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I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

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Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#331

Post by maccard »

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).

I've seen this sentiment more and more over the last few years here (and on Reddit). Can you give an example of some high quality content that loses out to SEO clickbait at the moment? As far as I can see, a "correctly" crafted query (read: the querymy parents would ask, not the query I would ask) will lead me to a well thought out response on Google 9/10 times, which is judtas often as it did 10 years ago.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#332

Post by ip26 »

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’ve found shared interest has actually been a very bad predictor of whether I’ll enjoy spending more than five minutes around somebody IRL.

isn't the internet's fault

An argument could be made on a tinder-ization of intellectual discussion. That is, it’s so easy to move on to the next stimulating discussion online that you are less willing to invest in chancy RL interaction.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#333

Post by jghn »

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…

> why am I not building lasting friendships with them?

I remember arguing with a high school teacher that 50 years in the future countries as we knew them would no longer exist. People would cluster online based on shared interests and goals.

That was 30 years ago. I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest it ain't happening the way I thought it would.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#334

Post by derefr »

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 know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to.

Yup. "Today's IRC" — the place for kids to idle around and make friends — isn't Discord; it's Minecraft. (Not that weird; Minecraft is a low-stakes graphical MUD, and MUDs have always served double-purpose as chatrooms.)

And "today's GeoCities pages" — shrines for an individual's personality, beliefs, and curated tastes — are now sprawling multimedia affairs split between a Twitch/YouTube streaming channel for community-engaged events; an Instagram/Snapchat for live stories/high-engagement lifelogging; a Discord/subreddit for async community engagement; and a Wordpress/Tumblr site with a comissioned custom theme to hold evergreen reference stuff, longform supplemental materials for videos, etc. (And maybe a Squarespace/Shopify/Redbubble store, too, if there's anything to sell; or a Bandcamp/Patreon, if the published online material is itself the thing to be sold.)

(Tangent: the number of different pieces of "heavy infrastructure" Internet plumbing required to make the modern approach to a "shrine of personality" work, should be a hint as to why people don't just make plain websites any more. They want to interact more with their audiences/fans/communities, and with higher fidelity, than a plain website / comments section / forum can offer; even more than a heavily-built-up Sandstorm.io instance could offer.)

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#335

Post by JasonFruit »

ip26 wrote: post #332
JasonFruit wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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’ve found shared interest has actually been a very bad predictor of whether I’ll enjoy spending more than five minutes around somebody IRL. isn't the internet's fault An argument could be made on a tinder-ization of intellectual discussion. That is, it’s so easy to move on to the next stimulating discussion online that you are less willing to invest in chancy RL interaction.

That is probably true. Maybe "lasting friendships" was not exactly what I meant, anyway; maybe "sustained interactions" would be more like it. I think about the way people in the past, like the Wright brothers with Octave Chanute, Jefferson and Madison, Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann, corresponded over decades, bouncing ideas off each other and honing their arguments, encouraging each other and keeping each other grounded in reality, and I don't know if that happens to the same extent today, even though it would be far easier and faster. Maybe I'm generalizing from outstanding examples in the past, and it never happened on a broad scale, but I'm inclined to think it did, and we're the weaker for not carrying it on.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#336

Post by queuebert »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #129
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".

To be fair, the reference documentation for 90s GUI programs was also excessively tedious in how it documented every single element and never quite explained how to actually do what you wanted. As prose, it was rather lacking. Videos containing the same information still somehow manage to be worse, though, no argument about that.

Unix man pages are the pinnacle of documentation, and you'll never convince me otherwise.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#337

Post by gentleman11 »

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…

Almost every blog I used to read 10–15 years ago has transitioned from a hobby to a form of content marketing or self-branding social media get-followers game. In that sense, a lot of the magic has disappeared. Maybe new people have taken their place and I just haven’t found them yet

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#338

Post by gentleman11 »

jl6 wrote: post #320
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…

You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning… And that, I think, was the handle— that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding t…

Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas by Hunter S Thompson, for anyone not familiar with the quote

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#339

Post by axiolite »

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".

> whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things

You can usually pull the transcript/subtitles, without watching the video.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#340

Post by gentleman11 »

andyfleming wrote: post #274
hyperpallium2 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s weird that YouTube and Google is now synonymous with “the internet.”
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