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

I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

sffworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 435 posts

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#61

Post by titzer »

j_wtf_all_taken wrote: post #46

Its still there, its just buried under all the other crap. As more and more people generate content, more and more bullshit exists. Unfortunately, Google etc. - despite all their big announcements - can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit. Where's the semantic web that was promised? I wonder if we're still paying for the mistakes that were made with the whole XML stuff ...?

> Google etc... can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit.

It's worse than that. They are shoveling bullshit. They turned on the bullshit magnet and lit up the bullshit bat signal. They created a bullshit attention economy and sold bullshit tickets to bullshit artists. Literally everthing about Google and Facebook is creating one opportunity after another to jab you in the eyeballs with ads and/or trap you in a never-ending cycle of "engagement" that has few paths out. It's a trap to monetize every aspect of your interactions with the digital world, to monetize your very attention span. Once you are in, you are at the mercy of a metric assload of computation designed to trap your little rat ass so your eyeballs can be strapped open and ads sold to the highest bidder piped right into your brain. And there are basically zero financial incentives for them to stop or slow down.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#62

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

markus_zhang wrote: post #17

I actually enjoy today's Internet much more. I'll lay out the reasons: 1) Easy access to many high quality contents. For example HN is a good platform for accessing new knowledge. Note that I say "access", not "learn". Reading HN sometimes give people the false impression that they are learning new knowledge, which usually is not the case. I treat HN as a platform to get a peek at certain new knowledge, but reading b…

Counterpoint. It is disappointing to me that most of the "web sites" people interact with now transfer more data on a single page load than an entire operating system and applications from 25 years ago, when you could get "on the internet" with a PC running Windows 3.11 and Trumpet winsock, or Slackware. And, yeah, a lot of that is because of much higher quality media, but a lot of it is advertising and tracking, too. If we did NOT have high bandwidth now, the internet would simply be unusable. And for what? I'm not any better informed these days. Slashdot was the HN of the day, and it's about the same vibe. Videos and podcasts are jokes, taking 100x longer to make the point than simple text. Social media brought everyone to the publishing "party," and that's worked out just as well as you'd think. In fact, I can't think of any way that the internet is fundamentally improved over the past 25 years. In additional fact, I think a lot of what's developed in that time is harming society.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#63

Post by RGamma »

papito wrote: post #30

Please sign my guestbook...

Thank your for this great content. It has really improved my insight.

Buy Viagra ONLINE NOW !! Best viagra sildenafil pills medication 100% safe reliable online shop.

Edit: I guess this ironic post may be indistinguishable from actual spam

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#64

Post by prepend »

Sadly, it’s the people.

The old internet had a filtering function where, because it was harder to use, people had to have some interest or skill to use it. So as a result, I think the proportion of people “online” had similar interest so more content was relevant and made by similar people.

Now everyone is online with more diverse interests and capabilities.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#66

Post by einpoklum »

mopsi wrote: post #44
jumploops wrote: post #20

Admittedly, I miss the “old internet” too, however I have hope we can build it again. As I see it, there are two main issues to solve: 1) It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision? 2) The “early”…

> It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision? 1. Sign up to $5/mo virtual hosting service and choose a domain name. 2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress". 3. Open Wordpress. 4. Write…

> 1. Sign up to $5/mo

You already lost most people here.

> virtual hosting service and choose a domain name.

Actually, people don't even have to have a domain name for their webpage. But ignoring that - how will people know that this is what they need to do? "I want to create a homepage, I don't know what 'virtual hosting' is. I don't know why I need to be looking for 'services'."

> 2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress".

In their what now click what now?

How are you so sure this is always possible?

Also, what about search engines (cough-Google-cough) under-ranking individual pages in favor of larger, corporate-favored sites?

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#67

Post by cousin_it »

zubspace wrote: post #40

I just watched Inside [1], where Bo Burnham creates a wonderful, funny, sad and thought-provoking "Special" about our internet culture. Highly recommended. This is one of my favourite songs now: [2] It's a bit crazy when I think about how different our generations grow up and it makes me a bit sad that our children will have a completely different understanding of what the internet is. For me it was a place of wonder…

In retrospect, the old internet had plenty of derisiveness, toward targets like religion or copyright. Many of the loudest voices switched to today's morality movement without skipping a beat.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#68

Post by hypertele-Xii »

torh wrote: post #52
j_wtf_all_taken wrote: post #46

Its still there, its just buried under all the other crap. As more and more people generate content, more and more bullshit exists. Unfortunately, Google etc. - despite all their big announcements - can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit. Where's the semantic web that was promised? I wonder if we're still paying for the mistakes that were made with the whole XML stuff ...?

I have been playing with the idea of making good old internet portal. A curated list of links to the good stuff. No FB, medium, Instagram or anything like that.

So who takes on the full-time job of curation? Could probably get donations eventually, but the portal would have to sufficiently succeed first.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#69

Post by ajuc »

ferros wrote: post #4

In 20 years somebody will write an article about missing this ‘old’ internet from 2021. I wonder what they will miss.

> I wonder what they will miss.

Being able to log in without providing you national ID number. And being able to run a public-facing server without a permit.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#70

Post by Zak »

mrtksn wrote: post #31
markus_zhang wrote: post #17

I actually enjoy today's Internet much more. I'll lay out the reasons: 1) Easy access to many high quality contents. For example HN is a good platform for accessing new knowledge. Note that I say "access", not "learn". Reading HN sometimes give people the false impression that they are learning new knowledge, which usually is not the case. I treat HN as a platform to get a peek at certain new knowledge, but reading b…

> Easy access to many high quality contents. On the contrary, I would argue that the content quality is drastically lower because of optimisation for revenue and much less purer motivations. The video quality is really much much better though. Original video scene is great as the business side of the things is a solved problem. Yet again, it suffers from optimisation for advertisers as less and less things are kosher…

> On the contrary, I would argue that the content quality is drastically lower because of optimisation for revenue and much less purer motivations.

I think the signal to noise ratio has decreased, but that doesn't mean there's less signal; there's just a lot more noise.

Post reply on HN