Funny how they use services like MySpace and Flickr as the “old Internet”. For me, the old Internet was Geocities and IRC, where sharing content required a maker mentality, not a service.
The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
211–220 of 310 posts
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. You're correct. Absolutely incredible that this is the only comment actually responding to the article's content.
The content isn't really front-page-worthy. People have gathered here to discuss the topic suggested by the (clickbait) headline. And in this instance I would say the headline discussion is probably going to be more substantial than the contents of the article To most people here, the "old internet" was not photobucket and myspace.
The discussion about this headline has been going on in circles for some time though.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#213Earlier 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.
> This may be true but it doesn’t justify the monetization of user data. I don't understand your point. If it can technically be done and it is valuable in any way, it WILL be done. No matter the justification.
> If it can technically be done and it is valuable in any way, it WILL be done.
Until society determines that the practice is unacceptable and outlaws it. Outlawing it won't completely eliminate the practice, of course, but it would dramatically curtail it, and provide people with an actual means of rectifying the situation when someone is breaking the law.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#214The 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…
It's not necessarily easier to run your own web servers... It's more costly than ever, and with the collapse of Net Neutrality going on (legal or not) and Google's stranglehold on search results and browsers, your likelihood of being seen are next to nil unless you have serious amounts of operational cash... This is also why brilliant people in school aren't inventing the next Twitter or Facebook. Big industry has stepped in to carve the Internet to suit it's profit needs and to put up walls for those who aren't accepted into the fraternity. Now company employees are encouraged to develop their ideas on company time, so instead of having to buy companies for a billion dollars, they get the same innovation (in house) for just a few annual salaries. Share holder driven companies are not our friends... The Internet how we knew it is indeed dead, and everyone was warned long ago, several times. :/
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Yes, I agree. But none of that changes the fact that when something shifts to being for-profit, that thing usually gets worse.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#216Earlier 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…
>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 niche "evergreen" content on small sites could actually be found by search pretty often.
This is useful for things like research or product reviews, but less of a thing for the sorts of current events and opinion pieces that blogging was used for (and then got moved to "social media").
But yeah, prioritizing stuff that's updated often has really killed the ability of sites to actually be useful repositories of knowledge and has probably intensified the trend towards opinion, editorial, and hot-takes of everything rather than well-researched articles about how to do useful/practical stuff.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#217I'm more worried about technological and legal chokeholds on free expression like GDPR, whose main effect was to nag users with a popup about cookies on every major website.
To me, it feels like the original possibility of inventing something, posting it online and earning a passive income is all but dead today. Too many hurdles now must be overcome. You pretty much have to learn a programming language, containerization, the various layers of HTML/Javascript/CSS deployment, amoral stuff like SEO and bribing influencers, to even have a chance at making more than $10 per month.
When I think of every major innovation in web dev since 2000, almost all of it has gone the opposite direction from how I would have done it. Instead of autoscaling distributed servers, programming languages and databases, we ended up with "bare hands" tools like Kubernetes, async-await and sharding on proprietary monopolies like AWS locked into physical regions. My description of what's wrong is fuzzy at best, but I feel it deep down, that this trend away from computer science to application has all but halted progress.
I could write at length (seriously dozens/hundreds of pages) about better ways of doing all of this. I already have to some degree. But nobody cares, and nobody listens to me since I never built anything that made any appreciable money. So what's the point? There isn't one. That's the internet today. Late-stage capitalism, pretty people, and divisive political discourse. Dystopia.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#218Earlier 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…
So are you saying that you believe YouTube will also perish because it's now mostly spam, albeit sanctioned spam? Not a facetious comment, I genuinely wonder. It'd be a wonderful twist, in a way.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#219Earlier 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…
I started college, and discovered the Internet, in fall of 1993. An epoch infamously known as "Eternal September" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September ). The old-timers on Usenet and IRC at the time thought that me and my classmates were idiots. That we killed the "old Internet". From my perspective though, the "old Internet" died when Deja News sold out to Google. When phpBB forums started replacing Use…
The internet is dead. Long live the internet.
I don't know if I agree with your unstated premise that none of these iterations are inherently better or worse than what came before or what will come after. I think there has been a phase change from participation to consumption. The internet has become TV for most users. Not just in the sense of the viewer passively watching, but in the sense of the content itself being highly centralized. There's no more "you" in youtube. The main content feed is high production costs and celebrities, not random clever people.
Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
#220It is interesting that people say "the internet never forgets", yet this article clearly shows it does. Do we want the internet to forget, or not to forget? Is forgetting so bad? Not everything needs to be collected and catalogued and preserved forevermore. There is a lot of crap out there - I'd be happy for some personal stuff I posted many years ago as a much younger and naïve person to just slowly rot away.
Interesting indeed, internet never forgets you but it can forget itself.