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I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

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241–250 of 435 posts

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#241
post #72
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who cannot process video, agreed this is genuinely insulting. To me, the majority of knowledge distillation is quickly becoming like cheap snacking - you get a bit, it leaves you wanting, but is ultimately bad for you.

There are tools to download the automatic captions of youtube videos as text. I do this with a lot of videos.

Sounds useful.

Which such tools do you recommend?

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us here followed the same path. HN is good for now, but it has been changing. It's unlikely we'll still be here in a couple years.

Sadly, you are probably right. For better or worse, I keep thinking that invite only forum is the way go to maintain a decent level of 'interesting conversations'. HN still has them, but it is getting harder to filter through.

I think that that will work in the short term, but unless you're very proactive about recruiting new blood your userbase is just going to dwindle away.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#243
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".

Worse still, a lot of those videos are simply a content-creator (as opposed to an expert in the subject matter) teaching you how to do something that they learned how to do from another video (possibly by an expert).

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#244
post #215
post #30

Please sign my guestbook...

I miss guestbooks. It was great to see comments from visitors thanking the webmaster; it made it feel like each site had a small community around it. Nowadays such a concept is hidden behind CAPTCHAs or happens on external forums, so feels much more disconnected. Also, hit counters were rad.

> Also, hit counters were rad.

https://stuff.mit.edu/doc/counter-howto.html still works! I still use it alongside an old php guestbook script on my personal homepage.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#245
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".

So you say, but a lot of times the videos are a Godsend. I will never go back to written recipes (at least for an unfamiliar dish), for instance — why struggle to figure out how much a “dash” is supposed to be or get confused over how exactly to do something when I can just watch it performed?

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#247

Earlier 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.

Yeah, TikTok.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#248
post #37
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".

As someone who cannot process video, agreed this is genuinely insulting. To me, the majority of knowledge distillation is quickly becoming like cheap snacking - you get a bit, it leaves you wanting, but is ultimately bad for you.

I don’t understand. Has someone made it so you don’t have access to books anymore? The videos are additive.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#249
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet killed bbses. Bbses were local (or not) more personal, easy to make longterm friends, meetups in malls died with the bbses. I miss bbses. I resisted the internet switch for as long as possible. I remember the last c64 release..wasn't it monsters of mayham.. the graphics were amazing and the gameplay fast. Sort of like a mario world. BBS could be elite where you needed references. It could be local family…

Some BBSes evolved into forums but even those were different. We lost the “local” based internet groups and we only really have “subject” based groupings anymore.

Yeah. Phpbb was a huge deal in the early 2000s. Then reddit came along with subreddits and Facebook groups took over. All stuff now happens under the curated moderation of the corporation that owns whatever hobby/interest.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#250
post #84
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".

Say "thank you Google" for this one. This is how they decided to monetize the internet.

It's also opportunistic fact marketers.
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