something definitely went wrong, imo. when that pizzahut website link was posted a few days ago, i felt nostalgic about old web pages. most of them were about favorite topics, shows, hobbies and links! friends (the show) had thousands of fan made websites. websites linked to other websites with similar interest. now it's all about "us" and "me". we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks…
Your posting this on a website that is pretty much exclusively links to other websites, "hey I made this" stuff, and people talking about their hobbies. I think it went /okay/.
The last two items in your list were already a thing on usenet.
"You should be able to clearly articulate your preferred privacy policy and reject websites that don’t meet your standards." It occurs to me that this could be a rough description of ad blocking extensions, although rather like the Aldous Huxley quote about means determining ends, ad blockers are the result of an adversarial relationship rather than a consensual one.
Not exactly in my opinion. My understanding of the passage is that he wants to block the entire website outright. So not, "Look at reddit, but block ads." Rather it would be, "Block reddit." Curiously, blocking the entire website outright due to incompatible privacy policies is a solution I never really even considered? It certainly changes the dynamic game theoretically speaking. I wonder what the internet would be…
I kinda recall there being some options in old browsers (>10 years ago) where websites could send their privacy policy as a blob in the http header and the browser would enable/disable content based on pre-defined user options. However I can't recall the name of this and a quick search isn't showing me anything that rings a bell.
It didn't go wrong. It went very well. It didn't turn into the idealized vision that the author apparently had for it, but that's not unusual.
something definitely went wrong, imo. when that pizzahut website link was posted a few days ago, i felt nostalgic about old web pages. most of them were about favorite topics, shows, hobbies and links! friends (the show) had thousands of fan made websites. websites linked to other websites with similar interest. now it's all about "us" and "me". we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks…
I always find it interesting that different people view the golden age of the internet as happening at a different time.
Some say the 2000s. For me it was the late 90s. For others, "eternal september" marked the end of the golden age - 1993. And I'm sure the current crop of children will say it was the 2010s.
I think the only common thread here is that the internet changes. And people don't like change. What is new is bad, what was old was good.
However, we could also call this a dedicated bookmarking app with discussion threads appended to it. This is certainly a special case (and also somewhat of an endangered species.) For "normal" websites, there are only few left that consider themselves as part of a bigger web, in which they are constituting yet another node (trying to make this web as a whole worthwhile).
Sure. And you could find a name like that for pretty much every website in existence in the 90's. I strongly disagree that it's a special case, and I strongly disagree that there are only few websites left that feel like part of a bigger something. I think you are romanticizing the past (as most people do with most things they remember from their youth - remember when kids' TV shows were actually good?).
There's definitely a difference. In what may appear here as "the good old days", authors usually showed their authority on a subject by frequently linking to other sources they would consider interesting in context, thus contributing to knitting the web. (Edit: It was this very phenomenon, which provided the base for the Page rank.) Personally, I see this rarely nowadays. Also, the entire idea of adding "something amazing" to the web, another sight to see and visit, has become a rare affair. Surfing is somewhat a thing of the past.
What do you guys think about a kickstarter to raise enough money to buy Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc and shut it down for everyone's benefit?
I think I would probably be making a Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc competitor that night. They exist because people want them to exist, even though they have some bad parts. It's much more effective to work to make them better than to just throw them out.
What do you guys think about a kickstarter to raise enough money to buy Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc and shut it down for everyone's benefit?
It's a great idea, but I suggest using IndieGoGo and set up the campaign to keep the money for the unlikely event if the campaign fails. Alternatively as a stretch goal add Medium to the bucket too.
We're marking the 50th anniversary at King's College London with an evening of critical reflections by the Department of Digital Humanities, next Wednesday 6 November. Open to all!
> websites should provide a privacy policy customized to you, something they should be able to do since they already customize the ads you see. Websites should also be required to take responsibility for any violations and abuses of privacy that result from their services These sorts of policies will completely annihilate small sites. Only large corporations and institutions with their own legal teams will have websi…