41–50 of 241 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The eternal September"...
Eternal September was September 1993... That's like, 2400 baud days
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, at least it's sort of not dead.
I just reposted this article to comp.misc, where we've been keeping up a parallel discussion for years. Usenet doesn't have the sheer numbers it used to, but anyone still there is there because we love it. Usenet's flaws remain unmended, but its strengths remain unfettered. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The issue is when the unwanted folks follow the cool kids around. This happens a lot on Reddit. People will make a subreddit with the type of community they want. Others will join. Eventually people will complain that the quality has deteriorated. Then the cool kids will start a new one and migrate there. Rinse. Repeat... ad infinitum . Edit: I don't know if there's a general name for this phenomenon, but I believe i…
Or is facebook to blame? John Gilmore famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- he was wrong, censorship just has to wait for the right monopoly to appear. And with the success of monopoly interoperability becomes its casualty
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.
Great point about Twitter and FB not having the "I've seen this" flag (although they probably have this info for their "engagement metrics"), it keeps people addicted and returning. I remember being glued to Twitter during the Mumbai terror attack, but the way it was designed, it was an endless stream of the same info, repeated. And spam, since bots add trending hashtags to their junk messages. I guess it's like cabl…
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.
Likewise I use IRC every day, through Bitlbee, to interact with people on Facebook Messenger and other platforms.
I can do all of this from my client of choice (I choose Emacs) without a problem.
Admittedly this doesn't solve the problem of topicality, but I think things are better than they seem.