181–190 of 241 posts
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…
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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…
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> 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.
If anyone is wondering, Usenet is still alive.
How do you connect these days? My ISP doesn't bother running a server anymore.
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Well, at least it's sort of not dead.
I just reposted this article to comp.misc, where we've been keeping up a parallel discussion for years. Usenet doesn't have the sheer numbers it used to, but anyone still there is there because we love it. Usenet's flaws remain unmended, but its strengths remain unfettered. :)
> Can't mark things as read
> ...
> it could resurface at any time
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…
Back in the day, I posted to newsgroups via Mixmaster remailers :) Now one can use VPNs and Tor.
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.
I don't think that's all of it. The Internet used to be these networks that we could, through tools, arrange to be around us. We'd have our e-mail network and our Usenet network and our IRC network, and we have ways to view all those things that aggregated among different e-mail servers and different USENET groups and different IRC channels, and gave us a view around How We We Engaging With The Content (e-mail for on…
Even assuming there were adequate mindshare to develop and maintain such an effort-- let's even just pick a modern day USENET-- how are you going to pay the bills?
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.
Looks like a quip/discourse clone from a 10 second look. Not sure why another product offering relatively the same service solves anything.
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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…
See Hannah Arendt's "The Crisis in Culture" (by way of ... Reddit):
https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/50umjw/hannah_a...
http://www.celinecondorelli.edu/files/arendtcrisisinculture_...
There's the "evaporative cooling effect":
http://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumble...
I see these as mechanisms based on Gresham's Law, though that's based on a longer argument.
