I think it's more accurate to say "The old Internet evolved while we watched. Because after all, that's what technology does and we like to see where it's going."
The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
131–140 of 310 posts
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#132The 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…
There was also a lack of incentive to tamp down on flame wars or care about a "quality level" of content when advertisers aren't paying for engaging content.
The SNR on old USENET and IRC was pretty low.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. When we don't like they way corporate-driven markets (so... all of them, really) are developing we should attempt to change things until they develop a way we like, where "we" is any interest group. If we're not ha…
> we should attempt to change things until they develop a way we like, where "we" is any interest group. OK, then my interest group is "respecting contracts and continuing to place the burden on consumers to make informed decisions, and on corporations to not commit fraud." What you present is, frankly, a disgusting way to think, and gives absolutely no volition to or consideration of the rights of the individuals wh…
Companies are creations of the state. We should do with them what we think most valuable and likely to create the best environment. This may, and probably does, include permitting them a wide variety of liberties and privileges.
> > democratic states
> Speak for yourself buddy. I live in a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy.
FYI the colloquial usage of "democratic" or "democracy" is also the way actual political scientists use it when dealing in generalities of this sort, so splitting this straw is not some I'm-better-educated-on-this-than-you "gotcha", and signals the opposite of what you're intending.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#134This is a terrible article and tries to make something out of nothing.
we’re supposed to shed a tear because AOL died? Is that really a version of the internet that we wanted anyway?
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like the ratios changed a lot which makes it seem like the old Internet died. But there are probably more people running their own servers than there used to be. It's just that that makes up just something like 1% of the user community instead of 100%. "The old internet" is what you got when only nerds were online. Replicate that and you got your old internet back. Cue the above mentioned decentralization work…
I feel the ratio is the important thing - at least if your goal is to let the broader society benefit from your work and not just an ivory tower of people with similar background. In that regard, the "nerds" utterly failed. We're looking back at the "old" internet with some kind of sentimental sadness, but we've evidently failed to convince the general public that a noncommercial, decentralised internet is the way to…
The UX on the old Internet was terrible, and I remember a solid generation of veteran users telling newbies to RTFM instead of either putting the hard work in to educate or improve the UX of the toolchain so education was less necessary (work that is hard because it is less about understanding the code and more about understanding how users think and why they don't think like the developer of the protocol or application).
Average users who don't have the time to understand IPs, sockets, or authentication schemas have been served by companies willing to shoulder the burden of relieving them of those special-knowledge requirements.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#136The Buzzfeed article seems to focus around a particular user usage pattern, in that these were sites I personally did not use that horribly much. My "old internet" was Digg, Slashdot, GeoCities, HowardForums, ISP `~username` pages, Usenet, IRC and a multitude of others I've long forgotten. The Consumerist has a better version that speaks to me: https://consumerist.com/2015/03/20/where-did-everyone-from-t... In any ca…
September 1993 Internet use shows the silliness of the idea of the death of the old Internet. In 1993, "...the World Wide Web, has seen the number of daily queries explode from almost 100,000 requests in June to almost 400,000 in October"
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/business/business-technol...
There are now over 4.5 billion Internet users. If even 0.002% of them make just one daily query on the web of the "old Internet," then it's still larger than the web before the Eternal September. Protocols like IRC and Gopher are more active today than late 1993.
It's true that data moving through centralized services is larger today, but that doesn't invalidate the continued life of the "old Internet" any more than the relative domination of analog communications over copper wires in 1993 meant the Internet was dead back then.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Cryptocurrency is freedom from intermediary interference. That's not a big deal in the US, but in some countries people can't even have bank accounts.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#138It's sad to say, but "we" as people who enjoyed the old internet or felt compelled to build and contribute to it are a tiny minority of internet users today. We are a niche. The vast majority are people looking to watch youtube, TikTok or some other social networking garbage. It's sad but this is the reality. People who are just looking for entertainment or social dopamine think the old internet is "boring" or "looks…
>It's sad to say, but "we" as people who enjoyed the old internet or felt compelled to build and contribute to it are a tiny minority of internet users today. We are a niche
That's not sad, actually, it's great. Being upset about that is like being upset that too many people use telephones who've never operated a switchboard or know morse code.
The internet (or at least the web) was never meant to be a niche redoubt only for nerds and programmers, it's supposed to be for everyone. The old hacker ethos was about liberating humanity from censorship and centralized control of access to information and communication, but now that that vision is actually coming to pass (kind of) people are complaining about how the normies ruined.
Fie. Fie, I say.
Also, almost everyone from the 'old internet' is watching Youtube and using social media as well. Your implication that everyone using social media is only doing so for entertainment or a dopamine rush is inaccurate. There are more hardcore, old school nerds on the modern web than there ever were on the old web.
>People who are just looking for entertainment or social dopamine think the old internet is "boring" or "looks dumb".
Nobody says that. Your can stuff your sorries into a sack, sir or madam.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#140The 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…
RFC 1436 Gopher - the joy
http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?a=gopher%3A%2F%2Fhngoph...