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

291–300 of 310 posts

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

#291

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

zozbot234 wrote: post #67
jakemal wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Along with the fact that we have the option to block all of those distractions now. With my blocking extensions, that article was a single photo and all text on a plain white background. It was a very enjoyable reading experience.

Back in the day, blocking all the distractions (well, almost all of them, and tags were a thing) was the default . You had to click a button in order to load all images inline, after the text had finished loading.

And hitting ESC stopped animated GIFs.

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

#292

Post by prox »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #280
prox wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the advance of mobile phones and the cool factor that surrounded it for a long time, and “Hey look at this picture of my coffee I am drinking right now” kind of drowned the blogosphere. It was the time Facebook could count on being cool. Which evaporated after 2010/2012. I think my personal take is that the idea of “your content is your own” got lost in the process of sharing-everything culture. Luckily it is…

Nowadays we have influencers on instagram showing their selfiesticked or quadcoptered adventures in HDR, which is then multiplied by mass media, or at least attempted to. The thing is, i know a few places which get instagrammed a lot, and they almost never look the way i see them when i'm there, no matter which weather or daytime. It's not exactly fake, but photoshopped, enhanced into something entirely different, al…

Good points. I think because it was so new, and the last decade could be called the decade of the phone and the (social) app. Hopefully it will transform into something better, more meaningful. We as developers have a big role to play. Strike a better balance between privacy and public sharing, between what is your own vs selling yourself out as a product.

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

#293

Post by prox »

zozbot234 wrote: post #124
mumblemumble wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even blogs feel a little bit stilted to me. They encourage a certain way of organizing things that is useful for RSS syndication, but at the cost of placing some fairly tight editorial limits on the person running the site. What I really miss is what came before the blogosphere really took off: Geocities-style loosely organized collections of static pages.

What's RSS syndication?

It’s a xml format spec. It holds the latest posts in a convenient way which a rss reader can sub to. It kind of went away unfortunately, it was pretty handy.

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

#294

Post by BrandoElFollito »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #277
winternett wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

I don't fully understand what you mean by your first few sentences. You could use some dynamic DNS service for your domain, or host your own on the lowest end VPS and point that to your own connection, if it is reasonably fast, and then have some cheap and energy efficient SBC/NAS running some Linux serve your content with something like [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(web_server) or whatever else works for…

I host my stuff more or less like you (also caddy, and docker automatically served by caddy).

Internet is 49€, could be 30 but when I got fiber I gifted myself the max throughput because I could :)

Domain is 2x8€/year

Server was 600€ bought a few years ago.

Power I do not know, never cared to measure but it will be 200€/y, roughly.

So this is not that an expensive hobby.

Then of course comes the maintenance effort, but that part is pure joy

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

#295

Post by TulliusCicero »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #256
TulliusCicero wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Food is a necessity, eating out is more expensive than making your own, and you can make it healthier for yourself.

Chat isn't usually a necessity, it's more or less free regardless of whether you use Discord or IRC, and using your own client doesn't make you any healthier.

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

#296

Post by kickscondor »

louisv wrote: post #278
kickscondor wrote: post #165

Oh hey - this is my dept. https://kickscondor.com I cover what's happening in modern personal blogs and independent web weirdness. Rest assured, you can now put Buzzfeednooze safely behind you...

I've been following your blog for quite a while now, and I enjoy it a lot. Are there any other link-blogs that you recommend? (besides the usual ones like kottke, etc..)

Oh thank you and yes, link blogs - the biggest one for me right now is at imperica.com. The weekly 'web curios' roundup. I link this one a lot, so apologies if you've seen it already. (And I'm sure you mean Waxy in the 'usual' ones, right?)

I've also linked to these quite a lot, but hey:

* https://philosopher.life/ (see his 'link log' pages)

* https://www.gyford.com/

* http://tilde.club/~jonbell/

* https://thingstoclick.com

* http://fimoculous.com/recs/

The Internet is lacking good linkblogs - people don't run them nearly as much.

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

#297

Post by shadowgovt »

CapricornNoble wrote: post #284
xg15 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my experience the problem isn't elitism. The problem is large swathes of the human population are lazy luddites. I see it with cars too. I have friends that love owning fast luxury coupes, and yet don't know how to change their own oil, and can't drive a stick shift. Some of those are guys who build their own PCs, but when it comes to anything mechanical? Nope. Don't even want to learn, and that surprises me. You…

Time is finite, and people choose what they are interested in learning. One is not a "Luddite" for not understanding how one's car works if one has a mechanic for that.

So too with software and networks. The internet would never have gotten so big and useful if we demanded every user understand all its subsystems.

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

#298

Post by cgriswald »

krapp wrote: post #262
IIAOPSW wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, there's still plenty of "You" in YouTube, but it is absolutely not what is featured by the site itself as it was in the past. YouTube would probably be much more profitable if we all consumed only those channels and it was just "Netflix with PewDiePie and Jenna Marbles". I think if they dropped all the other content at the current time, there would be a lot of backlash. The danger is after ten years of psychological manipulation of users (e.g., the main feed), many of whom will be young and not know the 'old' YouTube, they might be able to get away with it.

> 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.

One of two of my pet peeves with YouTube videos. Good content is 90% of the way there. I don't know why some YouTubers quit there or why people make excuses for them. There are literally YouTube videos about how to make good YouTube videos. Even a little effort in production goes a long way.

(The other peeve is videos that should be 30 seconds long but are 10 minutes long. Although a good portion of that has to do with incentives created by YouTube and/or monetization of the videos.)

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

#299

Post by xg15 »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #260
xg15 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'

I can understand that not everyone wants or has the time to keep explaining the same things to everyone (though I think there are solutions for that). Also, developers might have other priorities than polishing UX, especially if the software is a volunteer or hobby project. I wouldn't call those things "elitist".

However, what I absolutely believe is elitist is to intentionally design a confusing UX or value it as a "feature" because it will prevent certain groups of people from using the software. That was what the GP advocated for.

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

#300

Post by jeegsy »

ALittleLight wrote: post #172
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "old internet" isn't dead. It just looks dead, because the BILLIONS of people who joined the internet since 2002 simply never venture outside of the major centralized services. There are more privately run servers, self hosted websites and bb's now than there were back then. Its cheaper, safer and easier to start and run your own network and service today than ever. So in aggregate, there is 100x (1000x?) the nic…

Personally, I like the of niche, kooky, weird, fun, specific sites that I remember from years past. I created https://stumblingon.com to try and gather a collection of such sites and expose them to users. (I noticed that StumbleUpon was dead)

Thank you very much for creating this. I've missed stumbleupon so much since their disastrous pivot. I found so many random pages back then, really felt like I was truly "surfing" the web. Here's to finding more of that with stumblingon!
Post reply on HN