411–420 of 435 posts
To clarify, I didn't wrote the article https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/i-miss-the-old-intern.... A guy named Jonathan Scott Griffin wrote it. I tried to find him because I want to send him a message that I have posted his article on HN. I found his medium profile https://medium.com/about-me-stories/about-me-jonathan-scott-... (not sure if it's him).
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 landscape is very different; I'd argue society is not in a better position as a result.
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Includes the very worst part of echo chambering though. Don’t like someone OR their comment? Just do your part with three other people and it’ll be faded, once it’s faded other people will join in hiding the bad man who said the bad thing - and gone! No more contrarian opinion, we protected other people! Everyone agrees now. How wonderful.
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 :)).
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Unix man pages are the pinnacle of documentation, and you'll never convince me otherwise.
No, not really. (This is the only way an informative answer to this comment can begin.) If you’re talking about original man pages from volume 1 of the Unix manual (as found on e.g. http://man.cat-v.org/unix_v7 ), then yes, they indeed make superb reference documentation. However, even their authors recognized that reference documentation alone is not enough, and thus included a collection of (much less streamlined)…
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I agree. I think HN in the perfect combination of the old internet, with the text-only posts, and the web 2.0 way of doing likes and threaded conversations. And, of course, the moderation keeping it all in check. I'm grateful that I can come here every day.
HN is not anything like the old internet forums or BBSes. Content would get moderated but you could still read messages. Even the ones that went against the dogma. Not at HN, anti-dogma posts get downvoted into oblivion or flagged if they are bad enough. I recently posted a counter-opinion on burnout and was downvoted pretty badly. I didn't flame, and tried to articulate my point well. HN is composed of the exact mic…
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Roblox is indeed a MUD, but I would argue that Roblox contains too much varied niche "game content" to meet the needs of kids looking for a platform for mediated socialization. Not enough of the people who are playing Roblox are playing it just to socialize. You get more of the MMO experience (or, I guess, the "social multi-game lobby" experience, ala NeoPets), where no strangers want to stop and talk OOC; they only…
What is a MUD?
Many multiplayer online games played today have a heritage that comes from the MUDs. Minecraft is certainly one of them and fills a similar niche, though to categorize it as a MUD seems strange, unless any multiplayer virtual world with an ROG-like element is also a MUD.
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I think that that will work in the short term, but unless you're very proactive about recruiting new blood your userbase is just going to dwindle away.
It's true that HN has gotten more crowded with more noise, but it is still the best there is. I won't be going anywhere. I am constantly amazed at the thoughtful comments from people who are informed on a subject and take their time to layout a cogent argument. This makes it worthwhile to spend some time scanning more and more other stuff. I am getting to be quite a speed reader in this place. HN will be just fine as…
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> 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 flamewar about it. But where? The venues where that happened are gone. You can have a public discussion with 100.000 eyeballs, but not the kind of more intimate, local environment that were earlier boards and…
Hey, I'm currently building a website that I think would fit well with what you're looking for. It's called Reason, and it's designed to help find small (3-10 users per chat or so) group chats about the topics you're interested in. I started working on this specifically because the casual, small places to meet like-minded people on the internet have kind of disappeared. http://www.reason.so/
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Old internet had a bit RTFM and show your work to solve this before asking questions culture too. And were pretty curmudgeony back in the 90s on irc. Tbh its reasonable to ask people to bother to search for a minute before askinf questions, and if you tell people i tried searching with this before asking, they’re a lot more friendly. That sense of community is there with discord, you gotta use that.
It was different. If you go for example on a Facebook group to ask a legitimate noob question they will not answer you, or make fun of you. In the old days in the forums people were more friendly, and for example explained to others even stuff that is considered simple enough, or pointed up good material to read. The only exception is of course if someone asked a question already answered in another topic, and thus t…
I don’t know if this is true, but personally I wasn’t even aware Discord had voice chat support until I read your message.
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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.
The top results (including youtubers) gave the right answer, but the wrong reasons. You have to get down to the 5th (Sheldon Brown's) for expertise (it's "precession"). Sheldon passed away a few years ago, and now his site has ads - a limitation of personal websites.
> a "correctly" crafted query (read: the querymy parents would ask, not the query I would ask)
Can you elaborate please; an example?
Maybe you mean a grammatically correct sentence, which good for finding answers on forums, but I'm more interested in an expert's whole site.
Note that correct terminology is half the battle for searching, perhaps much more!