91–100 of 241 posts
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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.
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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 ne…
They'll hide behind "But people are voting for this mindless content" but that's not the full picture. A vote after 5 seconds is actually weighted higher than a vote after 5 minutes.
It's specifically because Reddit the company is against too much engaging content. They want people to smirk, chuckle, acknowledge, and move on. Engaging content means fewer pages viewed, which means fewer ad views.
It's not that these points aren't valid; they are, and I know some people who've been rightfully hammering the exact same points for, well, decades, at this point. But we arrived here neither out of pure accident or grand overarching malice, but simply out of the necessity of the now-commercial web and its lack of good business models, and perverse incentives. Back when most of the traffic on the Internet was academi…
One thing that keeps me returning to YC is that I'm not even reminded of the existence of moderators over here.
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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…
Is the monkeysphere is the root cause of the endless bifurcation of communities, culture? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
John Dvorak once opined that social networks stop being cool when that coworker you secretly hated tries to connect.
Of course, pushing the other way, is the power law distribution of attention. The best explanation I've read for our current winner takes all economy. http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w...
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…
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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…
"I don't go to that bar anymore, it's too wankerised."
"I don't visit Facebook anymore, it's become wankerised."
"The neighbourhood is too wankerised, I can't afford to live there."
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…
What Facebook / Twitter / Blogger / etc. are good for is providing context - why should I be interested in something. Generally it's as simple as "I like Mr. X and he's interested in Y". They're also reasonable at finding new topics to explore, although if you dive deep enough it turns out that everything is interconnected and you'll find it anyway.
It's really hard to define "topic" or "noise" in a way that isn't based on search keywords or (facets of) people.
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…
That's Google (almost; not everything is online). No need for the semantic web at all, or to wait for your vaporware 'solution'.