I've heard that less new websites and blogs are actually bad for large services like google in terms of their search product
The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
61–70 of 310 posts
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making it illegal so no legitimate business can do it without incredible risk of being sued/charged out of existence seems quite feasible.
How do you make illegal monitoring access to services? Because at the core this is what tracking is based on. Even if you trickled tracking down to IP addresses and time of usage only you could still have a very useful database of users across services. Oh and by the way, tracking was not invented by Internet companies, all payment systems and credit cards have been doing tracking for ages before that and selling the…
Oh yeah, I strongly agree those need to be stopped to. We keep hand wringing over all these leaks and such and "oh gee how to we improve security?", when the clear solution is to not allow it in the first place. That way a leak doesn't become some lame civil matter, but "oh, you had this plainly-illegal-to-collect info? Looks like your business is over" (which would be a rare occurrence, if it were actually that risky to do it, since it'd be hard to keep such collection secret given how many people would be involved and so how many potential whistle blowers there would be, and how large a "paper" trail is necessarily involved in mass-scale data collection, making it extremely easy to investigate and prove)
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#63The old internet died long before these centralized services appeared. The old internet was when we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites, and we were truly free in the wild wild west. Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do. The old internet is dead (for now) and it looks more like the BBS era today. But we innovated past that then, and we will innovate past that now. I am gre…
The article doesn't necessarily mean "old internet" in terms of internet culture or even the hosted services & structure of as such. She's talking about content, though most big swaths of that content was hosted on services, proprietary platforms or whatnot.
It's a noteworthy point. Over the last decade or two there has been quite a bit of churn and not much archiving. You can kind of estimate a default rate of social media bitrot, linkrot or whatnot...
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#64The old internet died long before these centralized services appeared. The old internet was when we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites, and we were truly free in the wild wild west. Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do. The old internet is dead (for now) and it looks more like the BBS era today. But we innovated past that then, and we will innovate past that now. I am gre…
I thought similar. To me what Buzzfeed are calling the "old Internet" here is something I very much remember bemoaning as the "new Internet" in which dedicated protocols such as NNTP and IRC got displaced by brattish commercial upstarts whose web-based versions had 10% of the quality-of-life features and about 5% of the community etiquette. However they displaced everything that came before them because you could embed images, have an animated avatar and (most importantly) not have to delve into the world of finding a client of choice and connecting it to your ISP's news servers.
What I find myself missing more than anything else is that news server was something you paid for, either as part of an ISP package, as a dedicated service or your university tuition fees. The commercial model was purely the provision of that resource - not selling your data, nor being a vector for targeted political ads. There was no incentive to make the basic mechanics of discussion worse or promote flame wars in the name of "engagement" or "monetisation", and while I'm sure the smaller community size played a part things seemed to bump along with a far greater degree of civility and allowance for misunderstanding.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I agree with this. It was when we designed protocols with consensus thru RFC, and apps communicating with those protocols.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#66Interesting that they don't mention the business model that powered the old internet: VC money based on a vague promise that a large enough user base, coupled with ad revenue, would bring untold riches.
As TFA says, most of those sites switched to paid accounts as the promise of "build a huge audience and work out how to monetise them later" didn't actually deliver any money.
So it's not that they died (they're mostly still there). It's just that they're not free any more.
I think the next decade will see this more and more: people actually paying for the things they use on the internet, because they realise that's the only way this will work now. The rise of information products and services focused around actually providing what their customers want, for a reasonable fee.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess everyone forgot the days before pop-up blocking was built into every browser? Sure, Javascript modals are disgusting, but by definition they have to be one at a time, not a giant stack of ads every time you browse a site. Also, lets not forget the joy of being nagged to install Flash and Real Player on every website.
Along with the fact that we have the option to block all of those distractions now. With my blocking extensions, that article was a single photo and all text on a plain white background. It was a very enjoyable reading experience.
Back in the day, blocking all the distractions (well, almost all of them, and tags were a thing) was the default. You had to click a button in order to load all images inline, after the text had finished loading.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not if it were illegal.
How can you make monitoring logs illegal? Because that is pretty much enough to start tracking users.
You don't need to make IP logging illegal to make collecting user info that's not absolutely necessary to a transaction illegal, and to make selling or using any necessarily-collected data for anything other than e.g. auditing or further service to the transaction (returns, say) also illegal. I don't know how this became about Apache logs or whatever.
[EDIT] my point is there's a ton of info being collected that goes way beyond web server logging, so I don't know how this became about why all this is impossible because server logs are a thing.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#69The old internet died long before these centralized services appeared. The old internet was when we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites, and we were truly free in the wild wild west. Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do. The old internet is dead (for now) and it looks more like the BBS era today. But we innovated past that then, and we will innovate past that now. I am gre…
I do build my websites, I do run my servers and I still feel like in the wild west.
Noise increased however by orders of magnitudes thanks to social media that's why you don't see the "old internet"
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#70News 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.
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