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I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

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Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#281

Post by christophilus »

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).

Search engines were pretty crappy when I first used the internet in the 90s. I’m not even sure that we had search engines, actually. Anyway, crappy search results were par for the course. The interesting content required some work to find. I think it’s still the same. There’s more content than ever, and a huge % is crap. Maybe that % is larger today then when we started, but there’s still a trove of good stuff out there. Way more, in absolute terms, than when I started.

I’m thankful for the internet and the career it’s given me. There’s plenty of room for improvement, but all the same, it’s pretty great.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#282

Post by jakelazaroff »

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…

This crystallized for me during a discussion about which websites people missed, when someone said “I would say Purevolume but there’s nothing that it did that SoundCloud or Bandcamp don’t do just as well”. I realized that it’s not the websites I’m nostalgic about — it’s the people, the culture and my younger self.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#283

Post by flyinghamster »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #237
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.

For me, HN suffers in the comparison to Slashdot, because HN is an example of the arguably overmoderated internet of today. Slashdot had a vibrant culture of troll posting. It wasn’t just dumb one-line slurs or whatever, which no one would want to see. Rather, it was often longform text crafted to a downright literary quality, to the point where many Slashdot regulars would choose to browse their discussion threads a…

On the contrary, I feel that "troll culture" is (along with commercialization) one of the things that has ruined the net. It's basically a form of bullying, and over the years, as bullies do, they've steadily escalated in their trolling.

Harmless pranks from the 4chan crowd morphed into harassment campaigns like Gamergate and Pizzagate, then to 1/6 [edit: the storming of the US Capitol].

Anyone disingenuously complaining that their "freedom of speech" is under attack because they or their hero got booted off Facebook, Twitter, or some small forum, needs to learn to distinguish between private website operators and the government.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#285

Post by mattkrause »

JasonFruit wrote: post #253
cloverich wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly I strongly agree with everything you said and also just wanted to say this was a very eloquent description that i hope i remember a year from now. I wanted to suggest a kind of alternative for discussion. I think there was something magical about the early web in that it offered a new way of interacting with the world that did not previously exist. It was difficult or impossible to find people that shared my…

> When i read on HN and realize just how many people there are like me, or that there’s people that are also way too into disc golf, acoustic guitar, or any other semi niche activity i wonder why it is so hard to make more regular connections and interactions with them. That hit me in the truth. I feel like that a lot: if I know these people exist, and care deeply about the things I care about, why am I not building…

I am much the same way....but it would also make my day if someone reached out like that. Go for it! (I should too!)

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#286

Post by a1369209993 »

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…

> they used ffmpeg to stitch 2 videos with a different aspect ratio together, so it crashes chromium.

Do you have link to that video? It sounds more (read: at all) interesting than the one you linked.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#287

Post by shrimp_emoji »

emodendroket wrote: post #239
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 completely agree. A lot of times I'll see people dig up old stuff from Something Awful forums or whatever and... honestly it's not as funny as I remember. It's just as lame and stupid as what people are passing around today.

Have you ever lurked wallstreetbets? It seems (or seemed, before the Gamestop stuff brought many new people in) like a sorting function for the now-older SA/4chan demographic, and they're the most consistently hilarious people I've ever seen on the Internet (still toxic af, of course, but less-so than in the old days, like tastefully mellowed with age).

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#288

Post by sircastor »

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…

I wonder if after the current Tik-Tok/YouTube Shorts/other version of video settles down we’ll start to see videos that don’t need to be long utilize this format and that will get pushed into search results.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#290

Post by SavantIdiot »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #272
SavantIdiot wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I remember the site UI change, but I was mostly grumbling because it looked even more 1990's post-redesign. I didn't realize that cause people to leave en masse. I'm surprised UI was more important than discussion, esp. when the UI change wasn't really that dramatic, IMHO.
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