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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

#261

Post by api »

mstade wrote: post #218
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…

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.

YouTube's deplatforming and demonetizing is about improving content quality for a broad audience, so they have been taking steps to fight spammy content. They will probably have to do more.

The systems that died were systems that were structurally unable to fight spam or where doing so was prohibitively expensive in time or money.

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

#262

Post by krapp »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #219
StevePerkins wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bein…

>There's no more "you" in youtube. The main content feed is high production costs and celebrities, not random clever people.

The main feed by definition doesn't comprise most of the content on Youtube. I'm following close to 500 channels and many if not most of them are not celebrity channels with high production costs, but just someone with a camera and maybe some editing skills.

People need to get over this hipster delusion that quality of production is inversely correlated to quality of content. There's plenty of horrible content on Youtube with low production value from random people (take a look at reaction videos,) and plenty of good content both poorly and well produced.

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

#263

Post by krapp »

mattlondon wrote: post #90

It 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.

"The internet" never forgets porn. It never forgets your dox. It will never forget anything it can use against you for the lulz.

Everything else is a house of cards, though. It's just software on a server, after all, and if no one cares to back it up, no one will.

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

#264

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

nonamenoslogan wrote: post #223
bravoetch wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hahaha, you keep telling yourself that. Some countries don't even have reliable network/power/etc and don't say "oh you can trade bitcoin with paper," because that's just stupid.

Sure, but there are enough countries out there that fall into both the "reliable enough connectivity" and "government control of money" parts of the Venn diagram that this is still valid.

And the world is only getting more electrified and connected as the years go on.

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

#265

Post by buboard »

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…

i m not so optimistic. The old internet died because it's not as profitable as the new internet, not because it's not sustainable, but because it doesn't stand a chance to grab the attention of makers, when compared to the obscene profits of the new internet. People either build a B2B SaaS (which is assumed to have higher unicorn probability), or go work for Faang. communities are over

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

#266

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

shantly wrote: post #75
rasengan wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. It was when we designed protocols with consensus thru RFC, and apps communicating with those protocols.

And companies started dropping that when it became very important to their business model that they maximize the amount of data they can collect about a user. 3rd party clients for my service? Unacceptable, can't spy on the user as much there, and can't advertise at them. Communicating with users on other services? Unacceptable, I need those users on my service so I can spy on them too , and besides those other servi…

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_silo

also called 'siloing'

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

#267

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

lubujackson wrote: post #141
sneakernets wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know why you're being downvoted when this is exactly the case in my experience. They never said "spying" outright but it's definitely why walled gardens like AOL popped up like wildfire in the 90s and why stuff like AIM was the exception and not the rule.

AOL was not about spying on you, it was about collecting that sweet monthly fee. And anyone who lauds Apple for bringing tech to the masses should consider that AOL did the exact same thing for the Internet and really brought a glimpse of the Internet (not just the web!) to the people. Yes, real techies might want to install their IRC client of choice and fine tune settings and all that, but Grandma just wanted to cl…

AOL was more 'spatial' vs. the netnerds obsession with everything has to be (ASCII)-text delivered by simple but sometimes obscure to the average user, means.

I sometimes think one could easily replicate large parts of that with

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel/UX

which evolved out of

{2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_(software)

but then it lacks mastodon/matrix like federation, i guess.

Sigh. Maybe this year i get to try it out... ;-)

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

#268

Post by MandieD »

api wrote: post #226
zzo38computer wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's too much time and work for 99% of users, even tech-savvy ones. 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.

I’ve found FastMail to be my happy medium: I can give out arbitrary aliases over a couple of domains, and only have to do the config once per domain, but they take care of the actual email server part. I can then later add mailbox rules for aliases I give important senders.

Granted, the domain config would be overwhelming for my friends and family not involved in IT - even my mechanical engineer husband doesn’t quite understand what I’m doing.

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

#269

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #119
shantly wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. When we don't like they way corporate-driven markets (so... all of them, really) are developing we should attempt to change things until they develop a way we like, where "we" is any interest group. If we're not ha…

> we should attempt to change things until they develop a way we like, where "we" is any interest group. OK, then my interest group is "respecting contracts and continuing to place the burden on consumers to make informed decisions, and on corporations to not commit fraud." What you present is, frankly, a disgusting way to think, and gives absolutely no volition to or consideration of the rights of the individuals wh…

When there are entities constantly spamming [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes in a mad raving way on all channels, at full treble, exploiting privacy and advertising falshoods for the benefit of the few, and the bullshit jobs of the masses, while trashing the cultural, mental AND physical environment, then I'm all for denying them that possibilty.

They can fuck off and go die somewhere, i won't miss them.

Aye häff SPOQQN!

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

#270

Post by elfexec »

malvosenior wrote: post #82

> The internet of the 2010s will be defined by social media’s role in the 2016 election, the rise of extremism, and the fallout from privacy scandals like Cambridge Analytica. When I think of the internet of the 2010s I think of clickbait farms like Buzzfeed politicizing absolutely everything . This statement by them is 100% in line with the type of content "journalists" have produced and polluted the internet with t…

By rise of extremism, is buzzfeednews talking about themselves and their fellow extremists huffpo, etc?

The worst thing about social media is that it allowed toxic extremists like buzzfeednews, huffpo, etc to thrive.

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