171–180 of 310 posts
I don't think it's as simple as more data = better.
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…
More than a dozen comments on this article and none reference the actual content of the article and miss the point of the article entirely. It's a headline the evokes different ideas but it has nothing to do with the Internet not being what it used to be. The sorry state of platforms is an issue, for sure, but it's not what this article is about. Commenting on headlines is another sorry state of Internet discussion.…
Wow. You're correct. Absolutely incredible that this is the only comment actually responding to the article's content.
To most people here, the "old internet" was not photobucket and myspace.
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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.
A lot of the kind of nerds that post on hacker news, myself included, frequently discount how much of a barrier technical difficulty is. For us, setting up an IRC client, or even a server, is hardly a big deal at all.
But for the average person, they either can't or won't bother with that. So setting up an IRC client for them, is like a wall.
Responses to pointing this out often go along the train of thought of, "It's not that hard! People could totally do it!" Well, regardless of whether they could or not, they won't. So you're basically just yelling into the void.
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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.
This is often repeated, but...Can you name a large news source that has not won a "journalism awards"?
It used to be, when you talked about computers, you talked about data, although at the time we confused behavior and data. Here's my computer. It has my pictures. I write programs on it. There is a thing. I posses this thing. It holds other things I posses that I can do neat stuff with.
But a weird thing happened. The arcade had sex with the IBM PC. That is, computers stopped being about "things I own that I can do things with" and became almost exclusively about the experience, the game. Having a good time.
If you'd asked me in 89 what the store would evolve into in 30 years, I'd probably say something about robots. Paper free, human free. Maybe humans out front to talk to people with robots working behind the scenes.
Instead, the computers controlled the workers. They took orders, they printed tickets to be stuck on boxes, they provided instructions, they tracked how much time the worker took for various things, they provided a cool interface for people to both order and see how their order was being processed. Who owned what that did what? Nobody cared.
If you have an enjoyable, perhaps addictive experience doing X, and it's free, who cares about ownership or data? We never thought behavior/experience and ownership would be separate, so we reason poorly about it.
On the old net, I would visit sites lovingly-crafted by their owners, with everything their owners enjoyed. We shared the experience of their creation, both creator and consumer. If there was a problem, I'd email. Your site doesn't work. You own it. Fix it.
The new net is full of companies providing unique and fun experiences that people like, collecting data on their fellow humans like their lab rats with the exit strategy of being bought out by even larger companies with even more data. We create things we do not own. Instead we're like prostitutes in a red light district that are forced to dance in glass windows. We are displayed. Our existence and the things we create is owned by others. They choose to show the parts of us as they will. Your data isn't important. My experience online using some app is important. Everything else is subservient to that.
The old web is gone because it either died or was eaten by companies who understand the new selection criteria. Anonymity is gone. Privacy is gone. Ownership is gone. We are left with just a collective experience which we will optimize for at all costs.
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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 applicat…
Average users aren't necessarily the people I want to interact with on a daily basis. It's like an advanced version of a captcha.
Maybe I'll make a technology and discussions site that is purposefully difficult to connect to. Maybe I won't use a standard protocol and you'll have to use netcat & gpg to read / upload posts or something absurd like that.
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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.
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.
Does seem a bit ironic that BuzzFeed would be complaining about the death of the Internet.