Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

buzzfeednews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 310 posts

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

#241

Post by xg15 »

ohyes wrote: post #178
shadowgovt wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, except this exact sentiment, I believe, is part of why we now have the internet we have.

The "old internet" was inaccessible unless you were an expert, true. The experts could have seen this as a chance to make everyone into an expert and teach the values that were important to them in the process. If all the talk about the internet as a democratising force and a tool for freedom of expression is taken seriously, this would have been the way forward.

Instead, experts chose to be elitist and decided to use the information asymmetry to offset themselves from "the masses" and exploit it for monetary gain. The result is that we now have a wealth of powerful, free but arcane and hard to use tools for devs and a locked-down, commercialised and psychologically manipulative web for the rest. What kind of future is that?

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

#242

Post by beatpanda »

frank2 wrote: post #205
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.)

Automattic was founded 15 years ago, and despite being a profitable and growing company for most of that time, has only raised $617.3 million, mostly to fund specific expansion projects. At no time have they sought 10x returns or some kind of spectacular exit for the benefits of its shareholders. It’s not even close to the disaster that is most of VC world.

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

#243

Post by AlphaWeaver »

> Companies don’t make internet culture; people do. People make communities; they make the inside jokes; they make their own mores and unwritten rules. But people need the web services and platforms made by companies to create this culture. We’re locked in a symbiotic relationship: We, the users, need the companies, and they need us to keep running. When they shut down or delete our precious stuff, it’s because we’ve abandoned and neglected them for years already, leaving them to starve.

This line resonated most with me. Truly though, it's sometimes not our first instinct as developers to design for the future- the current culture of "build an MVP as soon as possible" doesn't always incentivize forward thinking.

If you're interested in thinking about how we can better design software solutions to support online communities further into the future, you might be a good fit for a discussion group I'm starting soon, called VC3. We're trying to bring together people who are as interested as we are in solving the problem of building meaningful virtual community. Building communities that stand the test of time are part of that.

If you have any questions, shoot me a message (profile) or check out our website at https://vc3.club.

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

#245

Post by jimmaswell »

JohnFen wrote: post #208
jimmaswell wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If some guy sat outside with binoculars and wrote down things about people in public in a notepad, I'm not sure it'd be in anyone's reasonable rights to make him stop.

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

#246

Post by danans »

api wrote: post #201
JohnFen wrote: post #198

Earlier 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…

> 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.

The reason that former communist countries like Russia became oligarchies (what I think you might mean by mafia state) is because people with significant power in the previous communist system seized control of huge state assets during the disorder that accompanied the system's collapse, and in doing so took ownership of large pieces of the economy. Even under communism, power was closely held among a in-group, and that stayed the same afterward.

The oligarchy didn't emerge because average people were bored and provided for, didn't know what to do with themselves, and therefore decided to set up illegitimate enterprises.

Also, plenty of people in capitalist countries set up illegitimate enterprises like financial frauds and consumer scams of all sorts (remember 2008?), and capitalist societies have their own oligarchs - though we call them plutocrats instead.

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

#247

Post by will4274 »

samb1729 wrote: post #18
esotericn wrote: post #6

Is this a joke? I mean, it's buzzfeed, so it obviously is, but seriously? That internet didn't die at all! You're looking at the same thing with different company names! Myspace and Facebook are the same thing with a different skin. I figured this would be an article about like, vBulletin forums, IRC, tilde pages, something like that. They all still exist, you're just not using them, why don't you start?

BuzzFeed News is not BuzzFeed. They've won many journalism awards as you can see on their Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News I do agree that reusing the name must surely do their image significant harm.

> many

More like several, and no high-prestige awards. They've also published several incorrect stories and hold the dubious honor of being the only publication Robert Mueller called out for publishing incorrect information as fact while he was still investigating.

The point is, they are Bloomberg / Politico / Huffington Post tier, not WaPo / NYT / WSJ / BBC tier or even The Atlantic / CNN / Fox / MSNBC tier.

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

#248

Post by m463 »

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 promise of computing has sort of died too.

We buy computers, but they are owned and restricted by others, especially and problematically phones.

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

#249

Post by rdiddly »

That's why your local storage is the single source of truth, and anything you put "on the internet" is just a copy of something from there. I mean that's how you did things riiiight?

No biggie if not. As someone said elsewhere in the thread, most of that stuff is clutter and probably best forgotten anyway. But if it's something you want to keep, and the only place it exists is someone else's site/computer/database, then yeah, it's not a bad idea to start thinking of it as being gone soon, or even gone already. (Unless you WANT it to go away; in that case you should apply Murphy's Law and think of it as uncontrollably hanging around forever.)

Growing up with computers and the internet and not knowing how they truly work is maybe the central problem here. Did you "post a picture on Instagram" or did you create an image file, upload it via an app or browser, pass it across the network, to a server somewhere, where it's getting stored in a database, to be retrieved and displayed later? Seems like if you understand how it really works, you automatically start thinking about better practices. I dunno.

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

#250

Post by mrmuagi »

krapp wrote: post #149
carapace wrote: post #111

First, it didn't die , it attenuated. It's still there. Even Gopher is still there. Second, when one says, "we did nothing", well, speak for yourself, eh? Lots of people did a lot of things and are still doing them. But the normals do not care. It's that simple: apathy and complacency (the twins demons of our New Age) and a good stiff whollop of ignorance. (Over a billion people don't know that Facebook isn't the Int…

>Over a billion people don't know that Facebook isn't the Internet! Chew on that While that's a common axiom bandied about on HN, as is your general tone of condescension towards "the normals" (Eloi and Morlocks, seriously? You know the Eloi were the villains, right?) I'm certain that practically no one who uses Facebook is actually unaware that the rest of the web exists.

I'm utterly confused. Why is your reply so combative? I just read the Wikipedia entry on Eloi and Morlocks and I don't even see how you could pick apart OP's on this item. Consider this odd line:

> The Eloi are herded, bred and maintained by the Morlocks as a food source, much like cows or pigs are today.

Right. I've got no dog in the ol' Eloi vs. Morlocks debate, but let me apologize, I do not want to appear as an Eloi sympathizer in you presence -- or even risk taking any creative analogy (for one even I am glad to have made aware of, as my reading list ever grows), lest you accuse my tone against a fictional race as you are surely itching to -- as demonstrated prior.

Nonsense aside.

> I'm certain that practically no one who uses Facebook is actually unaware that the rest of the web exists.

Well if we're exchange common things bandied about on HN... Let's take a glaring example here. The above is an opinion presented with uttermost confidence about groups of users and their knowledge -- all in the presence of zero evidence. Hah, take that! Wait, how many does it take to tango?

It is a personal anecdote and long held opinion of mine that although the ease of access towards the internet, and therefore availability of, has increased, the technical chops of the general population may not be spread equally -- perhaps the unfairest of this is on the age variable with retired seniors not being able to get around much without help. I have helped old people with this matter, so I experience this sometimes. Perhaps I agree with OP on this, that they don't know the web really exists, and it's all a Cumulus cloud to them and I'm the wizard handles those unknowns for them. And I can take a step back and say, its alright that not a lot of people know https vs. http, or yada yada and perhaps on that point I differ from some opinions on HN, but I don't think you understand how oblivious people can be to the internet. I fear you will accuse my tone of condescension towards "retired seniors" and must now stop lest I dig myself any further. It was all fun and games with the fictional humans...

Post reply on HN