I am excited at the proliferation of Mastodon servers. Every cohesive tribe that can afford a $15/month VPS should set one up and ditch Facebook.
Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
51–60 of 241 posts
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#52Yeah, I'm old as well. Things change. Not for the better maybe, but you can't turn back the clock.. the only way forward is to make something new and better.
I'm still using RSS without issue. Funny thing is, i didn't really use it back in the day, I've just gravitated toward the best UX available over the years.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#53Earlier 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…
Reddit really 'dug' (see what I did there) its own grave by aggressively catering to casual users, in order to drive signups and grow the user base. I can't remember exactly what happened at which point, but it all follows the general pattern of appealing to the mass market. E.g. the curation of the frontpage via default subs such as /r/AdviceAnimals that don't really contain meaningful discussion. There's no real need to do this if one is concerned with maintaining an existing community, or the standards of it. As a counterexample, private trackers have been rather good at this, generally by having interviews/invitations for new memberships, or even disabling signups entire. Though these are really the most extreme options.
The other main problem is that like Digg, that there is a powerful cabal of moderators in control of most mainstream subreddits, including those concerned with serious topics like news and politics and they do a lot of "curation" of content by removing stuff, rather than letting the users decide on which links and topics are relevant to discussion (by, ya know... upvoting/downvoting) with chilling effects on those respective subs. That this was allowed to continue, without overhauling and maybe even democratising the moderation system of default subs, was Reddit's choice. I can only suspect that this either (a) plays into the hands of advertisers directly via corporate censorship or (b) indirectly, by relegating content from users who fall outside of the "mass-market" demographic to niche subreddits or other websites.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#54With 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.
This is probably the best and most truthful rebuttal to all the "the internet was better back in my day" posts that I've seen.
It's true but it's not a rebuttal. It's an explanation.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#55With 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.
Yes, but there have been an increasing trend in "reddit style" comments on news.ycombinator.com . Myself and other users have noticed, called people out, downvoted etc for the lousy comments.
But the realities of the threading style & upvote democracy is that lowest common denominator spreads easily.
Related discussion in same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699133
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#56> But we need a common API ... so that people can use their favourite tools Yup, that's exactly what made the internet great in the good old days. But how do you monetize users who get to use their favoirite tools instead of yours?
We need a win-win system.
People adopted schema.org so their search ranking improved. Adding markup for machine consumption doesn't make sense otherwise.
We need to build systems that benefit both parties.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#57My own theory about why our ability to focus on what we want to on the internet is Attention Capitalism. Our attention is the latest resource to be exploited by capitalism, and each company is attempting to control what we focus on for their profit. I've noticed this trend; very little software let's me control what information I see anymore. It's almost all controlled by some algorithm making me see what they claim I want to see.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#58Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#59Great 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 Facebook I scroll down until I see something I've seen before, then I stop. Doesn't seem very hard, and I imagine its what most people do. If I want to revisit older things then I keep scrolling, but that's almost never the case.
I used to do this with Twitter, but that's impossible these days.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The name I've heard for this is "Eternal September": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Yeah, that was posted elsewhere in the thread. I thought of it as a name specific to Usenet, as Network Decay is specific to television networks. I was hoping for a general term.