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I Miss the Old Internet

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Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#271

Post by bradlys »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #37
superkuh wrote: post #21

The old internet is still there, it's still growing. It's just covered in a thick layer of corporate shit sites. All you have to do is be the change you want to see. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand. Don't use any javascript frontends. It's a good time. As for finding others, well, HN isn't a bad place to start. Just install an RSS reader client and every time you find yourself enjoying an articl…

> Start hosting your website from home. This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a pitiful 10 mbps. Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home internet gets hugged to death.

I think most isps also block outgoing traffic on port 80 these days. At least, that's the issue me and some friends found when we tried to host websites on our various ISPs.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#272

Post by account42 »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #85
superkuh wrote: post #21

The old internet is still there, it's still growing. It's just covered in a thick layer of corporate shit sites. All you have to do is be the change you want to see. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand. Don't use any javascript frontends. It's a good time. As for finding others, well, HN isn't a bad place to start. Just install an RSS reader client and every time you find yourself enjoying an articl…

So much this. Unfortunately post google reader I never found an rss reader that really clicked with me as much. Part of it is because I followed a mix of text and just pure image sites, and par of it is the sites come and go and I haven’t found new sites. RIP ffffound and the like...

tt-rss works well enough for me as a google reader replacement

Better even since it has plugins to inline some comic strips where the RSS feeds are just links to the pages.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#273

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

pcnix wrote: post #250
AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>postal order >a bank >stand in line at a post office >car insurance quotes >booking flights/hotels >tax return These conveniences you cite of the modern internet all feel like they help the other side of the relationship even more than they help you. Imagine how much the airlines, banks, tax collectors, and insurance companies love the modern internet, making it all the more convenient for you to interact with their…

How does that change anything? The amount of ease of use you get from the internet is not zero-sum; everyone benefits from it. Calling the internet "cable television as a service" is ignoring the incredible reach and user-friendliness of the modern internet, and all the advantages that come from that. Nostalgia is okay, but that doesn't change the fact that the current internet brings a lot more information to a lot…

You could make the same argument about the television remote control as it relates to broadcast TV. There is a popular phrase these days, "progress trap," [0] which I think adequately explains the issues with both today's internet and the remote control.

We have indeed made some advancements in some interesting fields due to the modern UI of the web, but what underlies this is a really heavy-handed plasticity on the infrastructure/architecture fronts. That is what the earlier web lacked, and what made it such a fantastic, democratized resource for information and communication.

The remote control achieved the same thing for broadcast TV - a way to make the format easier to use mindlessly. And what it enabled was channel surfing: building it into the hunter-gatherer human mind that the TV was a universe to be explored, filled with wondrous gifts for the would-be explorer to uncover. But that's a lie merely proposed by the interface - the most common thing to land on during a channel surf is a network advertisement. You will of course land on some shows, too, but the channel surfer is destined to see more than a couple of ads before they are finished with their remote.

Getting the internet away from its keyboard-driven beginnings has led to a similar outcome on the web, and it's plain to see. The advent of touch screens has made this interface/architecture authoritarianism even harder to avoid now that the entire package has been shrunk to the size of one's palm and available at a moment's notice or a passing whim.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_trap

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#274

Post by anon9001 »

lethologica wrote: post #228
anon9001 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Almost all of that makes good sense, and it's pretty clear that optimization kept working so they just kept doing it. I wonder how much farther it will go. You lost me here though: > Hundreds of pages a day that were of absolutely no use to anyone but to Google Do you mean like spam/clickbait blog posts on their own domain? I'm having trouble connecting "producing garbage content" to "increased ranking from g…

Think along the lines of those recipe pages that have 2000 words of backstory that no one cares about but is considered good SEO practice in Googles eyes.

Fascinating. I didn't know that was so significant to Google. That does explain a lot of what we see in the search results though.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#275

Post by PhasmaFelis »

Dissley wrote: post #264
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be interested in https://millionshort.com , a search engine that lets you filter out results from the top 100 to 1,000,000 (your choice) sites. Depending on the search and the number you pick, it'll give you lots of personal websites and small forums. I also just found https://boardreader.com , which searches forums exclusively.

millionshort.com looks promising! I will give it a try. Do you know what engine they use? Google or Bing, or something completly different?

I had to dig for it, but apparently they use "a Microsoft Bing API and some in-house information." https://www.networkworld.com/article/2188911/million-short-s...

I should edit the Wikipedia page; it makes it sound like they rolled their own engine and crawler, which seemed pretty unlikely.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#276

Post by JohnFen »

pfeller wrote: post #191
JohnFen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prefer discord or slack closed discussion channels that cannot even be searched without being part of their closed community ? There's no sharing there. Reddit shares with the rest of the world.

> Do you prefer discord or slack closed discussion channels

My only experience with either of those is Slack, and that was only in relation to a job. So I have no idea if I'd prefer them or not, really.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#277

Post by randcraw »

I think most of the charm of the Old Internet lay in the state of social networking at that time. In 1993-1995, WiReD magazine was ablaze with new fresh ideas and grand possibilities made possible by connecting inquiring minds in creative new ways. Add 20 years and unsurprisingly all those fires have extinguished. Once you've been online for a decade, few unexplored paths remain.

It's like ham radio. There's only so much novelty in talking to random people who just happen to be on-air when you are.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#279

Post by kickscondor »

Mizza wrote: post #234
kickscondor wrote: post #94

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.)

Hey man, I just have to say, I've randomly stumbled onto three(!) of your projects this week and love them all! Keep it up!

Very kind. Thank you for saying hi. Your github has some sweet projects. Love the D&D5 tldr. I need to look over your SoundCloud scraper today - I'm doing the same thing in some code and it'll be good to compare. So thank YOU in advance, Miserlou.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#280

Post by rchaud »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #160
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…

You may be interested in https://millionshort.com , a search engine that lets you filter out results from the top 100 to 1,000,000 (your choice) sites. Depending on the search and the number you pick, it'll give you lots of personal websites and small forums. I also just found https://boardreader.com , which searches forums exclusively.

Yup, I was about to suggest this before noticing that it had already been said.

It is remarkable how many of the top domain that show up on search (amazon, ebay, others) have little or nothing to do with long-tail search terms.

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