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The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

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

#151

Post by zzo38computer »

icedchai wrote: post #57
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 actual "old" Internet is the stuff that predated the web: Gopher, IRC, Usenet, MUDs, Public Access Unix systems, telnet...

All of those things are still in use, although perhaps not as much as before. I suggest to continue to use it.

(Do you know my first post on Usenet (using a NNTP client program I wrote myself, actually) was in 2019? I still use it, although there aren't a lot of messages on there, but there still are some.)

I suggest if you wanted to make up a web forum or mailing list, to set up a NNTP instead please. I also invented Unusenet which is a way to form newsgroup names which are not part of Usenet (you can have both on the same server; the names never interfere). You could also have multiple interfaces to the same messages if wanted, making more use better.

With other protocols too (such as IRC), a bridge can be done. For many kind of text-basedinteractive uses, telnet (or SSH) is much better than using a web page.

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

#152

Post by StevePerkins »

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…

I started college, and discovered the Internet, in fall of 1993. An epoch infamously known as "Eternal September" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September). The old-timers on Usenet and IRC at the time thought that me and my classmates were idiots. That we killed the "old Internet".

From my perspective though, the "old Internet" died when Deja News sold out to Google. When phpBB forums started replacing Usenet, and ICQ or other chat apps started replacing IRC.

From the perspective of those newbies, the "old Internet" died when phpBB forums were replaced by LiveJournal pages and blog comment sections. When ICQ fragmented into AOL, Yahoo, and MSN instant messengers.

Those people saw the "old Internet" die when pages and blogs coalesced into early social media.

Those people saw the "old Internet" die when social media took on its contemporary shape (e.g. YouTube videos becoming more professional and SEO-oriented, clickbait, photo and video-based social media surpassing text-based social media).

This article is just some person at Buzzfeed, writing a eulogy for the "old Internet" as understood by the generation of people who have jobs at Buzzfeed.

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

#153

Post by EGreg »

We can do something

https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...

We have already been there with AOL, MSN, CompuServ. We learned that instead of government regulation we just need a really robust open-source permissionless ecosystem of software to run on servers and clients, like the Web, to disrupt them.

I saw this coming in 2011 and built a company to be part of the solution. If you want to learn more about the solution, ignore the token part (that’s to make it more like Xanadu) and read this to diagnose the problems and the solutions:

https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-...

Contact me if you want to join the effort btw. Especially if you’re proficient in Javascript and/or PHP and like to work from home.

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

#154

Post by dfee »

samb1729 wrote: post #18
esotericn wrote: post #6

Is this a joke? I mean, it's buzzfeed, so it obviously is, but seriously? That internet didn't die at all! You're looking at the same thing with different company names! Myspace and Facebook are the same thing with a different skin. I figured this would be an article about like, vBulletin forums, IRC, tilde pages, something like that. They all still exist, you're just not using them, why don't you start?

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.

From the Wikipedia page you linked:

> The media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that in 100 Buzzfeed stories about Barack Obama in 2016 (most from Buzzfeed News, but also from the general BuzzFeed site), 65 were positive, 35 were neutral, and one was critical. The report called Buzzfeed's coverage of Obama "creepy" and "almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic".

I do wonder how BuzzFeed(News) rises the HN ladder though. The only benefit I see to having content like this here is to display what opinions some demographic of people consume and believe.

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

#155

Post by lotsofpulp »

api wrote: post #123
Timberwolf wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inv…

Unfortunately, the "old" internet involved a lot of trust. Once sufficient numbers of untrustworthy players enter the system, you have to figure out how to protect yourself from spam and malware, and for most people that means using locked down systems such as iOS and services that verify identity via phone numbers and whatnot.

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

#156

Post by zozbot234 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #130
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 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.

E-mail and Usenet (or even Fidonet, for that matter) were a vast UX improvement over Compuserve. Today's monopolized walled gardens are more like that Compuserve of old than a truly open ecosystem.

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

#157

Post by shantly »

naravara wrote: post #96
chongli wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There was a Golden Age when Google would actually return results for interesting small sites on a regular basis. This was before they declared defeat in the Great Webspam War and (apparently) just upranked major sites and downranked minor ones ('08 or '09?), giving up on usefully indexing the "lesser" parts of the web. Also back when content that wasn't frequently updated didn't suffer badly in search results, so niche "evergreen" content on small sites could actually be found by search pretty often.

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

#158

Post by _8j50 »

Oh please...nostalgia is self deception. I knew this but the movie "Midnight in Paris" had a big impact on my perspective. The main character travels to the 1920s and meets famous writers and figures like picasso. And there were people and a general view that their time was past the "good ol days", we now call their time "the golden 20s" but they thought about how the late 1800s were much better.

Anyway, back on topic: The internet is the global BGPv4 and BGPv6 network,as seen in the global routing table. It's a network and how that network functions has not changed much.

The web on the other hand has changed a lot both in terms of functionality and content. But here's a different perspective: the "old web" was very slow. There were so many limitations, i mean are we talking pre-adobe-flash? If so,you had little rich and dynamic content. You couldn't stream movies,things like napster were viewed as criminal , as much as i dislike it youtube on it's ow has given much such rich and valuable content. Social media sucks but man, we're living in the golden age of memes!. Look at all the great things that happen because people can record videos and share them live/instantly! And security! We have come sooo far!!! From how amazing twitter has been to help infosec pros communicate to all the crypto improvements. I don't think i can go back in time and be able to share or access the same sites and content i did in the past,knowing how everything was so full of holes and made with little to no security consideration. I think I can easily make the argument that the old web was a dumpster fire. But in reality, I think it was ok for it's time and what we have today works for our time as well.

Let's be real here, anyone can host a discord server and many do that. There are so many free web hosting services now that let anyone host their own site without needing to learn html or webadmin. So many blogging platforms like medium and wordpress. So many privacy friendly products and services.

The past always looks different in hindsight and you don't know what you have until it's gone.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default-free_zone

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

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

#160

Post by duckqlz »

Wow a super one sided article. Pretty sure that with the advent of cheap VMs for hosting or even seeding has increased the total number of personal servers but I could be wrong. Bottom line though is that the internet opened up to a much larger user base and this shaped the majority of interactions we see. I don’t think there is anyone who could reasonably claim the Internet was hindered by the rise of large tech companies. Hosting your own server or using sites who’s interfaces didn’t translate well with other cultures was a barrier to entry for a huge portion of the world. Having everything look similar and hosting content easily and seamlessly made it so even non-English speakers could access the same content. There have been some big hiccups caused by things like conflicting ideals and automation which helped create the ongoing battles we have now where likes are monetized and content is pushed aggressively to vulnerable sections of the population but with those new problems also came new rewards. We are living in an age where a huge majority of the world is connected in ways we never could have dreamed of in 2010. Right now I see the world as being on the precipice of cooperation where we are all shouting at each other but if we step back we might just realize that while everyone is fighting we are all still coming to the table, posting our content and inching closer and closer to a fully connected society.
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