221–230 of 310 posts
Oh please...nostalgia is self deception. I knew this but the movie "Midnight in Paris" had a big impact on my perspective. The main character travels to the 1920s and meets famous writers and figures like picasso. And there were people and a general view that their time was past the "good ol days", we now call their time "the golden 20s" but they thought about how the late 1800s were much better. Anyway, back on topi…
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I hope so, but if you mean cryptocurrency wake me up when there is more to it than speculation and gambling. Other than the "wire transfer" classic use case for Bitcoin I see nothing new that anyone is actually using that is not one of those two things.
Cryptocurrency is freedom from intermediary interference. That's not a big deal in the US, but in some countries people can't even have bank accounts.
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…
My completely uninformed guess says that more people are running their own servers now than ever before.
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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…
And terrible UX was a feature to some extent. The people who got through it put in some effort to do so, so it filtered out a lot of low effort people. (Think about all the garbage on reddit, facebook, twitter). 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 difficu…
They just shouldn't be surprised when organizations that build something that tries to appeal to a mass audience become much, much, to appeal to a mass audience become much, much more relevant to the masses than the niches will ever be.
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> 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.
Think of it this way: lets say you value your time at $50/hour (very conservative for a tech-savvy person). If it takes an hour a month to admin that box, that's a $50/month e-mail service you have not including VPS/VM cost.
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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?
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…
fewer in ratio/percentage or pure numbers. If it is later, I disagree. Running your own instance of federated platform or forum has never been this easier. I have a discourse, pleroma etc running currently. There are lot of people running them when you dig around. What you find the problem is noise and search - both of which are dominated by big companies and pesky marketers hijacking. Anything big with traction has people paid by companies in big sums trying to game their post to the top. If you don't have shit ton of traffic or content, you won't even get on google search unless you search for very specific keyword or direct name which very few do.
The search everywhere not just your search engine but on social media is optimized for the lowest denominator who searches for x when he wants y. The search learns the way to ignore your words or meaning completely.
So both social media and search are hijacked. What else is there for discovering things? specific niche forums which also needs to be discoverable for people to land on.
With so many gate keepers on what should be installed on your device - app store or playstore. I am surprised lot of quirky things still pop up from time to time. But then I look into my surrounding, no one else gets the same stuff that I do....which means I am living in an echo chamber.
Edit: example of companies fucking with search - https://ibb.co/Lzh5ktQ
The Buzzfeed article seems to focus around a particular user usage pattern, in that these were sites I personally did not use that horribly much. My "old internet" was Digg, Slashdot, GeoCities, HowardForums, ISP `~username` pages, Usenet, IRC and a multitude of others I've long forgotten. The Consumerist has a better version that speaks to me: https://consumerist.com/2015/03/20/where-did-everyone-from-t... In any ca…
September 1993 Internet use shows the silliness of the idea of the death of the old Internet. In 1993, "...the World Wide Web, has seen the number of daily queries explode from almost 100,000 requests in June to almost 400,000 in October" https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/business/business-technol... There are now over 4.5 billion Internet users. If even 0.002% of them make just one daily query on the web of the "ol…
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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.
It's like saying that TV adverts give something for nothing, where the truth is they are a massive drain on society.