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I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
191–200 of 435 posts
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Counter culture is about people and what they want to express, sometimes it might be important "how", but for a lot of hobbies "how" is not that much important as long as it is clear and easy to do. The danger is that a lot of counter-culture movements aren't exactly welcomed by the major providers. Anything involving sex or sexuality - no matter if nudists, swingers, poly-amory, LGBT, fetish beyond 50SOG-style or…
Is it a danger? What is the upside of having nudist/sex-workers/poly amory group having millions of followers? For all of those activities it is best to keep it in small trusted groups of people. If you are really dedicated to that stuff you will find your way. Then is it really a counter culture if it can have millions of followers?
Relying on centralized entities is a danger for the movements themselves, as the nsfw community found out when Tumblr banned all of that virtually overnight. Or when PornHub banned everything not commercial (I do understand that this was due to revenge porn, which PH had ignored for years, but doesn't change the side effects!)
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
This orange website is truly a fascinating place. We reminisce about the old, less commercialized internet while rubbing shoulders with the people who made it the way it is today.
Indeed. I find it extremely ironic how people here - of all places - are sympathetic to this sort of stuff.
And we (software professionals) are the ones with the power to fix it! It seems obvious but the answer is to just stop working on products/companies that are making the Internet worse!
“Ads are annoying and intrusive!” posts the HN commenter whose next Jira ticket at work is to integrate a new ad SDK into their product.
I’ve quit jobs that I believed were making the world a worse place. Software Engineers supposedly are in demand and have the power to pick their projects and companies. Be part of the solution then, and not part of the problem.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#194I 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 almost never watch videos, unless it's the necessary medium for the context (i.e. music teaching or movie analysis), because I _need_ text to learn. But. Two weeks ago there was a small video on Discord that crashed the client when you played it. Here's a 8m30s long video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBNQ6tiNcI tl;dw: they used ffmpeg to stitch 2 videos with a different aspect ratio tog…
You should check out sponsor block
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Includes the very worst part of echo chambering though. Don’t like someone OR their comment? Just do your part with three other people and it’ll be faded, once it’s faded other people will join in hiding the bad man who said the bad thing - and gone! No more contrarian opinion, we protected other people! Everyone agrees now. How wonderful.
How ironic. I agree, downvote-based discussions invariably lead to echo chambers / monocultures. See the dumpster fire that are reddit comments. At least on old-time forums there was no such bullshit (except post count :)).
You can’t crowdsource quality. Comment voting systems only tell you what is popular, not what is high quality. So many sites make this mistake, including HN.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#196I 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…
If I had to distill four decades of "mass Internet" transformation into one phrase: Independent creator culture (1980-2000), converted into mass consumer culture (2000-2010), and then back into taxed creator culture within walled ecosystems (2010-2020).
The book "The Master Switch" explains how radio, film and cable TV went through the exact same phases. It's worth a read if you find this transformation interesting.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why are you not skipping the bullshit Honestly? Because I was expecting to hear something interesting at any moment. When I saw the length, I expected to see a technical explanation, a step-by-step how-to, a live example with the ffmpeg CLI. Anything remotely interesting. What I absolutely did not expect was a 6 minutes long "introduction" out of a 8:30 minutes video. All of that to finally say "it's 2 videos stitc…
Is there enough of a market for extremely short YouTube videos so that people could make a living just making “It’s 2 videos stitched together”? Honestly, my heart wants it to be true.
Short videos get killed by the YouTube algorithm since it’s difficult to show ads.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#198I 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".
That’s where the money is. I fuckin’ hate it.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What about a curated directory of archive links to decrease the rate of link rot?
I would suspect that even fans of independent content would be turned off by browsing through a large amount of Wayback Machine links, because Archive.org insert their own markup, and often the images in posts don't get archived.
People like using the Wayback Machine when they know that certain content used to exist, but not necessarily to discover new things unfamiliar to them.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#200Sadly the current state of the internet was predictable.