111–120 of 435 posts
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.
It's not the old internet you miss, it's some of the things that were in the old internet. The same things could be in the internet today. It's not the old internet you're looking for. Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.
The old internet was only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget...The magic is only in what the internet says, how it stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
The old internet showed pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.
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.
Climate change has produced their own religious zealots.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 "…
Why has the tech community at large completely failed to educate people on the basics of something used by billions of people daily and affecting increasingly-important parts of their lives?
Is it because we keep infantilizing them the way you seem to be doing, pretending they are too stupid to learn anything new? Or is it because in an effort to simplify, everyone simplifies to a different way, resulting in even more complexity? Or is it because tech really doesn't care and sucks at explaining anything?
A bit of all three (and probably more) if you ask me
I remember the backlash against unique designs where everyone said they just wanted plain sites, with the information in focus. Now when big parts of internet basically have become standardized and sterile everyone wants these unique designs back.
It's not the same thing. What everyone misses are the personal, hobbyist, non-commercial websites. This was replaced by things like Facebook, Wikia, Pinterest, Twitter, Medium, which are both constrained and ad-ridden. A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr. The "every site looking the same" thing is fine, however, and still preferred for commercial sites, government, newspapers, startups, other utili…
It will be a sad sad day when/if Tumblr gets shut down. I really appreciate the fact that users can customize their own pages in many more ways than just changing their profile picture and header image, it gives it a lot more personality than you can get on Instagram/Tumblr/Facebook.
It also has a timelessness that you don't really get on other sites, at least not to the same degree. Posts have timestamps, but on the dashboard they're only visible if you look for them. So most people don't notice if the post they just reblogged was originally posted yesterday -- or seven years ago. This also gets rid of much of the repost issues you see on Reddit and similar sites, since the original post can remain relevant for much longer.
I miss text. It seems now that whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things. A 10 minutes video with the usual 'subscribe and hit the bell icon', a word from the sponsor, a long winded introduction and then "click on menu, then click on this item, then select the size".
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…
Go back past the search engines, and most knowledge simply wasn't on the internet yet.
Below are some relevant articles I keep going back to that highlight the same phenomenon on the 'decay' of web as a platform (by decay I mean extreme commercialization, excessive bloat, endless tracking and whatnot) made by the linked forum post's author: * https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/ * https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ * https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/the-world-wide-web-is-d... Can't help but agree with m…
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”…
If these people were accessing the internet from a home computer they could just install a simple static webserver and put HTML files, jpegs, gifs, etc in a folder, forward ports on their router, and bam, they're on the web.