I Miss the Old Internet (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#121

Post by EamonnMR » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:40 PM UTC

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.

Wiby.me and oldinter.net are both good starting points

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#122

Post by DavidVoid » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:40 PM UTC

RGamma wrote: post #63

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

If your link wasn't directed to a video that is LOUD AS HELL then your comment would've been fine. Why not redirect to the regular Rickroll video instead of fucking with people's ears?

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#123

Post by evgen » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

cdrini wrote: post #93

evgen wrote: post #9

Strange, as this author misses the internet that they remember from the mid-90s and I miss the internet from the days before people like the author even knew what it was.

I never got to use the internet before the mid-90s; what do you miss about it?

I miss a high bar for entry that meant most of the people online were at a relatively small collection of universities, tech companies, or government and public service agencies. It was elitist for sure, but sometimes that is not a bad thing and the level of conversation was something we will never see again.

I miss being able to read everything interesting on Usenet over a long lunch sitting in front of a vt220.

It was slow, but you didn't mind because it was all text based. The protocols were open and barely compressed so it was easy to explore and play around with things. A few hours in a wiring closet with a punch-down tool, a crimper, and spools of cable could be used to create magic.

There was no money to be made so no one took it too seriously. There were vast spaces to explore; we didn't know as much as we do now about what is and is not possible (and what can or cannot be solved with technical solutions to what turn out to be meatspace problems) so every crazy idea held a kernel of possibility.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#124

Post by CyanBird » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

grishka wrote: post #101

prepend wrote: post #64

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.

Not quite. Companies decided to monetize the internet, and because they want to earn all the money in the world, they want as many people as possible to use the internet. So they dumb it down to make it "easier to use".

> Not quite

You are just describing the same thing as OP said

And it is not even a matter of direct monetization, but growth into monetization

So yeah, OP is correct

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#125

Post by selimthegrim » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

failwhaleshark wrote: post #5

"I miss old ATX." "I miss old [X]." There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always missed. You can't go back without a time-machine.

I am pretty sure people were missing old ATX the day Heartworn Highways was released

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#126

Post by firekvz » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

It's just nostalgia

You could say that you 'miss the old _____' and apply it to almost everything in life and you will feel nostalgia for it, even to the point of looking for a way to get back to it and once you are trying it, you become meh and get back to the new thing, as you realize that it changed for good

This happens repetitively to me and my friends with tech/videogames, we are randomly chatting about how good it was some game (i.e) and we decide to try it again, some 20 minutes into it we are already pretending we are having fun when in reality we are bored/hating it

We might miss litle things, but it's quite hard to actually give a good reason to get back to something 'old' besides just nostalgia

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#127

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:42 PM UTC

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.

Portals are still sometimes made to make it easier to discover independent content, you aren't the only one concerned about this. However, the problem is that independent creators often stop paying for hosting or domain registration at some point, so any manually created directory eventually abounds with 404s.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#128

Post by vkk8 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:42 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #64

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.

I think that most of the filtering happened because different communities operated on different platforms rather than a single huge one like Reddit or Facebook.

A small, old time discussion forum for a specific interest in my (rather small) language had only perhaps a hundred active participants and another few hundred casual posters. In that sort of environment it is actually possible for the actives to get to know each other and have occasional live meetings, which builds a much better community. The threshold of participation is a lot higher since a new participant would first have to find the forum and then go through the registration process, both of which filter out people who were not actually that interested in the topic.

In Reddit or Facebook, any "community" (the word in quotations because I don't think they actually are very communal) for even a mildly popular topic gets filled with thousands and thousands of posts from thousands or millions of casual participants. The quality of the posts get very low, it becomes impossible for anyone to read all of them and personalities of the participants don't matter at all.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#129

Post by mananaysiempre » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:42 PM UTC

fabbari wrote: post #34

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".

To be fair, the reference documentation for 90s GUI programs was also excessively tedious in how it documented every single element and never quite explained how to actually do what you wanted. As prose, it was rather lacking.

Videos containing the same information still somehow manage to be worse, though, no argument about that.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#130

Post by sen » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

fabbari wrote: post #34

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".

Spam that right arrow on your keyboard to skip through and find the relevant part. I refuse to listen to all the filler drivel that’s designed purely to pad it out behind 10min for the increased algorithm love. Then we’re supposed to sit through sponsor ads when we already pay for YouTube premium. I’m all for patreon and supporting creators but it’s gotten ridiculous. Multiple “sponsor” sections in a single video and endless meta crap irrelevant to the actual video. Don’t forget to like this comment, subscribe, hit that bell, join our amazing discord community, follow is on Twitter for updates, comment below for a chance to win our giveaway… etc.