I Miss the Old Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#91

Post by Aeolun » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 11:56 PM UTC

faissaloo wrote: post #69

buboard wrote: post #4

We don't have to "miss it". Let's just share it. There are many corners of the internet away from the spotlights. Let's just share some links, what are they ?

I created https://ratwires.space (nsfw) a crazy little javascriptless anonymous textboard with text effects that only permits 255 posts to exist at any one time and where replies eventually becomes threads in and of themselves. People often share links to various other small sites there so it's turned out to be great for (re)discovering the undernet.

It’s actually impressive. I guess it’s even possible a lot of it is internal jargon that I just do not understand.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#93

Post by in3d » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 12:02 AM UTC

skyyler wrote: post #25

ars wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reddit is 75% teenagers. You might get human thoughts, but you won't find high quality ones unless you filter carefully. (Teenagers, and yes I was one and I remember, usually have an inflated sense of their own abilities and knowledge, and they write that way.) What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Or at least highly targeted forums, where people spend years curating relationships, and shari…

Did those forums go away? Or are new ones not being made?

Unfortunately they are less popular but they didn’t go away. They offer more features than Reddit and have more real communities and discussions. Add “forum” or similar to to your searches.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#94

Post by kickscondor » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 12:03 AM UTC

I keep a modern directory to the 'old' Internet at http://href.cool.

I also track what's happening on blogs and wikis at http://www.kickscondor.com.

There is a whole lot of great stuff going on, regardless of how popular it is. (I kind of think it's great that it's not.)

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#95

Post by function_seven » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 12:05 AM UTC

daseiner1 wrote: post #92

function_seven wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately that redirects to Reddit's own search engine, which is often worthless for what I'm looking for. For example, if I'm looking for a comment that refers to my lat 2014 model of some widget, Reddit's search will fail to find it, and try to show me subreddits instead that are tangentially related to what I'm looking for. Still a good tip, don't get me wrong. But I find that asking the search engine to do th…

prepending site:reddit.com or site:reddit.com/r/ to your search works even better IME

Heh. That’s what I do. I just didn’t remember!

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#96

Post by bbanyc » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 12:06 AM UTC

Back in the day, your ISP would give you an email address, a login on their Usenet server, and a few megs of free web space under "~username". That was part of the standard package.

Nowadays it easily could be, but since approximately everybody only uses the internet for Facebook and Gmail, it became too much of a hassle (and a legal liability) to provide.

The old "free" hosting services injected all kinds of obnoxious ads - banners, watermarks, pop-ups, pop-unders, Flash. Still worth it for kids who couldn't afford to set up a "real" website. Now there aren't a lot of options like that anymore. You want a website? Pay for it.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#97

Post by inferiorhuman » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 12:09 AM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #30

notJim wrote: post #5

I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.) I think the old internet w…

Do you not find Reddit to be a bit of a cesspool? I tend to avoid it for that reason, but how true it is probably depends on which subreddit(s) we're talking about.

Do you not find Reddit to be a bit of a cesspool?

More than a bit, and quite frankly there's plenty of advertising masquerading as earnest content. Unfortunately it's also got a lot of useful, user-generated content.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#98

Post by snaky » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 12:09 AM UTC

notJim wrote: post #5

I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.) I think the old internet w…

Web forums are really big part of modern Internet, reddit is just the one of them.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#99

Post by hnuser77 » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 12:09 AM UTC

x2f10 wrote: post #9

buboard wrote: post #4

We don't have to "miss it". Let's just share it. There are many corners of the internet away from the spotlights. Let's just share some links, what are they ?

I find people don't want to share these. I can understand to a degree as I've seen good communities go to hell once the "normies" show up.

This is the "dark forest" theory of the current internet, ironically posted on Medium [1]. You can put up registration barriers and such, but even being world-readable can attract negative attention. It's getting to the point where you have to "know people" to find cool stuff online.

[1] https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#100

Post by kamfc » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 12:11 AM UTC

I miss Diablo II.