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

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

#201

Post by api » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #198

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…

> Money changes everything. And almost always for the worse.

Greed is as normal and natural as sex. If there is no legitimate, productive outlet for it, it finds illegitimate and unproductive outlets. This is IMHO who communist states turn into mafia states: the mafia becomes the outlet. Part of adapting to the change is going to be building legitimate profit avenues into systems so that the profit motive can find productive channels.

All the old systems had no channel at all for profit making, so it made it's own in the form of spam and similar.

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

#202

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:49 PM UTC

shantly wrote: post #157

naravara wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nic…

> a Golden Age when Google would actually return results for interesting small sites on a regular basis

Yes, I miss the days when Google search was actually useful.

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

#203

Post by btrettel » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

augusto-moura wrote: post #144

There's a project focused on backuping this kind of information[1]. It's actually a distributed and communitary way of doing it, anyone can run a "warrior" instance and help the project. Modern problems require modern solutions Edit: In the project wiki there's a lot of interesting links, like this one listing all tracked projects that are dying[2] [1]: https://www.archiveteam.org/ [2]: https://www.archiveteam.org/in…

Unfortunately newer systems seem more resistant to archival than older. Compare getting a copy of a mailing list vs. getting a copy of a forum like phpBB or (even more modern) archiving a copy of a subreddit or Facebook group. Some people on a mailing list may already have a full copy simply from their participation in the list, and if the list has archives then presumably they are in a format which has stood the test of time. The other cases contrast with this. You can run wget on online forums, though the result is not as clean as the mailing list. Someone (maybe me) should write a bot to parse the pages into something more useful. I've also seen a script to scrape subreddits, though in my experience scraping subreddits is rarer than spidering forums. No idea what you can do with Facebook groups.

While I am irritated by how much of the internet has been replaced by JavaScript, one advantage has been the exposure of APIs that can be reverse engineered, as seems to have been done in the recent Yahoo Groups case. So there might be some hope here.

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

#204

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #41

shantly wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making it illegal so no legitimate business can do it without incredible risk of being sued/charged out of existence seems quite feasible.

You really don’t think companies would figure out a way around any such “illegality” or just use it anti competitively as is being done throughout the EU with its ham-handed policies?

Worst case, such a ban would be a speed bump. But even just a speed bump would be an improvement over the way things are now.

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

#205

Post by frank2 » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

beatpanda wrote: post #196

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 o…

Automattic has raised US$617.3 million in six funding rounds, the latest one being 3 months ago. (Source: Wikipedia.)

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

#206

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:53 PM UTC

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #98

shantly wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this kind of defeatism entirely baffling . Regulating corporations is hard so we shouldn't try? This is a lot less complicated than many sorts of regulation we attempt. Just give up on all of it, it's pointless? Where's the bottom on this line of thought?

Yes, it's pointless. 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. It's a short-sighted, unimaginative, and blatantly violent way to solve a problem which stems entirely from the consumer public, not from big bad corporations. It will be used by major corps as a…

> nothing which should be illegal about what is going on.

I think that collecting data about people without their informed consent should absolutely be illegal, for exactly the same reasons that it's illegal for companies to install surveillance equipment in your home without consent.

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

#207

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #129

na85 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you suggesting there's no way to defeat the tech oligarchy and we should just surrender to them?

We are the ones that enable the tech oligarchy. We are, therefore, surrendering to them right now. My suggestion is to use our brains and not rely on the useless and frivolous "services" these tech oligarchy participants provide. We give them their power.

> We are, therefore, surrendering to them right now.

Who's "we"? I am not surrendering to them.

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

#208

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:57 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.

> Monetization of data seems like a great tradeoff to me, really.

That's a fair opinion. But why should those of us who do not share that opinion be forced to be subjected to spying?

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

#209

Post by takeda » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

shantly wrote: post #157

naravara wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nic…

08, 09 that was the time they introduced service to figure out typos in queries. That was the time that I noticed drastic reduction of usefulness of their search. When the team responsible for it visited my university, I asked about this. Their response was: we don't show results that you asked for, but the results you want.

I goddamn know what I want, and it is so annoying that Google returns sites that don't contain keyword that I explicitly want, doesn't matter that I put + in front or write it in quotes.

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

#210

Post by yoz-y » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 5:58 PM UTC

Is it worth preserving all social media content from MySpace, Facebook et al though? I see the argument for blogs because people usually put more thought into the articles and they are more likely to be timeless. However, an endless stream of breakfast photos or drunken lashing out may well be better off deleted. Imo, the danger lies when the "serious" conversation/publishing moves to ephemeral platforms.