Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

buzzfeednews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 310 posts

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#51

Post by samb1729 »

protonimitate wrote: post #27
samb1729 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BuzzFeed News is not BuzzFeed. They've won many journalism awards as you can see on their Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News I do agree that reusing the name must surely do their image significant harm.

Sure, but this article is hardly news. It's hardly even worthy of a tweet. The "old internet" is MySpace and Friendster? Really? "Click share if you think Google and Facebook are bad" pretty much summarizes the contents of the article.

See my response to the sibling comment from mashby.

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#52

Post by shantly »

zozbot234 wrote: post #24
shantly wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we want a (return to the) boom in open-source and paid standards-based solutions, we gotta ban collecting & monetizing user info. Monetized user info & related advertising paying for "free" walled services are keeping those down. We won't see widely-successful standards-based social networks or messaging services until that option is gone. [EDIT] and wide success/adoption matters for those in particular because mu…

The "old" internet was all static or lightly server-rendered pages, that can be developed and hosted at minimal cost today. Back in the day we didn't expect that "everyone" would sign up for whatever niche forum you were hosting, it was enough to have "everyone who's into that niche". These services don't need "monetization", they can be kept up with minimal amounts of crowdfunding, while federating through well-know…

Sure, and those old sorts of forums still exist (well, the ones that didn't get eaten by Reddit and Facebook—OK, so I guess they kinda don't) but if you want the Web as it exists for most people to go back to standards and competing paid & free+libre solutions, I'm pretty sure banning spyvertising is gonna be a necessary, since those are the two main "services" most people use online, other than email (the rest is mostly shopping and reading news-type sites, both of which would also be improved by banning spyvertising).

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#53

Post by agentultra »

Parts of it were good but there was a tonne of bad stuff too. Entire sites devoted to content that is beyond indecent that were completely open. Networks of sites devoted to exploiting young people. Nothing has entirely changed in that realm except that such sites are more rare. There was a whole cottage industry of software dedicated to making using the Internet for younger audiences possible. Without it the Internet was a funnel for the most base garbage humanity could produce.

I'm all down for decentralization but I think part of the protocol should be dedicated to enabling us to filter the content we receive.

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#54

Post by Pigo »

friedman23 wrote: post #20

News outlets like buzzfeed contributed to that. The old internet was an uncensored free for all and I really doubt that is what they are advocating for here.

Of course not, because extremism is on the rise according to this article...

If they got one whiff of what the wild west days were like, they'd be writing their Congressmen. They couldn't shame corporations into taking down sites they disagree with.

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#55

Post by sverige »

esotericn wrote: post #26
yifanl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the nature of network effects, if no one else is using them, then no one will use them. (Personally, I do still use old-school forums and IRC, but less frequently then I used to, its just far too convenient to use something like Discord instead)

Heh. To me discord is far less convenient. It's a fancy webpage that takes ages to load and bifurcates my chat experience across another platform. YMMV I guess. It's probably more convenient to someone that has never used a chat client before? I suppose this is how I end up siloed off with all the old fogies. :D

I just gave up on discord last night. Third or fourth time I came across a link to what sounded like an interesting server, then couldn't log in with existing credentials. I want to like it and use it, but frankly it's very tiresome to get going.

I'm not clicking on the link inviting me to your server any more. Have fun with those who fight through the silly spinning spider thing.

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#57

Post by icedchai »

zozbot234 wrote: post #24
shantly wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we want a (return to the) boom in open-source and paid standards-based solutions, we gotta ban collecting & monetizing user info. Monetized user info & related advertising paying for "free" walled services are keeping those down. We won't see widely-successful standards-based social networks or messaging services until that option is gone. [EDIT] and wide success/adoption matters for those in particular because mu…

The "old" internet was all static or lightly server-rendered pages, that can be developed and hosted at minimal cost today. Back in the day we didn't expect that "everyone" would sign up for whatever niche forum you were hosting, it was enough to have "everyone who's into that niche". These services don't need "monetization", they can be kept up with minimal amounts of crowdfunding, while federating through well-know…

The actual "old" Internet is the stuff that predated the web: Gopher, IRC, Usenet, MUDs, Public Access Unix systems, telnet...

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#58

Post by zozbot234 »

maxymajzr wrote: post #43

I remember the sound my 28800 modem made before connecting. I knew I have exactly 1 second below 60 minutes to be online before I get disconnected from my student dial-up. I had ICQ. We used Altavista (and Astalavista to crack the software we illegally got). Relevant information and socializing was done via newsgroups, as well as content-sharing. Many don't know why winzip/winrar has the option to split an archive in…

> Many don't know why winzip/winrar has the option to split an archive into multiple files (so they can fit 1.44" floppy disk

Good archiving programs came with the option of using erasure/error correction codes so that the archive would still be recoverable, even if some of the floppies were returning read errors or became unreadable altogether.

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#59

Post by mumblemumble »

> Can you think of a picture of yourself on the internet from before 2010, other than your old Facebook photos?

Nah, because I never felt compelled to put pictures of myself on the Internet before then. I still don't.

What I miss is the personal website, where people shared information and opinions about things they loved. That Web has been crowded out by, well, people posting pictures of themselves.

It's like that point in the party where the stimulating conversation ends because the host decided it's time to break out the slide projector.

Post reply on HN