I can't agree with this enough. The internet today is a cesspit, it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums. I made a lot of real life friends from the forums I frequented.
Oh the good old days :(
Oh the good old days :(
Oh the good old days :(
As do I, but I suspect much of what I miss is simply just being young and free and all that comes with that.
This would be less of an issue if users had clear legal rights (perhaps IP rights) to their own data.
I'd have fewer problems with "commercial platforms" if they couldn't rent-seek on free labour, ie., if the created content could be easily "replatformed".
Perhaps that's the next phase of the privacy war: the right to replatform.
Moderators, users, etc. are people volunteering for each other -- not for discord. Discord is just a public park.
At some point probably they'll go full social-media-megacorp and start to believe they own all groups using the public park; all their leaflets, and posters, and boardgames. All their time and effort.
This is really the heart of the reddit blackout. Who own's what makes reddit valuable?
On any sane sense digital ownership rights: it's users. Reddit inc provides well-trimmed grass and a nice pond (ie., source code and servers).
I don't think I will read anything else this insightful today. Would I pay for this thread? Absolutely. Would I pay $19.99/month for HNPREMIUM where I could read "the full thread" of top content providers like mjburgess? Nope.
Is it because people will genuinely engage with that content there?
Is it a “this is such good content I’ve captured it for posterity - look here’s the proof!” type of endorsement?
Or is it an attempt to archive the content into some sort of collective memory? Or an aide memoire for your own purposes?
Genuinely curious to understand your motivation, it’s not a criticism of what you’ve done, just something I feel I don’t understand.
So that was easier or more impactful to communicate via image than typing “this thread is valuable”
At least that’s how it made sense to me
edit: also I use greenshot so it's too easy for me to screenshot and get an imgur-link. And yes, I'm a screenshoter, sending my colleagues images of text all the time. I'm lucky to be alive still.
edit2: example, slack dm from 1 hour ago https://i.imgur.com/807OQML.png
Just click on the timestamp next to the comment, like "12 hours ago".
Sending the actual HN url to a comment or thread, instead of a screenshot:
* Is accessible to people with limited vision who can't or can't as easily read a screeshot. Many people even without vision impairment find text much easier to consume than a photo of text. For instance, text in reasonable CSS will flow to fit your screensize, where a screenshot will not.
* For those interested, easily provides the context of where the comment/thread appeared and what's around it, hard to trace back from a screenshot to HN
* For the future archival purposes, is often more likely to still be good than a link to a third-party image hosting site
* In the rare case where it matters, is "self-authenticating", it points to HN itself, while an image can be modified or faked, although certainly in most cases there is no motivation for someone to do so, still it's nice to have it built in.
When it's an HN comment, or anything else with a URL, I think it should be nearly as easy to show people what you're refering to with a URL to it, as it is with a screenshot?
I am posting here because its free for you. I'm posting here to participate in an open forum, I am donating my time to the people here, in conversation -- not to HackerNews itself. Which has my loyalty only insofar as it is the "public space I want to visit".
So if you were to have paid anything for that thread, I wouldnt have started it.
And likewise I have never posted to any internet forum behind a paywall and I find the idea practically and morally suspicious. All the places worth going to are run by those with a passion for them -- it is that passion which they want to share.
I'm quite capitalist myself, but for my own passions, an elite socialist -- that is, of course the value to me ought be non-financial; and likewise, to you.
A kind of "collective elite" is very intuitive for one's owns passions --- but it wont get you an economy.
But I dont wish to turn my thoughts into an economy. My words pay their own way.
Storage, compute, and bandwidth all cost money, and it has to come from somewhere.
Your mindset of "everything costs money and so everyone is the internet's paypig" is broken and exemplifies the problem with the modern internet.
Yes, everything costs money, but honestly, not that much money. $20-$40 a month is enough to run your own kbin/lemmy/mastodon instance on a VPS with your own domain name and everything. If you have 300 regular users, getting them to throw $500 a year in support at your site is nothing.
Also, if you occupy a niche and run it well, you can make internet money the old fashioned way, by finding products that your niche users specifically want and organically selling to them without ad spamming them to death.
Yes, that means money changes hands. That's capitalism. But in that system the site users are not being spammed with annoying ads and the only tracking being done is with the interest category itself and not on a per user basis including all of the other sites they've ever visited before visiting your site.
Just like forums used to do.
Sure, forums are outdated because the site navigation is clunky and user participation is difficult, but federated systems can bridge the gap between the forum based glory days and the modern interface without costing everyone so much money that it boggles the mind.
Yes, that's usually how it starts. It ends with invisible tracking pixels and flashing X10 ads everywhere. That or stealth ads disguised as content.
This isn't some hypothetical. We have 30 years of history now to tell us exactly how this plays out.
> Just like forums used to do.
That era was great while it lasted. But since the "adpocalypse", it's very very difficult for sites to make money without targeted ads and the requisite tracking. We lost a lot of high-quality sites like Dr Dobbs Journal in the adpocalypse, and all we have to replace them are SEO content farms and blogspam.
Despite that, I think ads will probably evolve to fit the new ecosystem, where two people like you and me are having a conversation and I will at an appropriate time and with a proper amount of discretion mention (shiny new toy) and that (I'm enjoying it) and then move on.
Annoying, blaring in your face spite ads and out of place porn ads will change, the new ads will be powered by AI personas that match their online spaces, have appropriate day night cycles and backstories, and will be practically indistinguishable from real live humans and they will occasionally gather together and talk excitedly with each other about (shiny new toy) or how (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' new birthday cake cereal recipe) is (awesome) and then us real human will stumble onto that conversation (without the parenthesis), leaving us to wonder if we should give them a try.
And if someone were to offer me thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue to host a site that seems hustling and bustling with activity that is appropriate for the space where sometimes people will be urged to get into flame wars about how (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' new birthday cake cereal recipe) is (Better than / not as good as) (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' Original recipe), thus preventing any conversation about (Plain old Oatmeal for breakfast) then who wouldn't take that?
In reality, we've got several options. People have house parties. One or several members of the community volunteer property they already own and maintain for another purpose to be temporarily used as a gathering place. The web analogy would be if we all had our own private blogs that we ran on self-hosted servers and we moved from the comments section of one to another and had our discussions there. Classically, Usenet was basically this but without the web.
Commons exist. These would be something like a park. That can be funded via taxes, or if you're militantly anti-government, via some more voluntary form of communal funding, like an HOA or a non-profit that accepts donations. The web equivalent of the latter would be something like Wikipedia, which could easily host threaded discussions if they wanted to. It's arguably a problem that nothing like the former really exists. A lot of people in the past several years have been saying platforms like Twitter deserve to be treated as equivalent to government-provided commons, so why not just have them actually owned and funded by the government? Ironically, the US government does own and operate a classified Twitter clone called eChirp, but nobody from the web can access it unless they have a JWICS account, workstation access, a security clearance, and IC PKI identity.
When thought about this way, do private for-profit parks exist? I know amusement parks exist, but they are clearly different. The value there isn't in going to see the other park guests who you know and would gather with anyway. The park itself is the attraction, filled with entertaining rides, shows, and restaurants that play off of brand loyalty and nostalgia. It feel like places like Facebook and Reddit want to make the same or even money compared to Disney, but without putting in the century of work to build a brand and back-catalog of high-quality entertainment franchises. So they rely on users to generate content instead and it's at best a shitty, ephemeral attention grab that nobody will look back on in 2120 and cherish.
What many of us want are parks, public parks with funding models, not amusement parks with business models, let alone shitty copycats of amusement parks where all the rides suck, but we go anyway because our friends are there and we have no regular parks to hang out at.
The parent commenter you're replying to here is effectively proposing I should get paid to hang out with my friends. I don't want to get paid to hang out with my friends. As soon as that happens, they're not friends. They're customers and I just became a business. I don't want to be a business. I'm just trying to talk, not generate monetizable content.
Indeed, and so I say: I would never have written anything at all if they had had to pay for it.
As I see it we're just leeching off Discord's infrastructure, in contrast to reddit (or HN) where each comment/post adds something to the platform in large.
It also likely contains information about you and your friends like holiday plans, medical conditions etc that can be used to more effectively avertise towards you.
But most of all, you are a captive audience that Discord can sell in the future.
These are moderated by whoever created them, and bringing more users (followers) is the creator’s work. But people depending on discord is what discord is after.
I fully expect a bait and switch on this platform once it has captured enough users.
That is not the case now.
On the other hand, from a parent's perspective, the "good old days" were an absolute nightmare, because nobody was particularly responsible for policing content your kids were being shown (except for, well, you). Whether or not you SHOULD be willing to offload that responsibility set aside as a matter for debate, you for the most part CAN assume that the volume of heinously inappropriate content being foisted upon your unwitting 15 year old is a bit more limited, at least on these big platform sites (aside from some of the more ephemeral content, where it's usually a matter of taking it down only AFTER the kids see it). But you can also usually rest a bit more easily knowing your 15 year old isn't uploading naked pictures of themselves to reddit like they may have been to a vbulletin or phpbb site in the days of yore (though, nothing stops them from going off the beaten path and doing so elsewhere unless you've got that firewall and/or actual monitoring going on).
I guess the point is, there are pros and cons. Personally I approach the kids on the Internet thing with some pretty hefty firewalling and monitoring and would really just love a return to the greater amount of decentralization (and for the love of god, search engines that just find what's out there, and report back based on terms, rather than curate "acceptable" and "promotion worthy" content...but this may be wishing for too much). But others may have different priorities.
For example the loose girls who 25 years ago would have maintained web galleries of honest, mostly well made naked pics of themselves now post Instagram reels where they use a strong light source from behind to display the silhouette of their pussy through a thin dress: no nudity, but far more perversion.
That very much depends on whether you agree with the curron popular opinion on what is appropriate for children.
Also, kids can just as easily find porn, gore, etc today as they could back when I was a kid. Hiding it on some platforms hardly matters.
I miss the days of the forum and wikis, it was vastly easier to search and lurk. and now you need a multiple accounts to even find that information.
I do miss phpBB forum with the curated read only section, the lore of important post that all the forum has read and so on
it used to be that you could find a wiki with all the frame data, bnb combos and character specific tips/guidelines, and move analysis.
now it's spread on character specific discords, where data is in google docs.
In my opinion, the UI of social media has been deliberately designed to be a dopamine waterfall that discourages people to think or invest themselves in any one community. If you analyzed the top 1000 links on Reddit r/all at any given time, without checking it myself, I think you'd find that 950 of those links are memes, funny pictures, lousy opinions or some kind of a drama going on.
And back-end is a non-issue either. A phpBB forum hosted on a DigitalOcean $6 VPS can comfortably handle 100,000 community members. But perhaps the bigger issue is that people don't even want to participate in an actual community/forum, because for example - there are no downvote/upvote buttons in phpBB. There's also no instant image preview (gratification), and you actually have to click on a new thread to read it.
So, yes, cesspit is a good word for it. But more than that its people having become so comfortable with meaningless browsing, for many of them - Reddit being gone for a few days means they will browse more TikTok or whatever else people mindlessly scroll through.
Anyone knows any forum about Forums? Or, better, about it's technical aspects? Or any blog, book, about forums? I would really appreciate any reference. I ask here because is the only community where I had found high quality blogs and off grid communities.
This summer I'll try to build and maintain one because I know a small community of max 2000 people who I know will be engaged in a positive and constructive interaction. I don't want to monetize anything, I think it would be very valuable for people. Maybe I am overconfident but at least I have to try. I think building a restful API is a better approach to detach it from UI, and also include latex syntax on the front end.
Also, do you know any forum like HN but being a real forum, with that I mean, that threads don't have a finite life?
I hope this is not off topic.
There is a community of people who administer web forums called "The Admin Zone"
You can probably find web forums to join based on the posters there. There's all sorts of advice on that forum to do with rules, server administration and guides.
Back then, sure, there was moderation, but there was also plenty of content that, while not egregious, by today's standard would certainly keep a small independent forum sysop up at night. Linking to pirated content, for instance, used to be generally a non-issue, and even if someone cared, the likelihood they were going to find it and bother targeting your forum was pretty slim. These days, that is very much not the case, with bots happy to scour the Internet for a rising number of possible content that could get your server targeted and pressured into oblivion by a pack of rabid attack lawyers.
I'm sort of hoping to see a move to the use of darknet services to alleviate some of that, perhaps with relays like tor2web or similar options for i2p that can make them clearnet accessible without the dread associated with running a server with user created content exposed to lawyers. That, or simple ephemerality of content (though say, IRC or similar protocols) seems to be the way around the reality of the legal environment brought on by web 2.0 (and beyond).
Behind almost every PhpBB/vBulletin messageboard of yore is a regular non-technical person who had to pay for a server, learn enough about databases, user authentication and backups to get started, and build and moderate a community.
Who was going to pick up that torch when you can start a subreddit or Discord or Telegram group with a couple of clicks.
I still am very happy about "fediverse" stuff because it enables a simple-ish protocol and working mechanisms for various communities to interact. But I really think that, for example, mastodon.social is a net negative to fediverse stuff except for pure "get people to adopt" reasons.
It's worth remembering that Usenet had threading -- it's nothing new.
I get building out to include more features, but it really feels like a lot of what's already been accomplished is just going unused.
forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins.
oh, the good old days.
Spam keeps getting blamed for the death of Usenet, but spam filters worked fine then.
No, the real death of Usenet was the excitement over the web, and the ability of web forums to have integrated images, nice custom layouts per forum, links tightly integrated in to the browser platform, and not needing to install/configure/understand a Usenet client.
Even just the ease of registering and logging in to a web forum compared to installing, configuring, and learning how to use a Usenet client would win over most users.
Social media cites like Reddit do one better by requiring just a single login to get access to thousands of forums.
Way in the early ages when nearly everyone was a professional or some sort of tech enthusiast, things were nice and pleasant.
But eventually the unwashed masses flooded in, and USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot. Gradually the best contributors decided they had better things to do, and wandered off elsewhere.
Moderation and spam filtering also sucked. Yeah, you could have kill files, but that had to be done by everyone independently. It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in.
We just used kill files, which let you ignore users and even let you filter through complex pattern matching. Web forums and social media still don't let you do the latter, despite such capability being available in Usenet news readers several decades ago.
"It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in."
Flame wars were a distraction, but they still happen in web forums and on social media, and depending on the community they may even be tolerated.
I can't count the number of times irrelevant tangents dominated the top voted comment threads on HN or on Reddit, and on Twitter the trolls have obviously been let back in. Reddit too used to be a safe space for them for most of its existence.
That was true about ten years ago.
Most forums that keep their software up to date support logging in with a number of SSO systems.
Not that it matters to most users, because they wouldn't know how to use such tools to begin with, and don't know what they're missing.
Discord is an information black hole, and I pity future generations who'll have virtually no access to the petabytes of history lost in dark data vaults like Discord.
I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server. Also, sometimes the server would not let go of my disconnected nickname, so I would get one with one of more `_` appended to it.
Re-joining would not fetch the previous messages, and I would have anxiety that someone has replied to my message that I posted a few minutes prior, but I would never see...
I know that IRC bouncers exist, and I have even tried using `tmux` on a server to keep my irssi connection alive, but that is in no way user-friendly, even for a fairly technical person. Last resort is to find the public channel logs somewhere, if they even exist.
At that point, I would just give up and use Discord.
This far been a solved problem for 30 years. You just run an IRC bouncer on a host that's always up (like on a VPS) and have your IRC client connect to that. The bouncer will keep scrollback and logs for you.
Of course if you use Discord you don't need to bother to do any of that, so the convenience it offers is real, but it's not like if you're an IRC user you can't have persistent history.
On the other hand, with IRC you only log the channels you're in (unless you run your own IRC server), so you will miss out on history from other channels.
Now, most people might not have any interest in learning how to change the oil in their cars, and don't want to bother even if they have the knowledge. They prefer to hire someone else to do it for them.
So it is with Discord, where you "pay" for the service by giving Discord your data and handing over control over your communities to them.
It does appear to be discontinued at this point, but I do believe I've seen other ssh clients that do support the swipe at this point. I must confess though my use of IRC on the phone has always been relatively limited -- chatting in general on a phone is tiresome. Even SMS I do more in a browser these days on my desktop.
Matrix seems to bring along the features of Discord with the freedom of IRC. But, as usual when freedom is concerned, it does come with a fair amount of responsibility, particularly in the form of setting up and running the server.
What's stopping anyone today to have a community around a forum? phpBB still exists...
I found the story of Hive (the social network) fascinating in that it was basically that idea of someone jumping in, learning the ropes, building a platform. And getting crushed under how much knowledge and effort, ultimately money, is needed to run a decent platform.
Their team was truely incompetent, but looking under the surface they were really a group of a few amateurs trying to do something, and it's only after the backlash that they realized a whole team of well experienced engineers is needed for anything touching user info.
I'd imagine trying to run a raw phpBB on the web today would be in the same vein ?
That is only a problem if you have user info. On classical forums, everything was public if there was no PMs.
Also under GDPR IP address retention can fall under that in your logs depending on how you manage the info, same way analytics would need attention.
It should really be more simple, and I wish we'd have more people just building small sites here and there without having to care much about these details.
This scaremongering about GPDR always conveniently forgets that the stuff the GPDR makes scary to do is stuff you should not be doing anyway.
Collecting IP address will not reduce the need for manual moderation, nor even reduce bot spam...
(I do admin a topic-specialized technical web forum which has been running for over 20 years, which doesn't even need to ask for cookie consent.. but of course, has never been legally tested, so YMMV)
Second, the new user is subject to approval and all his messages are moderated until a couple of posts. If he starts posting decent material, why would you care he was banned 2 months ago -- are you really that punitative? And if he just posts decent, insightful material for his 5 messages, gets approved and then descends back immediately into trolling, well, at least it's been a couple of months and then the couple of weeks he was under moderation of total silence, plus you have gained whatever contributions he made under moderation. I am yet to see a troll that will repeat this process (which requires insightful contributions in-between each iteration of trolling) for more than a year. That's way less moderating effort that it takes to handle new users at all...
You'll see strangely repetitive user coming from different AWS's IP blocks. User showing constant sessions from 5 or 6 IP blocks that seem to belong to different countries. Or users having a pretty consitent IP but asks for help right after a new login happened on a different IP.
It can be replaced with other info, but it's still a simple and pretty powerful bit to know about your users.
It gets messy when you have a number of users and need to know why a specific user is sending you 150 requests per min for 3 hours: you'll insta ban that user, but still need to understand what happened. Did they get their login info leak and the whole internet is having a field day with it ? Is it an issue with your system and their browser is stuck in a weird loop ? Are you session management backend going bust and they're actually all different logged users ?
You'll only know if you have the IP, parts of the headers and some more debugging info, and activating the debug after the fact is often not good enough.
Do you have more info on this story about them?
https://www.theverge.com/23607095/vergecast-solo-acts-hive-s...