> If you remembered how to log in, you could download your old chat logs.
AIM never stored chat logs, did they?
The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
121–130 of 310 posts
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#122The old internet is still around, if you know where to look.
You just need to look past the light pollution of google, facebook and twitter.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#123The 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're forgetting spam. Spam destroyed all those first generation federated systems. IRC survived because it was too niche for spammers to target much but spam is the primary thing that killed Usenet and email as a truly open system.
The closed systems were better able to fight spam because they could easily ban people and IPs.
On a deeper level spam, "brattish" commercial sites, etc. all come from when money got involved.
The old Internet was mostly noncommercial. Money changes everything.
Even on the new sites I saw a massive shift when e.g. it became possible to monetize YouTube videos. All the sudden everything became about engagement and controversy and got big and divisive and dumb and flashy.
Ultimately we must adapt or perish. There is no going back. I think all new systems must be designed with the trial by fire of spam and other profit motivated attacks in mind from the start.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 is…
Even blogs feel a little bit stilted to me. They encourage a certain way of organizing things that is useful for RSS syndication, but at the cost of placing some fairly tight editorial limits on the person running the site. What I really miss is what came before the blogosphere really took off: Geocities-style loosely organized collections of static pages.
What's RSS syndication?
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#125News 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.
> They couldn't shame corporations into taking down sites they disagree with.
Just host your site behind Cloudflare and optimize it for Google SEO. With the admitted and notable exception of two websites, they'll host absolutely anything and give it top rankings.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You forgot another vector of how companies monetize user data: using it to train ML models. You don't need to keep the data long-term (though it would be more profitable if you could). You can still get a lot of value using the data to train an ML model, then use that model to build valuable decision-making systems, which few other companies could produce.
Oh, yeah, definitely that should also be illegal. If you want to train an ML model you should have to pay directly for that data, not in connection with any other service or product. The current system means every successful monopolist is also a de facto nigh-unassailable leader in ML, which clearly sucks. "Create or buy a massive spying service" shouldn't be a necessary step 1 to realistically competing in consumer- and human-focused ML.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Exactly. The protocol era was hijacked for profit. I believe that incentivized, decentralized protocols are the evolution of all of this and will bring the protocol era back AND properly incentivizes participants.
I hope so, but if you mean cryptocurrency wake me up when there is more to it than speculation and gambling. Other than the "wire transfer" classic use case for Bitcoin I see nothing new that anyone is actually using that is not one of those two things.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#128Technology and how we share information always moves forward, this is just a new iteration, I expect that soon we will see decentralized internet services based on what we have learned from cryptocurrency, most services being hosted on others pc with high encryptions and high availability. Imagine a data center that is just the entire world.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#129Earlier 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?
So are you suggesting there's no way to defeat the tech oligarchy and we should just surrender to them?
We are the ones that enable the tech oligarchy. We are, therefore, surrendering to them right now. My suggestion is to use our brains and not rely on the useless and frivolous "services" these tech oligarchy participants provide. We give them their power.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#130The 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 honestly don't think the decentralization is going to succeed. Most users prefer the benefits of centralization and aren't concerned with the drawbacks.
Replacing the occasional collapse of a big central service with the low-grade noise of a distributed service run by a thousand unrelated sysadmins isn't going to be improved UX for most users, so most users won't sign up.