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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

#191

Post by u801e »

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…

> The closed systems were better able to fight spam because they could easily ban people and IPs.

Unless the server allowed one to send email or post to usenet without having to log in first, then there's no reason why the provider couldn't simply disable the account or block the originating IP from connecting to the server. From what I can tell, the providers weren't interested in blocking spam by blocking IPs or disabling accounts. This is very similar to the robocall problem and phone companies not really trying to fix it.

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

#192

Post by zzo38computer »

iso1210 wrote: post #189
api wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 0…

I run my own email server, and use a separate address per correspondent. This avoids spam entirely. I have sometimes got some spam from some addresses but simply disable that address and then the problem is gone.

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

#193

Post by Eikon »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #174
keiferski wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The advantage of the big centralized services is that they're more accessible. They're generally very easy to use, it's harder to fuck things up there. 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 w…

> For us, setting up an IRC client, or even a server, is hardly a big deal at all.

I administrated huge systems at massive scale, I deliver, what I believe is very high quality software which solves complex problems.

And you know what? I would never want to setup a freaking IRC client that has such poor UX that you wonder if it was intentional.

Oh, wait, you have to deploy a server to host your bouncer too! Oh, and then you have to interact with the nicserver!

What a joy! Really.

We have to forget about “state of the art protocols”, “unix philosophy” and very dumb UX if we want to see adoption of decentralized services.

You know why HTTP is fucking great and so ubiquitous? Because it fucking works. IRC and what not protocols are so broken that it’s not even funny.

I read too many RFCs of protocols that are so dumb that you understand they were never really written to be implemented and even less to be used but are more there to serve an intellectual challenge.

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

#194

Post by mumblemumble »

decasteve wrote: post #35

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.…

I'm actually OK with that.

Mass preservation of literally everything isn't custodianship, it's viparinama-dukkha. It's coming from the same place that resulted in my great-grandmother's house being fit for an episode of Hoarders. She thought that each of those items might be useful to someone some day, but actually it just created that much bigger and nastier a haystack to sift through when the time came to try and sort out a few family heirlooms and keepsakes.

And, once you take that instinct and apply it to massive, corporate-owned, centralized sites where people casually socialize, it becomes even more problematic. I agree, pre-sanitization Tumblr was a great place for young people - especially queer youth - to work out their sexual identities. But nobody wants to have that phase of their life preserved in perfect detail, for all perpetuity, and nobody wants it sitting around in a big public archive just waiting for someone else to figure out how to de-anonymize people's old Internet accounts. It's OK, even preferable for some things to be forgotten.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't preserve a record of our digital heritage. But it should be a curated preservation of a reasonable subset of the content on these sites, not an enormous trash heap of everything that's ever happened on the Internet being kept around for people to fripple through when they're in a voyeuristic mood.

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

#195

Post by JohnFen »

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 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 hope so.

While I don't think the old internet is dead at all (it can look that way because the new internet has grown much larger), it is true that the web (for me) is getting less useful and more dangerous as time goes on. I 100% expect that the day will come in my lifetime that I'll stop using it entirely. I hope that something magical happens to change that trajectory, but I honestly don't see anything like that on the horizon.

But the old internet does still exist, and so the internet will remain very useful to me even if I stop using the web.

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

#196

Post by beatpanda »

People love to trash talk WordPress, but by being consistently correct and committed to its principles, it got this single line in this article:

"WordPress has managed to keep chugging and even bought Tumblr off Verizon."

It's because Matt Mullenweg and co have held the line on open source and the open internet for more than a decade now, and we should all be grateful.

Everything cool I've gotten to do in my life I owe to learning to code via building WordPress websites. I hope in the next decade WordPress and companies like Automattic become the example to aspire to instead of people throwing more fuel on the never-ending VC trash fire.

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

#197

Post by chrshawkes »

ALittleLight wrote: post #172
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Personally, I like the of niche, kooky, weird, fun, specific sites that I remember from years past. I created https://stumblingon.com to try and gather a collection of such sites and expose them to users. (I noticed that StumbleUpon was dead)

Interesting that stumbleupon was also a reboot of a failed 90's website before that.

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

#198

Post by JohnFen »

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…

> Money changes everything.

And almost always for the worse.

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

#199

Post by keiferski »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #174
keiferski wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The advantage of the big centralized services is that they're more accessible. They're generally very easy to use, it's harder to fuck things up there. 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 w…

I don't necessarily agree that accessibility is a universal good thing, at least when it comes to building a community. Reddit is a good example - there is basically zero effort required to join and post. There is also very little incentive to remain active and post good content (karma is more or less irrelevant compared to incentives in forum sites of the past.)

As a result, you get fairly low-quality discussion content and essentially zero sense of identity - both of which were not a problem in pre-centralized niche forums.

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

#200

Post by orthecreedence »

34679 wrote: post #74

Buzzfeed did not watch and do nothing, they actively participated in creating its replacement. The author of this article is so tone deaf that he rails against social media giants dominating the netscape in an article with "Tweet" and Facebook "Share" buttons at the top.

I can dislike the state things are in and still use the tools available to spread a message or advance a cause without compromising my morals.
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