Txti is shutting down
txti.es
txti.es
> Yancey's Dark Forest theory of the web. The “dark forest” is a place that seems eerily quiet and devoid of life. All the living creatures within it are hiding. Because “night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent.”
> The predators here are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers, reply guys, and trolls. It's unsafe to reveal yourself to them in any authentic way. So we retreat into private spaces. We hide in the cozy web.
Two, large predators rarely go quietly in the night from starvation. They typically expand their hunting grounds and try new types of prey.
Seriously though, a real life robot is more expensive to make and run than an online one. Plus, there's nowhere for them to put "permanent" content, they'd have to talk to us one by one, or start graffitotagging ads everywhere. Any robots they did make would be obviously robots, and we can avoid them. It doesn't scale the same way.
Maybe it was more "Tragedy of the Commons"?
Spam is the form of predation that makes the dark forest so silent.
https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...
https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...
> In his sci-fi trilogy The Three Body Problem, author Liu Cixin presents the dark forest theory of the universe. (...)
Maggie Appleton on this blog literally says "Yancey Strickler's companion idea of the Dark Forest theory of the web".
I have a Dark Forest Theory of Hacker News. If I stay out of certain threads i dont get blasted. So i dont post in them. Hacker News is like Liu Cixin's dark forest.
i hope someone would say "as Fatneckbeard pointed out, HN is a lot like Liu Cixin's Dark Forest" not "Fat Neck Beards's Dark Forest theory of Hacker News".
I did not write 1000+ pages of books about this that became a world wide best seller and responsible for the phrase being a house hold word. I just pointed out they are similar. It is not my idea. It is not even my adaptation of an idea to a novel context. Im just pointing out something relatively obvious, because the original book is widely interpreted as an analogy for China's 996 tech startup culture by the Chinese readership which made it a success in the first place, so I'm basically making a pop culture reference. Even if I wrote a blog about it it would not make it my idea.
Liu Cixin did not come up with the Dark Forest theory. It’s been around for decades and many other thinkers and scifi authors had written about it before he did (nothing against him of course).
The core point seems to be the flippant assignment of origination irrespective of the scale of contributions.
(For those who haven't read Xtreme Programming, Chet would stumble into meetings that had degenerated into unproductive fingerpointing, and exclaim "Woops! My fault. WTF are we gonna do to fix it?", Even if he had nothing to do with it
Everything. Bad. Is. Chet's. Fault.
Also, anything good, is solely the work of Chet's cat.
Embracing this truth has greatly simplified my life.
If Chet did not, in fact, have a cat, then I must have fallen into another alternate universe again. Replace the animal in question with whatever you deem most appropriate.
I just use GitHub README.md to host my journal. I trust GitHub shall be around in 10 years.
If I start an open source product or service, the homepage shall contain the reference manual and examples and all the documentation. It shall be one asset that can be copied and archived and replicated across servers and mirrored. It won't be a paragraph of text in hundreds of web pages but a single long document.
A noble goal for sure, but much easier said than done. Complete documentation is harder than I anticipate.
As a long-time user I value what they've done and would like to help. Ideally, if it's just a problem of it being too much work for them to secure against bad actors, I'd just take over the website and organize that work myself. No promises, though, I'd need to understand the problem better before committing to solving it. :)
I suspect the authors and I have a lot of values in common.
Alternatively, the authors can contact me at [removed].
EDIT: Found an email!
For someone that's interested in crawling all the URLs (by avoiding the 10k limit) that were backed up, I found you can add YYYYMMDD in the * of the URL to see the sites archived during a particular year, month, day etc...
https://web.archive.org/web/2022*/txti.es/*
https://web.archive.org/web/2023*/txti.es/*
Txti is fast web pages for everybody. Most of the world still does not have internet, but many websites from countries like the United States are big and complicated. This makes it hard for people with slow internet to use these sites. It is even harder for those people to put their own thoughts on the internet. With txti, anyone can use any device to share their story.
Txti was created by Barry T. Smith because he believes that high speed internet is a responsibility, not a service people buy. He got a lot of help from his friend Adam Newbold.
What is "fast web pages for everybody"? Is it a proxy server that compresses websites like Opera Mini did?
Input markdown, get a web page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
It is of no good to you that you have internet connection but the website or whatever doesn't load because you are only on a slow cell phone connection somewhere in the middle of Africa or India, where cheap "feature phones" are the only way to access internet (and thus government services, for ex.)
Or if you have connectivity in the capital and one or two major cities - and the remaining 90% of the country is "dark" because of missing infrastructure, both electrical and communications (many African countries).
- from the linked page, emphasis mine; presumably the about page the "most of the world does not have internet" line comes from was also created nine years ago.
We are talking about ensuring that the content doesn't go away, not keeping the service writable.
Yes, I am serious. My email is in my profile. I would gladly take this on.
Perhaps in the future be less insulting and make fewer assumptions.
What was it this abused for? Malware C2 instructions?
It's never as simple as "here's the code, have at it". Actually packaging things up and documenting it takes times and effort. Also I'd imagine it feels like somewhat a slap in the face. "Hey, I see you've donated your time and money to this project until you felt you couldn't any longer but please donate more time to package it all up for some heretofore unknown entity that might benefit".
It's a lot easier to call for something to be open sourced than it is to actually take up the mantle and carry the project further. Same as when people say "Well have you seen if someone else wants to run it if you don't?" As if that's not a massive time investment of vetting and researching, not to mention your name is still attached to it even if you hand it over. Somewhere down the line a less scrupulous person might wrest control and do who knows what with it.
Lastly, it's been my experience that the majority of people asking for something to be open sourced have never used and/or are not interested in the original thing. They say it almost if by rote.
Again, I want to be clear I'm not trying to come down or attack you personally, I just feel like this statement gets thrown around a lot without a care in the world for the effort involved. I've had it said to me, I put in the time to clean up a project enough to open source, and no one touched it again as far as I can tell. That's more than a little disheartening.
>Occasionally, when we take action to moderate an account, we may revoke invite codes from that account and other accounts in the same invite tree.
I would simply never invite anyone. There has to be a moderate amount of "forgiveness" for people who can reasonably be thought not to have invited a deliberate spammer.
This never works. Like black SEO, where the competition deliberately does "forbidden SEO" things just to blacklist you.
txti @txties 28. März 2020: "Txti is currently down because some folks can’t follow rules and have created phishing or other malicious pages."
<https://twitter.com/txties/status/1243879222206246912>
The "rules" may relate to txti Terms of Service found <http://txti.es/terms>
txti @txties 15. Juni 2020: "I realize txti is broken at the moment, and I'm going to try to fix it. Truth is, I haven't really been doing web development for a few years and projects like txti have unfortunately taken a back seat to life."