Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by d--b » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 8:58 AM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #140

d--b wrote: post #127

As 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 we…

Good points, especially the last point. I approach "internet" differently these days. I have twitter for high freq thin data, reddit for a bit more dense information~. For deeper information I could read serious journals, books. But I rarely need that, or am not capable of digesting it. The force fed thing is inherent to the change of importance and structure of the web.. Remember when Google was an entry point to th…

Exactly, there used to be a reason why we called these things "browsers"

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

#142

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 9:04 AM UTC

themacguffinman wrote: post #132

peterwwillis wrote: post #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…

I'm skeptical the Egyptians simply "forgot" how to build giant pyramids (especially as pyramid construction seems to be well-documented today). It seems more likely that the age of pharoahs ended and giant pyramid construction was no longer an important skill. Technology hadn't "degraded", it had adapted. Just like we didn't forget how to build lunar vehicles, we just decided that it wasn't worth it in its current st…

Those two views are equivalent - humans don't forget technology; what was once invented can be reinvented (the more of the old invention remains, the cheaper it is to reinvent it). So it's always about incentives. But GP (and Elon) has a point here.

Infrastructure projects are important and what enables society to grow. Moon landings were plain awesome and had important effects on both the zeitgeist and growth of technology. That we're not incentivized to grow, or even maintain them, says a lot about us, and not much of it good.

And I do think GP is right when they say: "instead of trying to improve people's lives, we're just making things needlessly complex, buggy, and bloaty." Any actual improvement to people's lives that falls off this process on the web is incidental. The conclusions you say we've reached, like "RAM is cheaper than developers, a slower platform with a bigger audience is worth dealing with over multiple native platforms" are not conclusions. They're excuses. Excused for doing shitty engineering in order to get to the market first. And anyone trying to do the things the right way moves too slow to keep up with the hype train.

Ultimately, the complaints about the way technology develops today stem from this: some people see the suboptimal solutions created by our incentive structures, and also notice there are much better solutions available only a small step from the path we're on - solutions we could reach if only we could relax the market pressures a little bit. This is true as much for the web (e.g. for interoperability issues and bloat issues) as it is for transportation (where electric cars finally got viable after one player basically started to shove a product into peoples' throats until the market forces gave up and accepted it).

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

#143

Post by alanfranzoni » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 9:04 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #130

alanfranzoni wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most probably the github repo will be suspended, even though it's self hosted, I think. And you still need to account for upstream changes.

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

#144

Post by SyneRyder » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 9:07 AM UTC

incompatible wrote: post #72

hellbanner wrote: post #55

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.

If something is unfairly downvoted, wait a while and someone else will usually upvote it again.

But it's also worth remembering they're just internet points, there's no real value. Keep contributing good stuff & you'll eventually get past the 500 karma mark. After that it's just a vanity number.

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

#145

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 9:12 AM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #103

cookiecaper wrote: post #34

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…

> 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 policies of various content providers. 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 th…

> 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.

TPB and BitTorrent helps move files. Sci-Hub helps move a particular type of files (scientific papers). So maybe we need a TPB/BitTorrent for data streams? Some way of moving around generalized access to and results from APIs of server platforms?

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

#146

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 9:25 AM UTC

alanfranzoni wrote: post #143

TeMPOraL wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most probably the github repo will be suspended, even though it's self hosted, I think. And you still need to account for upstream changes.

Forget Github. It might be just a regular git repo on someone's server. IANAL, but could companies really go against a person hosting the source code of a software that scraps a website?

Even if, that's probably solvable (by turning it into cat-and-mouse game, TPB/SciHub-style). Have a non-turing-complete set of conversion rules that do scrapping -> standardized-data-format via a general-purpose scrapper. Distribute those through P2P. There might be problems with malicious actors, but generally this should be possible to implement in a way that's mostly transparent for end users.

> And you still need to account for upstream changes.

Upstream changes will never be too extreme to handle manually, if we're talking scrapping solutions - because any such extreme changes would also piss off the regular browser users.

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

#147

Post by r721 » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 9:31 AM UTC

plaguuuuuu wrote: post #13

chongli wrote: 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.

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.

>That's why HN is great (and other small communities)

SimilarWeb says HN gets approximately 20M visits a month:

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

#148

Post by CM30 » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 9:36 AM UTC

chongli wrote: post #40

plaguuuuuu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It happened a lot before Reddit too. Forums always used to have this cycle of starting out appealing to more mature audiences before getting flooded with casual users and spammers and many people then moving elsewhere.

Heck, in the world of webmaster forums, the ease in which they got filled with spammers and low quality content meant that the same people usually ended up being members of dozens of different forums and moving to a new site every month or two.

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

#149

Post by callumlocke » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 9:38 AM UTC

losteric wrote: post #66

cyphunk wrote: post #45

Did we get to this point of fragmentation due to smart phones and their walled garden philosophy? People stopped making applications for the sake of interoperability. ... if RealAudio™ was founded today it'd be king. Or is facebook to blame? John Gilmore famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- he was wrong, censorship just has to wait for the right monopoly to appear. And with…

Amazon and Facebook, to me, are symptoms of a deeper problem: Technology is still hard. We're building complex large-scale products because the non-technical consumers can't use the simple small-scale products. We're here because it's convenient, not because it's good. I always felt that Google should have created simple tools for web publishing and creating personal walled-gardens - make the web personal for 7 billi…

> Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo.

I guess Wordpress is an example. It's got a hosted plan, which requires little more computer literacy than Facebook, and you can also leave at any time and self-host the software, which keeps the hosted offering honest. But it's just not as contagious as something like Facebook. That's the problem, Facebook isn't just more 'convenient' than self-hosted tools, it also has your friends tagging you in photos.

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

#150

Post by ueroc » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 9:38 AM UTC

tux1968 wrote: post #35

ueroc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd argue it was only "meh" in the same way the average verbal conversation is to a dispassionate listener. For those now able to exchange ideas on a favorite topic with people who were previously inaccessible, it was great. And not because it was emerging, but for the experience and capability itself.

I'd still argue that those experiences and that capability had 'merit' because it was emerging. If you go and try and manufacture hardware in China you can have those same meaningful mundane conversations. Because that's something emerging so there's scarcity of information, everyone is to some extent a beginner and there's therefor incentive to share information. So I don't think it's the people or the conversations, but the environment.