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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

#161

Post by keiferski »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #142
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…

The "old internet" isn't dead. It just looks dead, because the BILLIONS of people who joined the internet since 2002 simply never venture outside of the major centralized services. There are more privately run servers, self hosted websites and bb's now than there were back then. Its cheaper, safer and easier to start and run your own network and service today than ever. So in aggregate, there is 100x (1000x?) the nic…

But this doesn’t factor in that smaller communities have been eaten by the bigger sites. Reddit, for example, has replaced hundreds of niche topic forums in the past decade, and done a rather poor job doing so, in my opinion.

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

#162

Post by maxymajzr »

ravenstine wrote: post #88
maxymajzr wrote: post #43

I remember the sound my 28800 modem made before connecting. I knew I have exactly 1 second below 60 minutes to be online before I get disconnected from my student dial-up. I had ICQ. We used Altavista (and Astalavista to crack the software we illegally got). Relevant information and socializing was done via newsgroups, as well as content-sharing. Many don't know why winzip/winrar has the option to split an archive in…

> The consumer-generation that's lifeblood of leeches such as buzzfeed/youtube has no experience nor right to write about "old" internet While I share your sentiment towards Buzzfeed and clueless millennials, I don't think it's entirely fair to say they have no right to write about the "old" internet. I began to experience the web around 1997, and it was different in a lot of ways compared to now. More personal pages…

When I used "they have no right" - what I meant was this: they haven't experienced anything fundamentally different 10 years ago, therefore they can't be writing about something that "died" simply due to the fact there was nothing different to experience back then that doesn't exist today. The article seems forced, as any article from fake-factory would be. I'm always skeptical towards such content, that attributes to my negativity when typing all this. I merely find it ironic that someone who has no clue about the matter is writing about it :)

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

#163

Post by btrettel »

peterwwillis wrote: post #120

The saddest thing about this is how desperately people cling to records of the past, as if they matter. If you actually missed something from back then, you would remember it, and it's not really gone. If you don't remember it, it wasn't important. But here people are, trying to convince you you've lost something that you don't even know what it is. The first time you lose all your files, it feels like disaster. The…

> If you don't remember it, it wasn't important.

I've found time and time again that something I thought wasn't important before can end up being very important later. That's only what I can remember, too.

Plus, there's a selection bias in what you remember. If you don't remember it, how would you know that it's important or not later?

If the cost is small then I think "digital materialism" is probably mostly okay. I've come to the conclusion that it's hard for me to predict the importance of things later, so if something appears to be ephemeral and has even a modest chance of being important later, I'll archive it and organize it so I can find it later if I want to.

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

#164

Post by starpilot »

Meta: Does nostalgia always pick up during the holidays? Is this the time when we reflect, on computing as well? We were reminiscing over the Windows 95 GUI, of all things, a week ago. What's next, "in defense of COBOL" or "the elegance of PC DOS 3.0"? If you look hard enough and you have some personal connection, any antiquated architecture seems worth reminiscing, but thank god all of it went away.

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

#166

Post by rib3ye »

api wrote: post #127
rasengan wrote: post #112

Earlier 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.

Decentralized lending via Ethereum smart contracts is now a real thing. Check out this out in a dApp browser like Coinbase Wallet: https://app.compound.finance/

I’m current earning 3.5% apr by lending out USDC (Coinbase’s stablecoin) via dApp.

EDIT: I guess I am being downvoted because people think this is spam? I only have a disincentive for people to use this dApp: as more liquidity gets added to the pool, my payout interest rate goes down.

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

#169

Post by cptskippy »

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…

> 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.

Very few people did this. Unless you were at a university or paid for an ISDN line, you didn't have a persistent connect and could not host your own server. Even when DSL and Cable appeared, ISPs actively blocked hosting.

Also don't forget registering a domain cost like $100 and required mailing or faxing paperwork. Getting an SSL certificate required even more paperwork. It's not like today where and can get a wildcard SSL cert faster than it takes to squeeze out a fart.

People did build servers and host them in Data centers but that was the exception and they usually had a side gig or solicited donations for covering hosting fees. Again it was unusual.

I worked at an insurance company in the early 2000s and setup an old machine with NT and a bunch of those Emachine softmodems to work as a poor man's ISP for a few of the IT staff. It also had an FTP server hosting stuff for an IRC channel I frequented. It was unusual and coveted because back then it was very rare for people to get access to a server they could host anything on.

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

#170

Post by shadowgovt »

zozbot234 wrote: post #156
shadowgovt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But I believe th UX of the modern monetized wallef garden would also have displaced CompuServe. Maybe CompuServe is a bad example because their UX was just poor (and they survived in an era of near zero competition).
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