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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

#251

Post by forgetfulusr »

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…

It doesn't feel that natural. I think we should stop resorting to human nature when something fits our mood. Violence is natural but we try to stifle it because it haa few benefits. Greed should be the same. I don't think our current worship of money is healthy for the future - if you believe what they say about climate change atleast.

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

#252

Post by frank2 »

beatpanda wrote: post #242
frank2 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

617 million is a lot for the general sector. Quora has raised 226 million; the company behind Stack Exchange, 68M.

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

#253

Post by yesenadam »

hanniabu wrote: post #77

> and did nothing False, it's just that plebeians like ourselves have no power against politicians anymore or the corporate world.

>plebeians like ourselves have no power against politicians anymore or the corporate world.

That's just what they want you to believe. You won't fight because you believe no fight is possible. The good news is, that's not true.

(Gee, feel like I'm writing the V for Vendetta script or something!)

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

#255

Post by na85 »

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.

Isn't that the same "just don't get addicted to nicotine" argument, but updated to the modern era?

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

#256

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

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 disagree. It's like saying anything else but fast food is too complicated. While in reality the net is full of cooking sites of all sorts.

Let's do more cybercooking in our cyberkitchens!

There is a saying that you are what and how you eat. What is the net? A medium for information of all sorts. Mindfood so to speak. Mind your diet!

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

#257

Post by watwut »

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…

It filtered out people with different interests. You do find way more diverse topics out there now in good quality. There are still plenty of forums and sources for technically interested people now - more then before. What also exists are forums and places for everybody else - majority of Internet.

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

#258

Post by [deleted] »

mumblemumble wrote: post #59

> Can you think of a picture of yourself on the internet from before 2010, other than your old Facebook photos? Nah, because I never felt compelled to put pictures of myself on the Internet before then. I still don't. What I miss is the personal website, where people shared information and opinions about things they loved. That Web has been crowded out by, well, people posting pictures of themselves. It's like that p…

[deleted]

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

#259

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

shadowgovt wrote: post #135
xg15 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the ratio is the important thing - at least if your goal is to let the broader society benefit from your work and not just an ivory tower of people with similar background. In that regard, the "nerds" utterly failed. We're looking back at the "old" internet with some kind of sentimental sadness, but we've evidently failed to convince the general public that a noncommercial, decentralised internet is the way to…

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…

That is why average users using dumbed down and teletubbyfied interfaces of 'trusted' sites have bean fashion victims by countless leaks, breaches, closed down sites, and so on.

I remember when MS-DOS came with large printed handbooks. They were good. Maybe casual users should have read about 20% of that, for learning how to organize and separate programs and data, and doing backups accordingly.

Almost none did. And then cried because of some mishap.

Shrug.

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

#260

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

xg15 wrote: post #241
ohyes wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I partially disagree because i did that educational thing, though a long time ago. All in all it was mostly a waste of time.

I have an aversion of being called elitist. It's more like resignation, cynicism. Like thinking 'Eat all the shit that you want. Just don't shit on me'

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