The old internet died and we watched and did nothing • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by shantly » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:29 PM UTC

jimmaswell wrote: post #150

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be true but it doesn’t justify the monetization of user data. If this data is useful to cross reference, let the user opt in and use it. Give the user control and insight into the data collection. The data can be useful without tricking users and making money off their private use activities.

Monetization of data seems like a great tradeoff to me, really. The users get free content for nothing essentially. I don't see why anyone cares. It's like we've struck gold mines of new utility for society and everyone is up in arms over it.

The collection of so much personal data makes possible all sorts of abuses that are otherwise infeasible. The difference between corporations collecting & keeping massive amounts of data on the population of a state, and the same state's government doing exactly the same, is minor, when the government can buy access to much of that data or compel production of any of it by court order. It'd bother me if the government were running this kind of dragnet surveillance, so it bothers me that companies are, for this if for no other reason.

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

#182

Post by seomint » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:29 PM UTC

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…

BBSes live on today in all their ASCII glory. Logged on to an Apple ][+ BBS yesterday running on port 6502 ~grin~. Ah, good times... https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/

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

#183

Post by krapp » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

kickscondor wrote: post #165

Oh hey - this is my dept. https://kickscondor.com I cover what's happening in modern personal blogs and independent web weirdness. Rest assured, you can now put Buzzfeednooze safely behind you...

Wow, that layout is so old-school quirky I think I may have literally injured my eyeballs reading it ;)

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

#184

Post by mthoms » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #119

shantly wrote: post #108

Earlier 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…

Your argument would be much better served if you didn't use words like disgusting and violent to describe the ideas(s) presented by the other poster. Frankly, it sounds like you're more interested in escalating this into an idealogical flame war than participating in a civilized discussion.

There's nothing inherently violent about a democratically elected government regulating the commercial activities of corporations according to the wishes of its people.

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

#185

Post by u801e » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

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…

> What I find myself missing more than anything else is that news server was something you paid for, either as part of an ISP package, as a dedicated service or your university tuition fees.

For what it's worth, there are still commercial newsproviders out there you can pay for. There are also free ones as well. Unfortunately, the all the newsgroups I participated in as recently as 5 years ago are pretty much dead.

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

#186

Post by markus_zhang » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

But nowadays we have so many personalized stuffs distributed across the Internet. For example you can just build a static page and put up on Github for free, and there are so many startups that provide all kinds of blogging (some of them are very serious and educational, just one level below books).

I'd say that if the old Internet died then let's look forward to the future and build something new.

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

#187

Post by kirykl » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

The internet is what you make it. Until the incumbents legislate an impenetrable switching cost for themselves, if don’t like the way the internet serves people, you have the power to give them another option.

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

#188

Post by takeda » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

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…

IRC has mechanisms that make dealing with spam easy.

Usenet on the other hand required cooperation from all providers. Actually I blame Google for killing Usenet. They used Microsoft's EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). They acquired DejaNews, renamed it to Google Groups, provided a gateway that allowed everyone to use Usenet. This introduced a lot of spam to the network, but whenever someone reported it, they did nothing. Eventually they introduced their internal groups, and shifted search in a way that it got hard to use Google Groups for searching Usenet posts.

They did similar thing with XMPP (Jabber). When they introduced Google Talk, their service was interconnected with the other XMPP servers. Once it got popular they discontinued it and introduced Hangouts (then later iterations) Hangouts was still connected people could see each other being present people on Hangouts could message anyone, but people on other XMPP couldn't message people on Hangouts. It didn't even show an error. This made many users switch to Hangouts to continue taking with their friends.

They attempted to do the same thing with email, but were less successful (since many big companies are also providing the service), this was done through introducing various anti spam measures. You now have to jump through various hoops (SPF, DKIM, RBAC) to have your service still reach Google uses. It didn't matter that I used the same IP and domain for 15 years never had spam sent from it, but suddenly my emails started being silently classified as spam without any warning.

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

#189

Post by iso1210 » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

A year or so freenode was hit by spam, and now everyone needs to verify, so spam still exists, as does IRC.

Even as late as 2000, usenet survived spam, conversations continued, and spam in email was far worse. Spam in email went the way of the dodo around mid-to-late 00s, with the centralisation of the providers (gmail, yahoo, hotmail)

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

#190

Post by knorker » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:36 PM UTC

I'm sick of hearing about the death of blogs.

I read more blogs now than ever. More than in the 90s. What are you even talking about? As a percentage of online content? Who cares? there are more blogs to read on any topic than you can read in a lifetime.

> A look through its “Deathwatch” page — a list of websites and services shut down over the last 10 years — is harrowing.

It's really not.