Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There is a tool that converts Twitter to RSS. I used to use it to get updates from a fantasy author who had neither a website nor a mailing list. It was self hosted but can't remember the name.
Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
121–130 of 241 posts
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#122> 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?
This is an EXTREMELY good point. We'll need to dig out a way.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#123What do you think about Reddit? Topics are enforced and have an API.
Depending on the subreddit, it's sometimes interesting. but I haven't found a NNTP-level client for it, yet.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#124> Once was IRC Seriously?
Uuh, despite the enormous attention, the article was written in just about an hour, and I'm not a native English speaker; that error slipped through the cracks. Thanks for pointing it out.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#125Earlier 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.
You do have access to the upvote button,so your vote can cancel out an unfair downvote.
Comments that get downvotes also don't get upvotes, so it's not just the small group who can downvotes who are causing the comments to be gray, it's also the large group who could upvotes but who chose not to do so.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#126This 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…
Am I the only one who read the name and thought this was a porn site?
I think the service would reach a greater audience with a simpler name.
(Btw I still don't get how the creator wants me to read the name and what it means)
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#127As much as I really liked using IRC back in the day, I still think I spent way too much time on it. I mean you got to know the people there, and after a couple of years most discussions were like office conversations. Plus the takeovers, the trolls, the noobs, the never ending screwing around with the bots, etc.
I've never done much newsgroups because I didn't like public speaking without anonymity.
ICQ and others were like today's WhatsApp and hangout. I didn't use a single interface for them at the time, and still don't today, I don't see a big difference.
Today, I'm off Facebook, I barely follow twitter at all. I'm fine with reading hacker news, and other tech news aggregators.
I think you can lament on the disappearance of RSS, but to me, that's just about the main issue.
I guess the big difference between then and now is that we used to control better what we opted in. Now we're more force fed.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#128This 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…
This looks really cool, but I found it distracting to see the word "boob" in all the app names.
I'd be inclined to ignore it, but then I saw this on the carousel:
"QHandJoob - You are unemployed? Use this application to search job offers!"
This naming convention is a sure-fire way to lose a big chunk of potential users.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Facebook used to support RSS feeds. So did Twitter. Now they're both gone, to force people to use their ad-laden interfaces. There are services to generate RSS feeds from both, but there's probably some catch to that. [1] https://zapier.com/blog/facebook-twitter-rss-feed/
The social media are pushing the social thing, which is fair enough from a business standpoint.
What isn't fine is that users are (intentionnaly, could be argued) led to believe that the media part is equivalent to traditional "RSS-like" media like AFP/Reuters/Bloomberg who carried the responsibility of being trustable.
There's a place and implementation for everything and social media is not an appropriate platform for diffusion of factchecked information. How we make use of the different information dispersion platforms is on us!
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Most probably it would be illegal, against each website's TOS. If such tool catches up, it will be removed - and you still need to account for upstream changes that periodically kill the functionality.
Thinking of such a tool as a service is a symptom of the same disease that got us where we are in the first place. If such tool would, instead, be open-source and self-hosted (or a component of trivially self-hosted) application, websites could do exactly shit about it. Traffic will be coming from everywhere, and the tool will get updated by people to overcome upstream interface changes.
Ultimately, it's SaaS webapps that's the problem. The model has legitimate benefits (lack of installation, cross-platform), but it also is the reason the Web centralizes so much.