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I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

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Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#381

Post by TchoBeer »

gentleman11 wrote: post #342
trey-jones wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd rather have it harder to make a living in the music industry if it means the free sharing of music (and thus I have access to all music from all of history). We have more musicians in absolute terms than every before anyway.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#382

Post by stubish »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #276
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…

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.

I've ramped it up to 2.0, and am annoyed I can't go to 2.5!

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#383

Post by gentleman11 »

TchoBeer wrote: post #381
gentleman11 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd rather have it harder to make a living in the music industry if it means the free sharing of music (and thus I have access to all music from all of history). We have more musicians in absolute terms than every before anyway.

False. We have more musician gig workers, but the lack of any music movement in the last 20 years is because musicians don’t have an opportunity to develop their own styles while earning a modest living. We have an army of part timers and a few at the top. Meanwhile, you are just enjoying the freebies

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#384

Post by giantrobot »

goalieca wrote: post #249
bombcar wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some BBSes evolved into forums but even those were different. We lost the “local” based internet groups and we only really have “subject” based groupings anymore.

Yeah. Phpbb was a huge deal in the early 2000s. Then reddit came along with subreddits and Facebook groups took over. All stuff now happens under the curated moderation of the corporation that owns whatever hobby/interest.

You're omitting a major driver of the exodus from private forums to walled gardens. It's the same driver of many other problems: assholes.

Spammers killed many a forum because it became a full time effort by admins and moderators to remove them. Automated tools, especially early tools, had limited effectiveness. People running a site as a hobby don't want to spend their days removing spam comments.

Assholes also (for many reasons) will DDoS forums. This is another administrative headache for site owners if not a financial headache.

The same driving force saw blogs remove comments for centralized solutions like discus or abandon self-hosted blogs for Medium and the like.

While Facebook and reddit have plenty of spam issues the "owners" and mods of a group/subreddit are different from the site admins. There's a lot less financial risk for someone running a group there than their own server. They also let a wider swath of people run a group rather than only those that are interested in a niche topic, have the technical skills to effectively run a forums, and the money to pay for it all.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#385

Post by systemvoltage »

andrepd wrote: post #380
systemvoltage wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is simple: Use downvotes for rude and disrespectful comments. I am all for moderating a forum for pointless and useless comments. Most downvotes now-a-days are about disagreements. Using downvotes as a tool to push others into conformity is the shittiest part of HN.

I actually have a sort of nice idea about this: make your downvotes' worth be inversely proportional to how many downvotes you give. A person who gives 100 downvotes per month will have his downvotes count 1/20th as those of a person who downvotes 5 times per month. An incenctive to be really judicious in handing out downvotes and not simply using them to drown out minority opinions.

Interesting. I think we would still have the issue of 10 people piling up on a comment with downvotes, as judiciously as they can spend the budget.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#386

Post by gentleman11 »

jefftk wrote: post #379
gentleman11 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why do you say the music industry is destroyed? With streaming, music industry revenues are almost back to their late '90s peak, and the diversity of options today is incredible.

Music used to earn a lot of people a middle class income. Streaming only really benefits the top of the charts. Everyone else works part time and music innovation stagnates since risk is so much higher for anyone who actually wants to earn anything. App stores do this too, commoditizing apps - only 0.01% of apps make back their dev cost. So what if a handful at the top make a dump truck of money? Nobody but risk averse executives can afford to spend years at a time experimenting

https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/9999-in-10000-mobile-apps-...

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#388

Post by solipsism »

JasonFruit wrote: post #335
ip26 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pretty sure Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are exchanging ideas in the same way Jefferson and Madison did. These people all have something in common, though, even across time -- they were all influential, successful, well known people.

I don't think the average person at the end of the 18th century was having significant, long lasting, publishable correspondences.

It's interesting to me that you expect to have the kinds of experiences Jefferson and Madison did, instead of those the local butcher did. Don't know who you are, but maybe Nassim Taleb just hasn't gotten around to responding to your letters yet? :)

As for me, just like the local butcher of the 18th century, i mostly interact with my family and friends, have a few hobbies no one else really cares about, etc.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#389

Post by fuzzfactor »

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 internet had some different qualities when it was something that no-one had ever grown up with.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#390

Post by diydsp »

I haven't seen anyone mention my observations yet: The internet used to be a place we visited. Now we live there. Life was the abundant, fun thing, and like any mild intoxicant, 30-60 minutes of internet enhanced life.

We shuttled ideas between life and the internet, (let's look up how to make fireworks! Let's find girls online at other universities!) but money was much more difficult or impossible to transfer. We used to send a check to an ISP like several other mild media such as telephone and cable. Now we burn through electricity to verify our payments.

And not everyone was on the internet. It wasn't easy or immediately rewarding. No slick salesman put a phone into your hand for $50 and gave any dickwad keys to the universe. You had to put some effort into it and earn your place there. You had to put together a number of pieces of information from other experts, persistently asking questions and taking chances. It was a nifty club with other lucky, brave, dedicated, skilled people. We considered ourselves grateful and (more or less) treated it with respect, vs taking for granted that the space would never offend us and conquering territory for ourselves (social media) and filling it with lies for our own selfish ends (fake news).

Now everyone is there (...Here!) all the time. It's like living in a subway station. Yes you can have fun there, but surely it's better to be outdoors mostly and re-enter as desired.

It was not unlike an intimate relationship's honeymoon, versus living together and suddenly required to have a productive partnership and responsibility. Sure, it's fulfilling for many people, but the carefree, easy days are over. Yes, you can still go to html5zombo.com, but don't stay too long! Your bills are in that other tab. And the camera in your child's pre-school in the other. And you've got to finalize your purchases or the Amazon delivery window closes. And you've got to research everything finance related. And double-check all the news because lies abound. And don't forget to maintain appearances on linkedin. And keep learning, because everyone else is learning and they'll learn more than you. And your school is analyzing your child's every breath and keystroke.

That phone screen and browser window are the new eyes through which you're looking at the world. We have left the world behind and now nature becomes the 30-60 minutes of unknown amusement and delight we dream of rather than our proper home. Try to count how many half hours go by this week in which you a. are awake and b. don't touch the internet. It's not the internet we miss, it's its subordinate relation to the real world we miss.

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