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I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

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Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#291

Post by a1369209993 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #132
pixl97 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"They" is a bit unfair here. The sequence seems to have been something like: (1) Advertisers: "We'll pay you $2 for a video ad, $1 for an image ad, and $0.20 for a text ad." (2) Google: "We should find a way to create more video ad space."

> "They" is []a bit[] unfair here.

Was going to disagree that it's unfair, but I suppose it arguably is exactly one bit (or ~0.3 orders of magnitude) unfair, since the parties at fault are Google and advertisers jointly, and the parent mentions one out of the two. Not sure how to rigorize that measurement, though.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#292

Post by agumonkey »

ori_b wrote: post #19
Kiro wrote: post #3

I remember the backlash against unique designs where everyone said they just wanted plain sites, with the information in focus. Now when big parts of internet basically have become standardized and sterile everyone wants these unique designs back.

It's not about the design, it's about the commercialization.

I agree wholeheartedly, it's the evaporation of genuineness. You know behind most stuff you see now, there's a monetization attempt eyeing at the corner, and since people think web is for mass scale of low hanging fruits .. that's what we get.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#293

Post by Black101 »

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 younger generation would be happy with an Internet that would constantly stream video content that they have ANY control over (AKA TV) ... that doesn't mean that it is better... WTF am I reading...

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#294

Post by flyinghamster »

raffraffraff wrote: post #213
ryandrake wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You reminded me of a failed experiment I did a while back with music tags. I still purchase music monthly (Bandcamp when possible), and I always tag music. I have a bunch of multi-value tags including 'instruments' and 'moods'. It works really well with a huge collection. I can quickly find songs similar to the one I'm listening to, or generate playlists. Anyway, a few years ago I thought I could speed up the tagging…

It reminded me of when I went through and ripped my CD collection. I'd estimate that almost a third of the album data was complete trash, and there were a shockingly bad number of spelling errors. I couldn't help but wonder if someone was deliberately poisoning data.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#295

Post by mda »

mrtksn wrote: post #31
markus_zhang wrote: post #17

I actually enjoy today's Internet much more. I'll lay out the reasons: 1) Easy access to many high quality contents. For example HN is a good platform for accessing new knowledge. Note that I say "access", not "learn". Reading HN sometimes give people the false impression that they are learning new knowledge, which usually is not the case. I treat HN as a platform to get a peek at certain new knowledge, but reading b…

> Easy access to many high quality contents. On the contrary, I would argue that the content quality is drastically lower because of optimisation for revenue and much less purer motivations. The video quality is really much much better though. Original video scene is great as the business side of the things is a solved problem. Yet again, it suffers from optimisation for advertisers as less and less things are kosher…

Completely disagree, there is probably 100x more content now compared to 10-15 years ago, sure garbage also increased but excellent content is there and internet of today is better overall.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#296

Post by neolog »

flyinghamster wrote: post #283
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 complai…

I'm sure I don't want to know, but what is 1/6?

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#297

Post by Sleepytime »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #189
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #127

Earlier 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?

IPFS mirroring would probably be ideal for simple websites like this.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#298

Post by neolog »

ryandrake wrote: post #193
vkk8 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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!

I'm not convinced. We don't work in defense contracting but that industry seems to be doing fine without us.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#299

Post by flyinghamster »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #290
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm kind of thinking that it was more about the new owners than about the site redesign.

I still visit /., but it just isn't what it used to be. If anything, the trolls are even more vile than they were back then.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#300

Post by code_duck »

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".

My issue is that I don’t find it convenient to watch a video at all. For answering simple questions, there are many drawbacks to the format compared to text. I can usually extract necessary information from text in seconds. I might have to turn on a video and wait several minutes to hear the relevant information or spend minutes searching through it. Info in videos is not searchable by keywords or easily copy/pastable, and I may be in an environment where I don’t want to turn the sound up.
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