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I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

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Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#341

Post by TaupeRanger »

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…

It's a bit of a downer response. I think there's plenty to get excited about on the internet still, and I'm in my 30s. You don't have to accept boredom/apathy as a consequence of aging, although the catalysts will change. I don't expect an adult to scream with jubilation about toy trains.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#342

Post by gentleman11 »

trey-jones wrote: post #254
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…

As far as I'm concerned it has nothing to do with joy. The internet enables a lot of things that can improve human knowledge and prowess. It also enables the opposite. This has always been the case, but I think the hindrances are progressing faster than the helpers. Here are a couple of the best things that I think the internet provides, both of which have been around basically since its inception: 1. Instant communi…

That free sharing of knowledge more or less destroyed the music industry, and commoditized many other things too. It’s extremely hard to make a living wage at many things now. We have a fake gig economy to replace middle class jobs

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#343

Post by gentleman11 »

erikbye wrote: post #231
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…

Yeah.. this younger generation you speak of will at some point lament about Discord or Snap with the same nostalgia. Maybe.

Won’t be long. Discord is in talks to be sold. I can see it becoming as scummy and invasive as LinkedIn or Facebook depending who buys it

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-talks-buy-discord-m...

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#344

Post by emodendroket »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #287
emodendroket wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Not for me but I probably would have liked it when I was younger.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#345

Post by emodendroket »

joshspankit wrote: post #327
emodendroket wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, TikTok.

Hahaha, I knew this comment was coming. Fun fact: TikTok is experimenting with longer videos. I think they’re up to 3min already.

Eventually all these things converge on an identical feature set, I guess.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#346

Post by DamnInteresting »

maccard wrote: post #331
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).

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.

I have some first-hand experience with this problem. I'll give a specific example:

In 2005 I published one of the Internet's earliest articles on the "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon"[1], also known as Frequency Illusion. In the intervening 15 years, thousands of sites have linked to my article, so you would think it would rank really well.

Instead, my article is barely on the first page of Google's search results. Above mine are more recent copycat articles, few of them containing any meaningful details beyond what I included in mine. Some of them are so similar that they are clearly just lazy rewrites of my article (similar jokes, etc). They appear to be ranked higher than mine solely due to being more recent, and presumably some SEO shenanigans.

This is not the only example--far from it--but it's one of the clearest.

[1]: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomeno...

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#348

Post by mkr-hn »

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…

The problem is the bulk of the demand is at the places with all the money, and those places mostly make the ads, show the ads, or serve companies that make or serve the ads.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#349

Post by jcfields »

ryandrake wrote: post #195
andrepd wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How ironic. I agree, downvote-based discussions invariably lead to echo chambers / monocultures. See the dumpster fire that are reddit comments. At least on old-time forums there was no such bullshit (except post count :)).

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.

Slashdot tried to solve this problem by making mod points limited and requiring you to give a reason for moderating a comment. Then there was a metamoderation system where you decided if the moderation someone gave was fair or not. If someone consistently doesn't use the moderation system correctly (and the metamoderation system is successful in identifying this), they don't get mod points anymore.

It didn't work perfectly (obviously the site is still highly opinionated in favor of certain things, like Linux and free software), but it also wasn't the smooth-brained hivemind that Reddit comments sections are. I can't think of another site that's even tried to come up with a better moderation system than simple up/down votes. At best, there are some behind-the-scenes algorithms that decide how exactly to prioritize comments based on the voting, but that's derived from popularity as well. An immeasurable side effect of this is that many heterodox comments simply aren't posted at all since people know they're going to be downvoted to oblivion anyway.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#350

Post by ALittleLight »

rvense wrote: post #181
scambier wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 learned recently that you can make tea from roasted buckwheat. I googled it, and found a seven minute video of a man making tea with his daughters. And I don't mean an artful exposition or something, just full-on Youtube "yo what's up welcome back to the channel so since last time we've been really loving BUCKWHEAT TEA here's how to make it don't forget to LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE" drivel around pouring water on buckwhea…

A weird thing I learned while working on my own YouTube channel is that saying "Like and subscribe" actually does work. As in, you get more likes and subscribers by saying it compared to not saying it. It's like people need to be reminded that they can or should click those buttons.

I could never bring myself to say it at the start of a YouTube video but I added it at the end and saw improvements in the analytics from videos that had the reminder versus not.

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