Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Internet I Knew (2014)

flowerhack.dreamwidth.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 122 posts

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#31

Post by pipio21 »

ukulele wrote: post #30
lyra_comms wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely hearbreaking to see the independence, critical thinking and self-determination that Western society has been building up since the Enlightenment, weakening under the forces of big data and targeted advertising. Communication should be open, profit should not be involved in discourse, and advertising should not corrode conversation. Viva la revolucion! www.hellolyra.com/introduction

> advertising should not corrode conversation. You really followed this with a link to your website?

Why downvoting you for stating the obvious contradiction?

We humans apply double standards for others and for us.

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#32

Post by username223 »

waytogo wrote: post #8

OT: I don't get social networks. Till today, I don't see any value in real name social networks like Facebook. They should present content I want but they don't, they show upvoted content from my connections which is wrong from a consumer and entertainment perspective. My friends like or share mostly content of people because those people are kind of high-profile in their circles. Not because they post good content.…

Thankfully, RSS lives on. I follow 40-50 feeds using a native app, and pay a few bucks a month to host an ad-free blog that offers its own feed. My blog software even automatically posts links to Facebook for the weirdos who try to follow it there. I'm not sure how well that works, though, since I refuse to pay to "boost" those links.

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#33

Post by 60654 »

lyra_comms wrote: post #27
nofilter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why does all the free and open stuff look so bad. I mean seriously, Lyra is in dire need for someone with a UX/UI background to join their team.

As a nonprofit, we operate on grants and revenue alone, not investment. We'd love to hear some specific feedback on what you think could be improved about our UI :) We also think we're not doing too badly compared to Reddit and Hacker News!

Not the parent, but I have two specific suggestions about the on boarding process.

One, please add a directory (feed?) of public conversations that can be viewed without logging in. I want to see how the platform is used by other people and whether that fits me - but if you ask me to create an account first, I'm going to bounce.

Two, here on HN you say the team is mostly cog sci and engg people, which sounds awesome and piques my curiosity about why you made this. But the web site itself doesn't mention that, or anything about the people behind it. Please add an 'about the team' page so that I can understand more about the people who are inviting me to use their platform.

Hope this helps!

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#34

Post by watwut »

lyra_comms wrote: post #16
agentultra wrote: post #13

I recall being a bit confused about the terms, "social web," and "social network" when they were beginning to be bandied about to discuss Flickr and Facebook et al. The Internet was already a social network. You had irc, nntp, http, ftp, etc etc... communication protocols. For communicating with other humans. The only thing Facebook did, in my experience, was make the web anti-social . I distinctly recall when my gro…

It's absolutely hearbreaking to see the independence, critical thinking and self-determination that Western society has been building up since the Enlightenment, weakening under the forces of big data and targeted advertising. Communication should be open, profit should not be involved in discourse, and advertising should not corrode conversation. Viva la revolucion! www.hellolyra.com/introduction

The period since Enlightenment in West contains two world wars, genocide, nationalists movements, monarchy keeping in power through censorship, revolutionary attempts, KKK ... All of them totally full of critical thinking and self-determination for sure.

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#35

Post by en-us »

You don't have to use corporate sites like Facebook and Pinterest. Check out scuttlebutt.nz for a serverless alternative, or Mastodon for one where anybody can host a server. Or just stick to forums and IRC.

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#36

Post by pault »

dijit wrote: post #23
nimbius wrote: post #11

call me nostalgic, but i refuse to let go of that internet. There are plenty of alternatives that dont get a multi billion dollar TV ad blitz, and theyre worth checking out https://freenode.net for a classic IRC experience, free of charge. https://mastodon.social/about for a distributed open source twitter-like experience https://diasporafoundation.org/ for an alternative to facebook that respects your privacy.

I maintain to this day a personal IRC network. Many of us have been “together” for over a decade. In fact I just tried to advocate self-hosted communities at CCC. So I’m also stuck in the past and refuse to let the internet go. But I have two points I’d like to mention. 1) Forums are dead for almost all but the biggest communities that surround a product of some kind. Social forums are simply dead. 2) As an IRC-user…

Spam is the reason Facebook is currently the easiest way to get in touch with someone. Otherwise you could just put your email address in a publicly searchable database. It seems like we need a service that provides the verification and permission based communication model of Facebook but without the public feeds, virtue signaling, and political garbage.

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#38

Post by amelius »

agentultra wrote: post #13

I recall being a bit confused about the terms, "social web," and "social network" when they were beginning to be bandied about to discuss Flickr and Facebook et al. The Internet was already a social network. You had irc, nntp, http, ftp, etc etc... communication protocols. For communicating with other humans. The only thing Facebook did, in my experience, was make the web anti-social . I distinctly recall when my gro…

> Most of these web services made quite a lot of interesting innovations and such but I can't help but wonder what the web would've been like if we'd stayed true to its roots and improved the protocols and infrastructure instead of centralizing everything behind walled gardens.

In my view, we should let academia develop the protocols, and let companies deliver the basic tools (such as hardware). This makes sure that innovation happens in a way that people find useful (not serving advertisement/shareholder goals), and also keeps data out of the hands of companies (because universities will develop federated protocols to keep data safe, and companies actually have no business looking into our data).

This would be a quite bit like how the internet worked in the old days (with universities and government agencies running the internet, and companies providing the hardware).

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#39

Post by reificator »

lyra_comms wrote: post #16
agentultra wrote: post #13

I recall being a bit confused about the terms, "social web," and "social network" when they were beginning to be bandied about to discuss Flickr and Facebook et al. The Internet was already a social network. You had irc, nntp, http, ftp, etc etc... communication protocols. For communicating with other humans. The only thing Facebook did, in my experience, was make the web anti-social . I distinctly recall when my gro…

It's absolutely hearbreaking to see the independence, critical thinking and self-determination that Western society has been building up since the Enlightenment, weakening under the forces of big data and targeted advertising. Communication should be open, profit should not be involved in discourse, and advertising should not corrode conversation. Viva la revolucion! www.hellolyra.com/introduction

> advertising should not corrode conversation.

> Viva la revolucion!

> www.hellolyra.com/introduction

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#40

Post by nerdponx »

waytogo wrote: post #15
nerdponx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, you missed out on the brief time in history when they did exactly what you were asking for. MySpace had no likes and no algorithm to filter your activity. Neither did Facebook for several years, nor did LiveJournal (and all the other social blogging platforms), or even Instagram at first.

> they did exactly what you were asking for No, MySpace and Facebook didn't what I was asking for because they didn't have any feed then. With MySpace and Facebook in its early days, I could just stalk profiles and both didn't serve me any content based on my interest. On MySpace I could browse through some music genres but this is not my understanding of an interest-driven site.

That's what Myspace bulletins were. Your friends posted a bulletin, and you saw it. End of story.

Likewise with Facebook when they first introduced the newsfeed. It was literally just a feed of recent activity as far as I remember.

Post reply on HN