The old internet died and we watched and did nothing • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by zozbot234 » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 4:17 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #76

zozbot234 wrote: post #24

Earlier 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 problem isn’t hosting, it’s discovery. Discovery was easy on the old internet because we weren’t yet drowning in spam, link farms, and cloned/scraped pages. To bring the old internet back we need search that filters out all that commercial noise and we can’t rely on Google et al to build it. Why not? Because those companies have a conflict of interest due to their ad-driven business model. A new “Old Internet” ne…

Bring back webrings, "favorite links" pages and the ODP/DMOZ. Good niche forums (both on Usenet and elsewhere) tended to gather FAQs and information pages that would ultimately aid discovery. That whole dynamic is quite dead these days.

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

#92

Post by agumonkey » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 4:17 PM UTC

rasengan wrote: post #4

The 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…

Was it really a matter of self hosting ? or a matter of what people meant by "web" ? early internet had no strong goal, but when it became a soil for a new economy the vibe changed from genuine, wild and funny to structure and optimized (for business, for users it's de-optimized).

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

#93

Post by nathias » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 4:17 PM UTC

i'm still using irc

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

#94

Post by prox » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #59

> 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 p…

I think the advance of mobile phones and the cool factor that surrounded it for a long time, and “Hey look at this picture of my coffee I am drinking right now” kind of drowned the blogosphere. It was the time Facebook could count on being cool. Which evaporated after 2010/2012.

I think my personal take is that the idea of “your content is your own” got lost in the process of sharing-everything culture.

Luckily it isn’t dead, this site and the people writing informative blogs is still available.

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

#95

Post by zozbot234 » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #82

> The internet of the 2010s will be defined by social media’s role in the 2016 election, the rise of extremism, and the fallout from privacy scandals like Cambridge Analytica. When I think of the internet of the 2010s I think of clickbait farms like Buzzfeed politicizing absolutely everything . This statement by them is 100% in line with the type of content "journalists" have produced and polluted the internet with t…

That's the thing about extremism, it comes in lots of flavors. And clickbait farms are incented to whip it up.

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

#96

Post by naravara » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #76

zozbot234 wrote: post #24

Earlier 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 problem isn’t hosting, it’s discovery. Discovery was easy on the old internet because we weren’t yet drowning in spam, link farms, and cloned/scraped pages. To bring the old internet back we need search that filters out all that commercial noise and we can’t rely on Google et al to build it. Why not? Because those companies have a conflict of interest due to their ad-driven business model. A new “Old Internet” ne…

I feel like content discovery in those days didn't primarily happen via search so much as word-of-mouth though. Blogs kept a blogroll on the side which had an overlapping network of other bloggers, people in IRC channels or BBSes would recommend other places for you to check out if you were interested in something, webcomics would host guest strips so other artists could cross-promote each other, etc.

In that respect, I feel like Reddit and Instagram are much bigger culprit than Google for sucking up all of the space for socializing and referrals. At one point several of the forums I was on all basically just focused on linking to or talking about Reddit posts, which is when I realized those forums were not long for this world.

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

#97

Post by balozi » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

Predictions: Reddit will make the next list.

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

#98

Post by AndrewUnmuted » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

shantly wrote: post #84

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really don’t think companies would figure out a way around any such “illegality” or just use it anti competitively as is being done throughout the EU with its ham-handed policies?

I find this kind of defeatism entirely baffling . Regulating corporations is hard so we shouldn't try? This is a lot less complicated than many sorts of regulation we attempt. Just give up on all of it, it's pointless? Where's the bottom on this line of thought?

Yes, it's pointless.

There is nothing illegal about what is going on now, and nothing which should be illegal about what is going on. In this context, "regulating" simply means making a behavior we didn't see coming illegal.

It's a short-sighted, unimaginative, and blatantly violent way to solve a problem which stems entirely from the consumer public, not from big bad corporations. It will be used by major corps as an anti-competitive weapon against smaller up-start competition - an outcome we should expect from all such attempts at "regulating" the tech oligarchy.

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

#99

Post by flir » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

Timberwolf wrote: post #64

rasengan wrote: post #4

The 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 emb…

You've put your finger on something important - innovation moved from collaborative protocols to antagonistic web sites, and we're all the poorer for it.

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

#100

Post by spaced-out » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

shantly wrote: post #33

ekianjo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we gotta ban collecting & monetizing user info anything that runs across a network can be monitored, and such data is valuable when you are able to merge it across several data sources. It's very unlikely tracking can even be banned or un-monitized.

Making it illegal so no legitimate business can do it without incredible risk of being sued/charged out of existence seems quite feasible.

Very few voters will support a bill that will result in them having to pay for things like email, facebook, youtube, etc...