111–120 of 241 posts
> 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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same thing happens to every subreddit. It's good, people like it, it grows very large, the quality of submissions goes down (or the same content gets reposted constantly). People are incentivized by their visible "karma" score to post mass amounts of low-effort content.
I feel like Hacker News is one of the only online communities I've participated in where the score is handled appropriately. It's a good personal measure of how well my posts and comments were received by the community, but it's not bragging rights. No one else can see my vote tallies here, so I have no real incentive to increase it. I've seen this affect sites like Stack Overflow as well. At the bottom of any popula…
- each website is handled by a module that does all the scraping, or uses the api if needed
- each module provides one or more capabilities, such as "list an account transactions" (typically for your bank or your mobile provider) or "receive and send messages" (such as HN or reddit or tinder)
- applications plug into those capabilities and give the user functionalities, regardless of the website. You can list the schedule for your bus just as well as the schedule for carpoolings.
One of the applications is actually a daemon with the capability to send and receive messages (with threading and all) and sends messages to the email adress of your choice; you can also configure it as an smtp mta, which means you can use any mail client and interact with all your discussion websites without ever opening the browser.
Obviously this is not a perfect solution for OP's problems, but it seems to me it's going in the right direction. Oh and it doesn't stop at websites; I use it for sending RSS feeds to my email in the background.
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.
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…
> one giant unified database of everything That's Google (almost; not everything is online). No need for the semantic web at all, or to wait for your vaporware 'solution'.
As a (presumably) end user, do you think that the interface provided by Google is database-like?
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…
This is partly what weboob ( http://weboob.org ) wants to solve, or at least work around. Its goal is to pull the web out of browsers (hence the name): - each website is handled by a module that does all the scraping, or uses the api if needed - each module provides one or more capabilities, such as "list an account transactions" (typically for your bank or your mobile provider) or "receive and send messages" (such a…
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.
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.
Go read old IRC logs, it's pretty "meh". You can join mailing lists where there mostly "old schoolers", which is also pretty "meh". The people or the conversations where never that exciting. It was all about the context of being exposed to something emerging. You were chatting with people from the other side of the world while most people had barely read a foreign newspaper. I'm sure one could have similar experience…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The eternal September"...
Which, as it happens, predates the arrival of 56k modems by several years. The author may in fact be one of those who arrived afterwards. Which all goes to show that people, in general, believe the best time was when they arrived/discovered/attended whatever. In other words, "pull the ladder up after I get to the top."