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I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

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Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#271

Post by shrimp_emoji »

scruffyherder wrote: post #257
jasode wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and [...] I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate. Thank you for writing that. I…

Time scales too. Remember how long the death March to Chicago was? It was 1993 and NT had finally shipped, Linux was slightly useful and this was OS/2’s era to shine as Microsoft had stagnated with no consumer releases of any meaning post Windows 3.1. 1993 finished, and 1994 came and went as well. IBM pushed out Warp as this was their chance to arrive early, and then it was late summer of 1995 that Chicago finally sh…

I can't tell if this is a "getting older" thing or a "I got used to marking time with exponential growth in tech and tech-adjacent culture" thing.

2000 to 2010 felt like a huge jump, and it was -- you had the explosion of broadband, enabling huge MMOs like WoW which was a life-absorbing phenomenon for me, and computers and GPUs went from scrawny, green-board things to beefy, pro-sumer luxuries blazing with LEDs. Fat client IMs and social media redefined how we connected to people online.

Compared to that, 2010 to 2020 feels like an inertial flatline. We dropped Skype for Discord, which is the best IM since WLM (yet still inferior in many ways lol), GPUs have gotten beefier since they're purely parallel compute machines (and yet nearly 70% of people still have a 1080p display according to the Steam Hardware Survey[0], a resolution that was readily available on LCDs 13 years ago!). Motherboards have more LEDs than before, and look more and more like exotic alien space cities, which is awesome. SSDs have gotten... slightly bigger. Ray tracing and VR, which seem like the only major innovations of the decade, are both kind of here, but only kind of, and not enough for a WoW equivalent or genre to capitalize on. The games we play or their graphics haven't changed significantly. I started using Linux and learned exponentially more about tech than in the prior decade, and I now play those samey games on an open source OS, and that's cool. :p Crypto came, and a lot of security lessons have been learned in the tech world. That's nice. But it feels like bacteria filling out the blank spots of a petri dish that's stopped expanding.

0: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#272

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #261
barney54 wrote: post #60

This sentiment of missing an older internet is one reason like like Hacker News. Slash dot was great in the day. Digg was so great in the day. Then the early days of Reddit were great. I’ve been her for over ten years and Hacker News is still good. So thank you to the team that runs Hacker News and everyone who comments for making it a good place to come to.

What the hell happened to Slashdot? I was on it from 1997 until about 2010ish, and now it is pretty ugly. I think /. cratered due to poor moderation. It's just toxic. Digg is now like Axios for people who think link I do, so I check it daily. And reddit is, well, since the Digg/Reddit wars, its just become all-consuming and too noisy for me. I'm guessing HN has remained civil because paid mods--who strive to be objec…

On HN with its dang moderation that is often praised, I have noticed a tendency to ascribe Slashdot's fall to poor moderation. That wasn't actually how things happened, though.

Slashdot's decline started in the years around 2004 because of a site redesign that was taken very badly by the community, and the sale of the site to new owners who began to make all kinds of annoying changes with a view to monetizing. A lot of longtime users bailed out. It was only due to this loss of the productive participants that the site seemed to be taken over by low-quality posting.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#273

Post by vkk8 »

slver wrote: post #202
vkk8 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memes will be killed by some entrepreneuring copyright troll at some point. In many jurisdictions, memes would either break the copyright laws or at least be in the grey zone. It's only a matter of time before someone exploits this. After one case, the platforms will ban them to avoid the risk of getting sued themselves. The same will probably happen for gaming videos.

Really. All right, I'm looking forward to the author of dickbutt stepping up and claiming what's theirs.

The author of the dickbutt (if he/she can be found) might easily sell the rights to their creation to a copyright troll for one million dollars after which my scenario could take place.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#274

Post by andyfleming »

hyperpallium2 wrote: post #262
thom wrote: post #206

I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flame…

You used to be able to find high quality information, by people who loved the topic. Now the top search results are SEO commercial sites; the old sites are gone or filled with ads; and the new sites... there aren't any new sites like this. Maybe stackexchanges are the closest (recently sold).

The landscape has changed, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t high quality content available anymore. For example, a lot of content is on YouTube. That may or may not be someone’s preferred medium to consume, but there’s definitely good and niche content.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#275

Post by GuB-42 »

jiofih wrote: post #264
thom wrote: post #206

I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flame…

> I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it. But where? The venues where that happened are gone. You can have a public discussion with 100.000 eyeballs, but not the kind of more intimate, local environment that were earlier boards and…

Discord servers seem to be the place where it is happening right now. There are still some community forums, and maybe Facebook groups. On a more public scale, there are some well managed subreddits.

Edit: Plus the oldschool, geeky stuff like BBS, usenet, mailing lists, IRC etc... that still exist but are usually limited to technical people and subjects.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#276

Post by IIAOPSW »

scambier wrote: post #107
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".

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…

Always play at 1.5x and skip the first third. That's the secret. You can skim videos just like skimming text. It's a learned skill.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#277

Post by jghn »

foobarian wrote: post #268
thom wrote: post #206

I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flame…

The thing that's even easier to forget is that back then, a much smaller fraction of people were online and thus we had a very special self-selected group. Going on the Internet basically guaranteed you'd find someone interesting. Then the commercialization happened (Al Gore remember?), AOL hordes came in, trolls came in, jocks figured out how to use it, and it went down the toilet from there.

It's always September somewhere on the Internet ...

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#278

Post by flyinghamster »

imiric wrote: post #211
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".

Or even if there is a text article, it's obscured by cookie consent forms, ads, "subscribe to my newsletter" popups, padded intros and outros, and most likely scraped instructions from elsewhere. It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky with random search results.

> Or even if there is a text article, it's obscured by cookie consent forms, ads, "subscribe to my newsletter" popups, padded intros and outros, and most likely scraped instructions from elsewhere.

The worst are the ones that obviously scrape content from StackOverflow and then reword it.

> It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky with random search results.

This indeed, and DuckDuckGo automates it further with their bang shortcuts like !w for Wikipedia, or !reddit, !ebay, etc.

But even though DuckDuckGo has mostly shaped up to be a good alternative to Google (I rarely use !g anymore), it's vulnerable to SEO tricks in its own right. Searching specific sites helps a lot, but it shouldn't have to be that way.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#279

Post by v_london »

jiofih wrote: post #264
thom wrote: post #206

I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flame…

> I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it. But where? The venues where that happened are gone. You can have a public discussion with 100.000 eyeballs, but not the kind of more intimate, local environment that were earlier boards and…

Hey, I'm currently building a website that I think would fit well with what you're looking for. It's called Reason, and it's designed to help find small (3-10 users per chat or so) group chats about the topics you're interested in. I started working on this specifically because the casual, small places to meet like-minded people on the internet have kind of disappeared. http://www.reason.so/

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#280

Post by baobabKoodaa »

hyperpallium2 wrote: post #262
thom wrote: post #206

I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flame…

You used to be able to find high quality information, by people who loved the topic. Now the top search results are SEO commercial sites; the old sites are gone or filled with ads; and the new sites... there aren't any new sites like this. Maybe stackexchanges are the closest (recently sold).

People still make good websites. You just can't find them with Google (unless you're writing keywords to search for the exact site).
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