101–110 of 241 posts
As someone who remembers being uber frustrated at having to use trillian to talk to all of my friend, I disagree, there was major fragmentation back then as well. Also for which BBS you were on, which friends were on AOL or other nerfed internet.
It was possible to use and create trillian. Now I need to have slack, Hangouts and WhatsApp web open independently
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.
If only it where not for those meddling open devs, distributing all the nice things among the clueless.
Walled gardens and a "protectionist web" are the natural outcome of the legal structure we've chosen to put up around the internet. It's not a technical limitation, and technical solutions can not really affect it. Just this week there was a "Show HN" that combined data from Twitter et al in interesting ways. It was offline less than 24 hours later as all the comments indicated that it was a clear violation of the po…
I missed that. What's the HN URL?
> Why should we care about those policies? Well, because under the CFAA, we've made it a federal crime to send packets to a server in a way that displeases the server's owner.
There are ways to avoid such oversight. Consider, for example, Sci-Hub or TPB or third-generation dark markets. What's hard is doing that at scale. And that, I believe, is a huge niche that's aching to be filled.
Frankly I think what is missing is an understanding of statistics. Even having “1000 friends”, which sounds amazing, is statistically insignificant when we are talking about populations of millions or billions. Think about the last “really long thread” you read on Reddit or something, and think about when you tuned out: was it a few dozen comments, maybe a few hundred? Still statistically insignificant, or at the ver…
Also useful is https://www.reddit.com/r/all/top/?sort=top&t=day, a bit US/tech-biased but definitely a few million.
Indeed. I miss the days of IRC and such. The internet started feeling really noisy after the iPhone was popularized.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to see better moderation systems. Moderation done by people who are actually good at it rather than just upvoting or downvoting comments depending on whether they agree with them or not (moderating the moderators). Ways to mark comments as duplicates so they are all grouped into one bundle. A way to avoid the "first posts" effect, where the earlier posts are likely to be the highest rated regardless of their…
Begs the question: what are the best moderation systems in software? Are there any?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to see better moderation systems. Moderation done by people who are actually good at it rather than just upvoting or downvoting comments depending on whether they agree with them or not (moderating the moderators). Ways to mark comments as duplicates so they are all grouped into one bundle. A way to avoid the "first posts" effect, where the earlier posts are likely to be the highest rated regardless of their…
Begs the question: what are the best moderation systems in software? Are there any?
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.
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…
How about implementing an RSS interface on top of the likes of Twitter and Facebook by screen scraping? Would have to take authentication of course. Then we could consume it via RSS readers just like the good ol' days. Does that already exist? I would pay for that.
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…
How about implementing an RSS interface on top of the likes of Twitter and Facebook by screen scraping? Would have to take authentication of course. Then we could consume it via RSS readers just like the good ol' days. Does that already exist? I would pay for that.