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I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

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Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#81

Post by robotresearcher »

itchynosedev wrote: post #67
tluyben2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is important to curate it, but I applaud the idea. I would say; only allow people with over a certain karma score on HN (>1000)? That way you benefit from the quite strict moderation here. But indeed I remember the days on vBulletin forums; all my remarks against ‘you cannot make friends over 30’ that I uttered here come from there: most my current friends and one of my best friends I met on forums. It jus…

Now it sounds more like an elitist club. Weren’t most of forums free for all?

Free for a heavily selected group of people with internet access and specialist knowledge of how to find stuff. So: elitist in a sense of resources weighted by interest.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#82

Post by tluyben2 »

itchynosedev wrote: post #67
tluyben2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is important to curate it, but I applaud the idea. I would say; only allow people with over a certain karma score on HN (>1000)? That way you benefit from the quite strict moderation here. But indeed I remember the days on vBulletin forums; all my remarks against ‘you cannot make friends over 30’ that I uttered here come from there: most my current friends and one of my best friends I met on forums. It jus…

Now it sounds more like an elitist club. Weren’t most of forums free for all?

Yes, but there were only a few people around and they were tech savvy and often entrepreneural especially in tech forums... Now when a forum gets any sort of uptake, it is jumped on by marketers and other spammers. So elitist, I guess but it was automatically back then I guess.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#83

Post by nanomonkey »

slagfart wrote: post #20
nanomonkey wrote: post #14

The author hasn't come across the decentralized web (ie scuttlebutt or dat). That's where I've found all the personalized interesting content.

pls help me get online, nerd Seriouspost: Agree with all that’s been said. Corporations have turned the web into an unpalatable wasteland. The prospect of someone finding out my name and job has taken all the joy out of calling someone a fuckhead online. I want to find it again. I will start searching, but the good communities I’ve found have been invite only.

Scuttlebutt is as anonymous as you make it. That being said, people tend to not tolerate insensitive name calling much, and will likely block your feed from being replicated by their client, if they find your contributions annoying. But that's sort of the point of taking back distribution, you get to pay attention to what you find worthwhile.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#84

Post by hitchhiker999 »

Great! We're all old here it seems (I'm 42), a few of us joined back in the 90s...

It started as a great human experiment, such fun. It became co-opted by commercial enterprise. The two largest gateways into the experience are now Google and Facebook. Really, what did we expect would happen? Probably best to take it back now.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#85

Post by gaius »

foolofatom wrote: post #13

I think the internet is less fun now -- I can't decide if its from maturation of technology or maturation of people though. (Has anyone else felt like things became less fun as they got older?) I felt a greater sense of community 10 years ago when I mostly used IRC and PHP BBs. The communities were smaller, and it was fun even if you disliked people. Flame wars and trolling were mostly for the audience's amusement, b…

maturation of people

If anything it’s the opposite. The old golden rule used to be “what goes online stays online”. Now people call the police if they are “offended”.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#86

Post by dchuk »

dchuk wrote: post #27
foolofatom wrote: post #13

I think the internet is less fun now -- I can't decide if its from maturation of technology or maturation of people though. (Has anyone else felt like things became less fun as they got older?) I felt a greater sense of community 10 years ago when I mostly used IRC and PHP BBs. The communities were smaller, and it was fun even if you disliked people. Flame wars and trolling were mostly for the audience's amusement, b…

I’ve actually been thinking about this recently, as I was also a heavy forum user back in the day. Why don’t we just start a forum for the HN crowd? Not a new interpretation of the forum model or anything like that, literally any instance of vbulletin or phpbb or something comparable and “traditional”. If people are genuinely interested in this, I would be up for spinning something up over the weekend.

Update: Spent the evening researching software options for the "old school" style forums, and it seems like Xenforo is a solid choice in terms of active development, lots of addons/themes, and not crazy expensive. So I think I'll snag a license and put it on a droplet later this week when my wife is out for the evening :)

Also think I found a good domain for it that I'll snag tonight as well.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#87

Post by whatshisface »

nanomonkey wrote: post #77
wakkaflokka wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand a bit more on this? How do you find content on these decentralized services?

Scuttlebutt is a gossip protocol, so you are essentially connected to content through friends of friends. I started by downloading Patchwork, one of SSB's clients, and going to local hackerspaces and following whomever was on the network. After that I could branch out and find other people that seemed interesting. After awhile you're pretty much connected to the whole ecosystem and you have to start pruning connectio…

So, out of the box you are only going to have the kind of people on the network that go to hackerspaces, and they will only post the kinds of things that they would like the people that met them at a hackerspace to see?

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#88

Post by ravloony »

eitland wrote: post #69
organsnyder wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use Discourse. It's not only the most advanced from a tech perspective, but it also aims to promote strong communities.

Am I the only one who is totally confused by discourse? Maybe it's because rhe demo instance was reset way to often or something but I've never really seen a really working discourse instance. (I think both Mozilla and Canonical (has?) run one but they weren't to active either IIRC. Anyone has examples of a working discourse community?

I think https://purescript-users.ml is running on Discourse. It's quite young though.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#89

Post by susam »

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is still around and that's one of the few places on the Internet where I still see tightly knit communities with old Internet buddies from the early 2000s. I am quite happy that IRC is less popular than the world wide web. As a consequence of it being less popular, it has not become riddled with ads, political influence, and addictive content popping up every few minutes, like the web has become. Some IRC channels can be unusually quiet with nothing more than phatic expressions exchanged occasionally for days before any engaging conversation comes up. Yet these channels maintain a tight sense of community.

Among some of the active channels I have found due to my interests, I find the Freenode ##python and ##math to be very good quality channels. There is a #not-math channel which is good fun. Then there is #not-not-math too. I have been an operator of the ##algorithms channel for over 10 years now, and although I participate rarely in this channel these days, the channel continues to have good quality discussions by other operators and members of the channel. By the way, my nick is "spal" on Freenode.

These days, there are web gateways to IRC, that make it easy to connect to IRC networks without having to install a new client. For example, there is https://webchat.freenode.net/ which is a bland but decent interface to connect to the Freenode IRC network. Note that the "unaffiliated" cloaks are not honoured while connecting via the web gateway. Using a proper IRC client like WeeChat or HexChat provides a better experience than the web gateway. Pidgin supports IRC too.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#90

Post by Terr_ »

y2bd wrote: post #61
gkoberger wrote: post #44

I think a lot of people here are missing the point. Yeah, there's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel like a community... it feels more like watching reruns on TBS. I remember making actual friends on message boards. Friends I eventually met in the real world. I don't think relationships like that are really formed anymore. Most of social media now is a broadcast, not a conversation. People (m…

This is pretty much how I felt as a long-time TF2 player super excited for Overwatch to come out, and then very sad once I realized what kind of game it was. You grab your friends and play Overwatch, while you play TF2 and meet your friends. And also a parallel, TF2 obviously still exists, but all of the servers I used to play on are gone now. Haven’t found anything else quite yet. FFXIV actually was super enjoyable…

I think the key distinction is the concept of "place".

TF2 has (or had) a concept of "place" in the form of named servers. That made it possible to encounter the same stranger repeatedly over time.

In contrast, Overwatch wants you to already know and specify your friends into their social-media graph and group up before going to a random/anonymous/ephemeral location. So you seldom knowingly encounter the same stranger twice.

> FFXIV

Thinking about an MMO, a "placeless" MMO would randomly assign you to a one of a great many small instances every time you log in. Eugh.

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