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I Miss the Old Internet

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291–300 of 317 posts

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#291
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any way around this? Surely i don't need an industrial setup to scale my home website

You don't, the reality is it's extremely unlikely this happens and if it does the worst outcome is high bandwidth use + the image doesn't load for everyone. Hardly the end of the world. You can very easily host things on a paid server though, which these days cost very little, use another image host or S3/similar when if things went crazy popular.

> worst outcome is high bandwidth use + the image doesn't load for everyone. Hardly the end of the world.

No, the worst outcome is that your home internet connection is being effectively DDoSed.

You could probably apply some QoS on your router to minimize the effect, of course.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#293

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…

Neocities[1] and tilde servers like tilde.town[2] is a pretty large hub of old-internet sites. It's a free Geocities-like host that's home to a lot of neat, creative sites.

You can also get a VPS for about $5/mo and have your own self-hosted server with whatever servers and web apps you want, like an RSS reader, an IRC client, FTP/Gopher server, etc. (Shameless self plug: this is what I do with my own personal site, https://invisibleup.com)

[1] https://neocities.org [2] https://tilde.town

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#294
post #260

Rose colored glasses. "The old" internet still exists, it's only that there are many orders of magnitude more content available online today than in the old era. The idea that corporate dominance and filtering is hiding content is false, in fact, the opposite is true, today's search engines are better than ever before at finding whatever you're looking for, what has changed is that search habits have become much more…

today's search engines are better than ever before at finding whatever you're looking for IMO this is empathically not true. Not necessarily because Google has gotten worse -- although I will argue that in some ways it has, especially by deleting or ignoring search terms that I explicitely include in my query while freely adding others that are only vaguely connected -- but because people have gotten better at gaming…

The handful of anti-features that google has implemented do not nullify the immense progress in the other direction. There is literally nothing I cannot find on google.com with ease if I know what I am looking for.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spend enough time on 4chan and you'll realize reddit is a safezone kid gloves hug box. And 4chan isn't even that bad in terms of bad or illegal content so that goes to show how relative it all is.

4chan is outright fantastic in some aspects. /g/ is actually quite useful and friendly, especially the DPT (Daily Programming Thread), more-so if you're a beginner. /trv/ (travel) is just good and perfectly slow where you won't feel pressure to keep up with a thread because it will still be there tomorrow. /fit/ has good information and really encapsulates what happens when the internet meets bro-gym culture. Compare…

4ch is honestly great. In many ways, it's so much better than reddit:

- No "ego"-moderation. Mods and janitors are invisible, and seem to do their jobs well. Compare with the constant mod drama (years of the stuff) on various subreddits.

- No "retaliation culture" via downvotes. If you really really hate something someone said, the worst thing you can do to them is just ignore it.

- No identity. Posting with a name gets you shamed into being anonymous pretty quick unless you have a very good reason to do so. This means there are no karma/score/image issues, you just say what you think.

Like you mentioned, /fit/ and /g/ are great boards. /p/ is solid too if you're into that sort of thing.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#296
post #41

> You have to enter the exact name of the website to find it on Google. MayVaneDay is also mirrored on I2P, TOR, and Dat...You have to look really hard for them now, and the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites Without getting into the argument of whether Google deliberately makes these sites hard to find, it doesn't really support the author's thesis that the old Internet was any better…

> The modern Internet is far from perfect, but the diversity and quantity (and arguably, quality) of voices is far better than when the Internet catered mostly to college-age kids and academics, i.e. people with access to free, high-speed Internet portals. Ironically, I could not share this article itself on Facebook, because it apparently violated community guidelines. So yeah...

Ya I noticed that too when I tried to share it. I've been reading through the articles, and even though I am INFP and the author is INTJ, I align very strongly with many of the main points so far.

It's a strange feeling to have (what in my mind is) a very consistent, rational view of reality with all of its beauty and flaws, yet have that considered to be so fringe or even disruptive somehow by society to the point where it is censored.

I actually just posted quite a rant on Facebook about the dangers of censorship and how corporate control can distort the conversation, using links from that site as evidence. It's funny to see the comment count be 6 or whatever and only see 4 comments because the others are blocked. An oversight like that in their code tells me that even Facebook is having a hard time stomaching censorship, so that gives me hope that some enlightenment may come of all this.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pitiful 10mbps, eh? Back in my day... That's your 100K image 10 times a second, or 600 times a minute. You could also just like, run a caching server on a 5$ VPS.

Right, but then you wouldn't be hosting it at home anymore, which is what we were talking about.

The only difference is that your final SSL termination would occur on a host that's better placed to handle the load. Literally everything else could be done on-prem e.g. at home.

Realistically this 'oh no I got hammered by HN' case is something that is irrelevant anyway. If you're really worried about it, don't host large image files, sorted. The "old internet" didn't have that stuff anyway because we were all on slow connections, 100KB took 10+ seconds to load on dialup.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voat is a breeding ground and gathering place for white supremacists. A small selection of the top posts on Voat right now: - "jew politician calls for war on whites" -> http://magaimg.net/img/9f2p.png - "NFL player's wife accuses Dolphins owner of favoring 'Jew buddies'" -> https://www.timesofisrael.com/nfl-players-wife-accuses-dolph... - "Everything's about race. Every single thing is about race. Remember that it's…

What those people really need is to have their opinions challenged by outsiders. That used to happen more on the early internet. Keep in mind that they didn't leave Reddit because they wanted to leave. They left and made Voat because they were banned. Now they don't have to interact with people that have dissenting opinions, and they can ban you if you dissent. Reddit is relieved because their users are no longer exp…

> What those people really need is to have their opinions challenged by outsiders. That used to happen more on the early internet.

This is your opinion, please don't present it as fact.

Feel free to spend your own time deradicalizing white supremacists, but don't insist that the problem is that normal people aren't being welcoming enough to white supremacists.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#299
post #181
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…

Maybe the old internet is still there but hidden behind the 100th search result page. I often times wish search result were ranked by how genuine the page seems to be, measured by the ratio of content over ads. Indeed, the less advertisement on a page and the more likely it is written by an actual human being with something to say. Sadly, I suspect ranking to works exactly the opposite.

I just read in another HN thread about Million Short. Knock off the top 100,1000,10000... sites in your search results

https://millionshort.com/

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am six months into reddit detox. The amount of time I have back is amazing. Only semi social site I read is this one. I have internet down to BBCNews, NHK, Reuters, HN, a few comics, Ars, next platform, the morning paper, Matt Levine and el reg. I am much happier :)

I only user Reddit a few times a month, specific focused subreddits, but find it invaluable for hive mind opinion/debate without product shilling (which is all you get on Google or Youtube). Reddit is great. It reminds me of Usenet back in the day I suppose it can get addictive too, but I haven't found that to be the case for me, not yet anyway. HN on the other hand... :)

The problem with reddit is that you get downvoted simply for going against the hivemind, even if you supply evidence that you are right. It's impossible to have a meaningful conversation on the more popular subreddits, especially on politics.
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