What 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.
A quick search finds at least two GNUS backends for reddit.
Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
171–180 of 241 posts
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#172Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#173I think this is related to monetization, since the web gets "louder" to attract advertising consumers. Most companies are actually advertising companies and the users are just part of the product (sold to advertisers). Maybe we need more paid services - and the will to pay.
I'm thinking about creating a hierarchical forum like the usenet, but I'm sceptical whether this would earn enough money to work in the long run.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was possible to use and create trillian. Now I need to have slack, Hangouts and WhatsApp web open independently
It kinda is possible. You can use Franz: http://meetfranz.com
Would trust this service, if I could read the source. I don't know what the plan with MeetFranz is, but since it isn't open source, something tells me that there at some point will be monetization involved. Monetization isn't bad, but it also will at some point cause misalignment between it and the users.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The question is whether we're fetching this off of the same APIs i.e. Twitter themselves are using, or if we're scraping it from server-side rendered sites.
If we're attemtping to do it via their open APIs we're going to be hitting rate-limits, and probably also face liability.
What if there was some service that you could run on different computers, that each had their Twitter API tokens, and then we'd distribute the requests to different hosts, so that it could not be tracked.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#176> 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?
Perhaps some form of decentralized hosting to offload the costly aspect of hosting an online community to its members? The percentage of people with access to ample broadband connections at home is increasing constantly, and bittorrent proved that distributing large amounts of data amongst peers can be done without centralized hosting. It would be pretty neat if everyone could simply buy or configure some low-power h…
This has been tried in various forms, and always fails for a few reasons:
- Spam. When the cost of bandwidth goes to zero, the most useless freeloaders are enabled with no negative consequences for their pollution.
- Media storage. There is a huge demand for storage of (pirated) movies, tv, music or video games, which sucks up the vast bulk of volume. Entertainment needs monopolize communication resources to the detriment of knowledge preservation and freedom of expression.
- Legal and other liability. Aside from the piracy, there's child porn, private information, politically sensitive topics, etc. Society wants an accountability mechanism and will destroy or discredit platforms that lack it.
Commercial silos tend to address all three. Social media in particular is effective at #1 by leveraging the social graph as a filtering and reputation system. Which means once people are invested in their profile or channel, you can wield it as leverage to ensure compliance with #2 or #3.
There are still huge pieces missing to do this in a decentralized and federated way. For starters, a reputation and identity system that is not fully public and transitive. And also, a return to the willingness to tolerate violations of #2 and #3 on a local scale for the sake of intellectual freedom, which the contemporary web sorely lacks.
Email isn't even an exception. Becoming a reputable sender is hard, the data volume is still limited, and the privacy protection is laughable in the wild.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#177"There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilivy, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
Anonymous publisher, as quoted by Hamilton Holt, Commercialism and Journalism, 1909.
https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#178Earlier 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…
I believe "cool kids" is primarily used as sarcasm.
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#179As 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…
> ICQ and others were like today's WhatsApp and hangout.
That's why they were awful. When they died or stopped being popular you lost all your contacts and had to start from scratch somewhere else. With open protocols you don't have that issue at all.
> As much as I really liked using IRC back in the day
You don't have to speak in channels to make use of IRC. I use it for private chats (I know it's not "private", but that's better for me than using any proprietary client and IRC has clients on every platform).
Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
#180As 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…
> ICQ and others were like today's WhatsApp and hangout. That's why they were awful. When they died or stopped being popular you lost all your contacts and had to start from scratch somewhere else. With open protocols you don't have that issue at all. > As much as I really liked using IRC back in the day You don't have to speak in channels to make use of IRC. I use it for private chats (I know it's not "private", but…
The other problem with IRC is that it's not very user friendly: there are many different networks, which implement different rules. Your IP may be banned for some reason. People can steal your nickname, etc.
While this is totally fine for internet-savvy people, I can see why regular people who just want to chat turn to alternatives.