Live data from Hacker News

Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

franzoni.eu

161–170 of 241 posts

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

#161
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…

Have a go with Lyra (hellolyra.com), it's designed to be an efficient use of your time rather than a sink for time, trolling and harrassment.

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

#162

We are working to restore the openness of online discussion with Lyra: www.hellolyra.com. We aim to provide helpful services for conversation, not to get users addicted. We have made the choice to focus around people and conversations rather than topics (because Lyra is designed to be harrassment-proof, and topics lead easily to harrassment - you don't see this so much in the tech world but in the mainstream it's a h…

Just some thoughts: putting the full message in the discussion tree means that people will tend to write shorter / comment-like messages, and not in-depth argumentations.

On the other end, having only a tree of authors is a bit to slim, cause you have to read the content of each message to know what's going on. I think people who reply to a thread should give it a "reply title". You know it's the same thread, but you can have an idea of the content with the reply title.

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

#163

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.

Against the TOS does not make something illegal.

Not yet - but people seem to confuse legislators and corporations more and more frequently...

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Against the TOS does not make something illegal.

Not yet - but people seem to confuse legislators and corporations more and more frequently...

Clink or Hoosegow?

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Begs the question: what are the best moderation systems in software? Are there any?

I always thought slashdot had a pretty good moderation system. Would in most cases separate the wheat from the chaff leading to excellent comment threads

Yeah meta-moderation, limited mod points and a secret algorithm for earning mod points based on reputation works pretty well. Oh.. and a maximum score for comments.

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

#166
post #153

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

Out of curiosity, could you explain what you mean by more Reddit style comments? Because I don't think I've seen too many low effort comments here recently, or at least not much more than there were in the past. And while political threads get a bit out of control, my experience there is that the most volatile, disruptive posts tend to get downvoted to hell before they can cause too much of an issue. So even if a cer…

Example of "Reddit style comments" would be low effort jokes. Some subreddits are addressing this by using a convention where you can mark submissions with a "[serious]" tag, forbidding such replies (if there are any, they will usually be removed by the subreddit's moderators).

On HN, quite a few of them seem to get heavily downvoted (sometimes enough to mark them as dead, meaning you won't see them unless you explicitly opt in to see them).

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

#167
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…

I think a lot of the nostalgia is a result of being uncomfortable dealing with people now being the "insiders" rather than the users. It's much easier to call out the new generation of users or large companies and praise old things than actually creating something relevant for today.

I've played around with creating a relevant version of things like usenet, but at the end of the day it wasn't something I wanted to work on. A large part of the work is correcting for flaws of the Internet that most "hackers" won't recognize. And while you could certainly overcome those problems, I don't think the end result would be worth it. Much of the "hacker crowd" these days aren't, in my opinion, motivated by naive curiosity and shallow idealism (like it used to be), but forced nativity to further their own interests and a opinionated demeanor. That's why many of these alternative services don't work out. Because they aren't motivated by creating something that is nice to use, but to satisfy the convoluted criteria of the creators.

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

#168
post #18

And apparently there are now state-sponsored sources of noise. Wasn't there an RFC finalized recently for a site-independent comment system?

Do you remember anything about the name of this? I am very interested in contributing!

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

#169
The internet era our author mentions was not dominated by companies whose investors measure success by "engagement" -- that is, by wasting our time.

FB and Twitter measure success by engagement. That means they don't have the incentive to organize our information and save us time.

(Gotta go... Hacker News is about to tell me to get back to work!)

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

#170

I am excited at the proliferation of Mastodon servers. Every cohesive tribe that can afford a $15/month VPS should set one up and ditch Facebook.

Maybe that'd help ditch Twitter, but not Facebook. There needs to be a better (de-centralized) solution for writing that's longer that also provides the ability to add photos, videos, etc. The substitute for Facebook should be like Facebook in almost every way in terms of features to get better adoption, with improvements in several areas where Facebook is weaker.
Post reply on HN