Live data from Hacker News

Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

franzoni.eu

21–30 of 241 posts

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#21
post #5

I'm going to write a chat app built on IRC that gradually uses more and more RAM, and adds new features while breaking old ones. Just as it has everything MSN used to have ill have it shut down, rename itself and its website and start all over again.

Ping me. I'm really excited about this.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#22
post #10

With all due respect, what changed since the 56k days (which I remember fondly as well) is that people showed up. Before that, the only users on the internet were early adopters. It's unreasonable to expect 'those people' to go away.

The Internet is decentralized. It doesn't matter that all the 13 year olds are congregating on Club Penguin or whatever; we can set up our own communities. That's why HN is great (and other small communities). It's intrinsically hostile to the wider internet simply by virtue of the subject and the format of its content.

[deleted]

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#23
post #5

I'm going to write a chat app built on IRC that gradually uses more and more RAM, and adds new features while breaking old ones. Just as it has everything MSN used to have ill have it shut down, rename itself and its website and start all over again.

So Slack then?

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#24
post #10

With all due respect, what changed since the 56k days (which I remember fondly as well) is that people showed up. Before that, the only users on the internet were early adopters. It's unreasonable to expect 'those people' to go away.

"The eternal September"...

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#25
post #5

I'm going to write a chat app built on IRC that gradually uses more and more RAM, and adds new features while breaking old ones. Just as it has everything MSN used to have ill have it shut down, rename itself and its website and start all over again.

Don't forget to make it struggle to scroll text at some point in the cycle.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#26

What do you think about Reddit? Topics are enforced and have an API.

The same thing happens to every subreddit. It's good, people like it, it grows very large, the quality of submissions goes down (or the same content gets reposted constantly). People are incentivized by their visible "karma" score to post mass amounts of low-effort content.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#27
post #10

With all due respect, what changed since the 56k days (which I remember fondly as well) is that people showed up. Before that, the only users on the internet were early adopters. It's unreasonable to expect 'those people' to go away.

Go read old IRC logs, it's pretty "meh". You can join mailing lists where there mostly "old schoolers", which is also pretty "meh". The people or the conversations where never that exciting. It was all about the context of being exposed to something emerging. You were chatting with people from the other side of the world while most people had barely read a foreign newspaper. I'm sure one could have similar experiences today, but it's unlikely to be in a text interface among adults with $3000 laptops.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#28

The problem is that it appears most people actually want noise, and it's becoming especially apparent as a lot of these content channels become more mainstream. Anyone who's been on Reddit for the majority of the site's existence will probably have noticed monumental shifts in popular content, which I feel is essentially a movement away from serious diverse discussion towards entertainment and self validation. I don'…

Yeah it seems that people like the memes, image macros, and one liners. It's throwaway entertainment so people don't have to think (of course, there are people who do want to think and have intelligent discourse too). Like someone else wrote in this thread, what happened was that people came, people who didn't grow up using the Internet in the days when it was run by academics, government, and hobbyists.

I think the solution (as much as there can be one) is to just stick to your own communities where you find the discourse that you enjoy. For me, it's Hacker News, certain subreddits, and some forums.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#30
Don't worry. I'm in the process of solving this.

The solution was in front of us all this time. It's the semantic web. What was missing is an accessible client, and it will be available soon.

Imagine one giant unified semantic decentralized database of everything. Add smart contracts, quantified self, intent inferring, and binary input (à la Tinder or Akinator). Organize this on a timeline, so that your OS becomes a task management system. That's it.

Unfortunately, my strategy is to target kids that haven't yet be corrupted by current communication paradigms. I think 5 to 12 year old is the sweet spot. Older people will be able to use it, but I don't know if they'll be able to grasp the full potential. Only time will tell.

Post reply on HN