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Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

franzoni.eu

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

#81
post #60
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eternal September afflicted mailing lists, too.

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

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It always sucks to have your insightful (in your own eyes at least) comments downvoted, just because there's a group of people who disagree with it. It's a downvote democracy, but not a true democracy because it only takes a minority to vote that way. I don't even have access to this downvote feature, I guess I don't have enough karma.

Right, downvoting gets enabled when you hit 500 points, or so I remember.

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

#83
post #36
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The eternal September"...

Eternal September was September 1993... That's like, 2400 baud days

I was using a 1200 baud, via SLIRP[1]. In 1994 (I think?) remember cycling into University with a box of 10 1.44M floppy disks to copy Slackware 0.1 so I could install it at home.

The bandwidth of a box of floppy disks on a bicycle was higher.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp

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

#84
post #77
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think the term is specific to Usenet at all. It's genesis is in Usenet, but I've heard it used many, many times to refer to the general phenomenon that the original Eternal September was a specific instance of.

It's fine to say that, but this phenomenon is even older than the Internet. Think of the hip bar that gains a sudden influx of customers following a New York Times story. Yogi Berra remarked on this phenomenon with one of his famous quotes "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded!"

Another idea related to the general phenomenon is gentrification: the cool artist colony suddenly overwhelmed with yuppies who drive up the rent, forcing the artists to move out.

Is there not a general term for this whole phenomenon?

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

#85
Elon Musk said that as time passes, technology continuously degrades, not improves, if people don't make a hard effort to keep improving it. The Egyptians knew how to build giant pyramids, and forgot how. The Romans built fantastic aqueducts, and forgot how. We built vehicles that landed on the moon in the 60s, and the next vehicle we built could only go into earth orbit, and then we no longer even had a vehicle that could do that.

Today, for some reason, everyone thinks that writing software for a platform on a platform on a platform with no interconnecting standards or protocols is a great idea. Instead of trying to improve people's lives, we're just making things needlessly complex, buggy, and bloaty. You need 8 gigs of ram minimum just to browse the web, and god forbid you want to do something like back up your data. I was just in a meeting where nobody could get Google's video conferencing to work.

Instead of building internet technology, we build web technology. The web is harder to write software for. It's an ephemeral, inconsistent, difficult thing. But if we try really hard, we can turn the tide on the unnecessarily complex box we've forced ourselves into.

The proposed fixes are good ideas, but they're bandaids on axe wounds. There are much deeper problems going on that won't be fixed by a feature add or a pivot. We need a re-evaluation of all internet-based technology, how we develop it, how we incorporate it into our lives, and what we want as a society from it.

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It always sucks to have your insightful (in your own eyes at least) comments downvoted, just because there's a group of people who disagree with it. It's a downvote democracy, but not a true democracy because it only takes a minority to vote that way. I don't even have access to this downvote feature, I guess I don't have enough karma.

Yeah, this too.

I was more lamenting the lousy comments eg. puns, comments that add nothing etc. These are possible with 0second old accounts.

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

#88

Elon Musk said that as time passes, technology continuously degrades, not improves, if people don't make a hard effort to keep improving it. The Egyptians knew how to build giant pyramids, and forgot how. The Romans built fantastic aqueducts, and forgot how. We built vehicles that landed on the moon in the 60s, and the next vehicle we built could only go into earth orbit, and then we no longer even had a vehicle that…

Musk never knew how to make a good electric car people want to buy so I guess he has nothing to worry about.

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

#89
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.

I don't think that's all of it. The Internet used to be these networks that we could, through tools, arrange to be around us. We'd have our e-mail network and our Usenet network and our IRC network, and we have ways to view all those things that aggregated among different e-mail servers and different USENET groups and different IRC channels, and gave us a view around How We We Engaging With The Content (e-mail for one-to-one or one-to-many longform discussion, USENET for many-to-many longform discussion, IRC for short-form discussion, both one-to-one and many-to-many). Now, instead of forming the center of our own Internet experience, there's these silos -- Twitter, Facebook, Slack -- and we form a network around the silo instead of our networks having us at the center.

Now, having large number of people makes many of the features of these silos more desirable, they're not unrelated. But if you could find a way to scale up the "me-centric" view of the web to modern needs, then everyone -- early adopters and the mass audience -- would both benefit, I think.

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