option again. Internet is dividing further. Either you overpay for the convenience or self-host the whole stack yourself. Second one, backed by a static page generator looks more and more enticing now.

There is a middle ground, generate the static site content yourself and then there are plenty of providers who will host your static content for free and even let you use your own domain name. Although I'm not sure why I'm telling you this when the website in your HN "about" already uses Jekyll.

Of course, I already started building my page via Jekyll (and I have the domain and the hardware to host it), but wanted to see if there are any more carefree options, just for fun actually.

Looks like I'll continue building that page via Jekyll on the same hardware. Probably automating the "generate-publish" cycle a bit with some little CI/CD pipeline and calling it a day is a safe bet.

I have a Wordpress.com blog at https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com. I switched there from Blogger. Moving all that content took me most of a summer (part time) even with the Blogger import tooling, and will be much harder if I have to go to some markdown tool. This is made worse due to the fact that my site contains finicky images and formatting and (some) LaTeX math. I know a move to a static site is possible but I absolutely dread having to do this again. The transition cost for existing content (and comments!) is really high.

I chose Wordpress.com because (despite the fact that security people make fun of Wordpress) it’s full-featured and could handle my usage for about $100/yr. Now it’ll apparently be $180, which is an annoying surprise price increase. But the real annoyance is 100,000 visits per month for the paid plan: I’ve had months that easily blow past this limit (due to HN hugs) and I genuinely don’t know what will happen to the site if this happens in the future. That limit is extremely problematic and makes me wonder if the company is entering a terminal decline.

I'm also VERY worried about that. My company was just about to use wordpress.com as well, but this limit is insane if true, and means there's no possible way we could even consider using wordpress.com for our company blog. Like you, I have written blog posts that have exceeded 50K visits for one post, and two such posts would exceed that limit. I've done that several times, and it would be crazy to suddenly have a blog hosting platform block viewing of a blog post that turns out to be super popular. For us, it would be fine if they just charge a little more, rather than blocking viewers. However, the fact that they don't say what they will do is a deal breaker.

Edit: I see the CEO has posted elsewhere to address this -- "Traffic limits will only be enforced on the honor system. If you consistently go over the cap month after month, we will let you know and ask you to pay a tiny bit more to cover the cost, but we will NEVER shut off access to your site, nor will we ever auto-increase the amount you're paying."

I feel the same. 100K visits is really not that much, and for the price they're charging... What the fuck? This is seriously making me consider dropping them and rolling out my own thing.

Bandwidth is cheaper and cheaper yet our MBA driven world seems to find a way to charge more and more. Capitalism isn’t about finding cheapest pricing anymore, it is unlimited power of business to charge the absolute maximum the customer is willing to expend because competition is gone. All of us on the cloud are just going to sit there with pikachu faces when rates get higher and higher.

> We've lost so much already... the old Flash content, the GeoCities pages, the forums fallen under Facebook's iron curtain, the archives of obscure culture erased by copyright lawyers. The lit windows of the Internet that went dark, one by one, only to be replaced by gaudy commercial signage.

Have we? I disagree. Why not self host with Ghost? [1]

I think a golden age of decentralized tooling (payments, content, etc) is starting to emerge [2, 3], you just have to be optimistic enough to see it. Let's not reminisce about the "good old days," bc the good days could be ahead too.

[1] https://ghost.org/docs/hosting/

[2] https://balajis.com/set-up-a-paid-newsletter-at-your-own-dom...

[3] https://balajis.com/how-to-gradually-exit-twitter/

The internet has become gentrified. Money ruins everything. People's greed and in our terms "optimisation" is counter to creativity and genuine expression. We are part of the problem.

This is absolutely spot-on, and I think a lot of HN will agree with you here…

…which makes it all the more baffling why many on HN decry decentralization and web3 as scam artistry.

Because web3 decentralization is not the solution. The web when it started out was pretty decentralized. Consolidation and centralization happened because of economies of scale and it was convenient for the users also as compared to self hosting.

Even in web3 there will be a similar cycle. In fact we are already seeing this.

> …which makes it all the more baffling why many on HN decry decentralization and web3 as scam artistry

Because "web3" is a scam. Claiming to solve this problem is not the same thing as solving it or solving it well.

All solutions to problems generally start off as toys or proofs of concepts. and they improve over time.

See: The Wright Brothers.

What was the problem, from an end-user perspective, again?

User End Problem: The state of not being scammed

I think he bailed after making big claims.

My problem here, and correct me if I'm interpreting this incorrectly, is that web3 calls only for decentralization around current authorities and proposes recentralization around new authorities. The web as it is already has the technology and possibility for "decentralized" content creation and publishing, but as with all things it is easier to do so on "centralized" platforms. I don't see what web3 offers beyond that. We will still rely on DNS, BGP, and all host of other technologies to connect our digital world, and within this framework decentralization is ingrained.

Agree. I’ve actually seen an interesting shift in such arguments. People will talk about decentralization being a good thing — but rather than talk about web3 from the economic lens of decentralization the arguments always flow to crypto scams and environmental factors.

> People will talk about decentralization being a good thing — but rather than talk about web3 from the economic lens of decentralization the arguments always flow to crypto scams and environmental factors.

"web3", by the bulk of use, is a pile of crypto advocacy.

I want decentralization. I don't want web3. They're not the same. (Even if at one point they were.)

If you'd look into most "web3" projects you'll see they are extremely centralized.

Not wanting to disturb your "Web 3.0" tangent, but you're aware you're writing on a forum where most anyone is bringing their project and clicks to github.com without a second thought?

>github

good example: git, fully decentralized. Github: centralized git

and of course web3 git: own a NFT of that specific revision.

> Own an NFT with a link to that specific revision.

Fixed that for you. NFTs don't store actual data, just links to them.

And having an NFT with a link to something really brings nothing to the table when talking about link rot.

No. This is just yet another attempt to monetize social interactions so it’s pretty much going into the wrong direction.

All of the things GP mentioned were just open, free, ways to communicate without attachments. This is why they have been beautiful and exciting and often of higher quality and honesty.

I have still to see one thing this web3 is supposed to solve that cannot reasonably be solved with the standard web1.0

Web3 is a scam for extracting cash from the uninformed, it's not a solution to any problems and it's orders of magnitude costlier to operate than a centralized server.

It shouldn't be baffling at all.

The methods of decentralization already exist and would be known to people that frequent this forum.

"Web3" is a marketing term created by venture capitalists that want to fuse a tokenization layer to it from which they can extract perpetual payments.

Discord has done more to kill traditional forums than Facebook has.

Which frankly, should have been a complement of forums but not a replacement

(And more frankly, the forum board softwares haven't evolved gracefully)

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