The Founder of GeoCities on What Killed the 'Old Internet' | Hacker News Reader

The Founder of GeoCities on What Killed the 'Old Internet'

gizmodo.com

37 pointsm-watson7 comments

> Proponents of Web3, like Andreessen Horowitz general partner Chris Dixon, argue that we need to get back to what we had in the days of GeoCities—while also not giving up the advances of the Web2 years—and allow creators and businesses to form a relationship with their audiences that is not governed by algorithms and advertising.

There's many places to host content for free without advertising: Github pages, Neocities... You can also upload pages to Ethereum using https://newgeocities.com by paying the transaction fee. If hosting is paid for completely upfront, does the dynamic change?

> “GeoCities was not about self-promotion,” Bohnett told Gizmodo in an interview. “It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge.”

With today's ML algorithms, posting one's knowledge feels increasingly like unpaid labor to these AI models.

The unpaid labor part especially hits home with me. I have a REALLY niche background and have tons of notes and blogs about it. I'm in the process of becoming a lecturer since I love helping out. But it feels like i'm doing free work for a company that despises me when I post technical things and guides. If I post anything odd, like a post about anticheat in a videogame, it gets removed and taken down by reddit mods. Despite it being very educational.

It's especially bad because of how rampant auto generated text is in security research, If you google "PDF Malware Example", it will give you 50 web pages with all the same copypasted text with code that hasn't work since 2004 where they first ripped it from some dudes blog.

> If I post anything odd, like a post about anticheat in a videogame, it gets removed and taken down by reddit mods.

There's your problem-- you used the wrong pronoun. Reddit posts identify as "they," not "it."

If you have valuable insight into anything, don't post it on Reddit-- the bullies have taken over the playground (same with StackOverflow, sadly). Your only audience there will consist of children and underachieving adults with moderator privileges who invariably know your domain better than you.

Why was it necessary to bring in pronouns to this discussion? It seems like a truly irrelevant dog whistle specifically in order to offend the identity of those that are non-binary. It has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand at all.

I thought hacker news strived to at least have some decorum in regards to discussion.

> Why was it necessary to bring in pronouns to this discussion? It seems like a truly irrelevant dog whistle specifically in order to offend the identity of those that are non-binary.

...your response to which is to liken me to a dog while crying bully, ascribing malicious intent and bemoaning lack of decorum on my part? As a wolf, I am deeply offended.

What I was responding to was the arbitrary nature of content moderation on Reddit. Substance doesn't matter, posturing does. I said nothing about the non-binary demographic-- you did that in trying to spin my comment into HR Thunderdome. This is literally the problem that makes Reddit so toxic!

> ...your response to which is to liken me to a dog while crying bully

Dog whistles are blown by humans. Arguably it implies the people you're trying to reach are dogs, but I don't think the analogy is intended to be taken that far.

> I said nothing about the non-binary demographic-- you did that in trying to spin my comment into HR Thunderdome.

Following up "you used the wrong pronoun. Reddit posts identify as "they,"" with "As a wolf, I am deeply offended" doesn't exactly reassure me of honest intentions.

> With today's ML algorithms, posting one's knowledge feels increasingly like unpaid labor to these AI models.

I hear you. Also on the other hand your beloved search algorithm of choice often surfaces content not by quality but optimization for said algorithm.

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