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The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

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Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#91

Post by marginalia_nu »

graycat wrote: post #81

Good to hear -- my startup wants to be one more example. Irony: The opportunity, goal, purpose of my startup is to help people find such Web sites, especially little or focused ones, that they will like . Or the short description of my startup is to help people find Internet content they will like , say, via, roughly search, discovery, recommendation . A novel part is that the site gets some new data via a likely so…

That's an interesting take.

Just curious how you plan to make money off this. I think profitability is what has killed most recommendation ventures. It's easy enough to find something that's fun (like StumbleUpon). But they usually eventually self-cannibalize by inserting ads in the recommendations.

On the flip side, if you attempt to do some sort of gated boutique thing where you need a subscription to see the results, you may encounter resistance when you attempt to discover recommendations (assuming you're crawling by yourself, which you'd almost have to I think).

Don't mean to be a downer, but profitability is arguably the hard problem to solve in this space.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#92

Post by reificator »

lol768 wrote: post #58
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By not collecting data it has no need for, and not passing that data on to third parties? By providing an ability to delete any user account, and for editing any personal information? By not using EBCDIC to store said information? Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be?

> Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be? A large proportion of folks on HN seem to think GDPR is "out to get" everyone rather than a set of common sense regulations that should not at all be a concern for an individual who's serving a blog or personal site and doing nothing to collect PII/track their visitors. I don't understand why this view is so prevalent.

> I don't understand why this view is so prevalent.

Fearmongering from those actually affected by these common sense regulations.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#94

Post by largely_sitting »

Corporate interest in the internet is going to shrink when people stop wanting data silos, and instead want open data storage with some programmable layer on top and nothing else. Corporate interest is high now only because of the exploitable future, but when it's found that the future is a bunch of open generic data tables and virtual machine on top, it's going to have a hard time competing with that. If Facebook, Google, and Amazon were all forced to use an open data storage system to house all their user data or become obsolete they would quickly become obsolete because advertisers would access it directly instead of paying them.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#95

Post by kradeelav »

amelius wrote: post #42
kstrauser wrote: post #5

I sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine . I made that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned that service from end to end and had completely…

The thing that is missing in the DIY website space is discoverability. Fix that, and you might have a chance of competing with big corporations. (In the old days we had "web rings", but I'm afraid that's not going to work today)

Why not, with web-rings?

I don't mean that snarkily: I have at least 2-3 webrings on my personal link page, and neocities is home to literally hundreds more.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#96

Post by ravenstine »

InefficientRed wrote: post #41
na85 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is your ISP?

Verizon FIOS residential fiber. (I've never had an ISP that allowed hosting HTTP servers in its TOS. But I've always hosted HTTP servers, and I've never had any issues. FWIW Gemini servers are also servers.)

Same, although I'm no longer doing what you're doing. With today's average bandwidth usage, I don't know why an ISP would seriously give a crap about someone hosting an HTTP server on their home IP unless it was dealing with some insane amount of traffic.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#97

Post by deckard1 »

jackson1442 wrote: post #59
pavlov wrote: post #30

> 'Some people use the term "Web 3.0" to refer only to decentralized blockchain-based networks without considering that all personal websites have essentially the same goals, be they on the regular Internet or on the new blockchain networks. Those who use the term "web 3.0" seem to have forgotten that self-hosted personal websites that run on home servers and are accessible over the regular Internet are inherently de…

I got bored the other day and thought it would be funny to make a copy of the most expensive NFT and set that as my Twitter profile picture because they added that silly feature. So I downloaded MetaMask, got everything set up, and went to one of the NFT marketplaces to try to make one. Uploaded the image and got a big scary warning: > (paraphrased; I don't have a screenshot) This image was found too many times on th…

Obfuscation is the point.

None of it designed to make it easy or to make sense. Because if people realized they are being taken for a ride, no one will show up and empty their wallets. It's what corrupt businesses and dictatorships do. Confuse and conquer.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#98

Post by Melatonic »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #36
madrox wrote: post #19

When Walmart started taking over consumer goods, everyone thought small business was dead. All that was really died was the general store, and we saw a rise in boutique storefronts. Depending on their niche, people craved more than the lowest common denominator that Walmart provided, and these small businesses filled a need. I've long held that social media is following a similar trend. Much like Shopify, the next wa…

I don't think this is correct. For somewhere in the range of 3 decades, companies like Walmart have decimated small businesses. "Boutique storefronts" have not replaced the stores that Walmart et al. helped to shutter all through the late 80s until today. They exist (mostly in large cities), but the reality is that small business, compared to the way it was in, say, 1974, did die . It might be true that things like S…

Yea I agree - Walmart and Amazon and all the giant corps have destroyed small businesses. We may be exposed to it less becuase like you said - the audience here lives in large cities where the population is diverse and wealthy enough for them to survive.

We have seen tons of boutique online vendors pop-up however. I wonder how the total diversity compares?

A new age "general store" that was a group of small online vendors getting together (shared ownership) might be an interesting way to resurge local business - imagine like a co-op but for small businesses all under shared physical locations. Products and vendors could even rotate out depending on the season and local population.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#99

Post by bsamuels »

sprkwd wrote: post #90
idiotsecant wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that there is a core of people doing real work in crypto who are not trying to peddle NFTs or other sleight of hand rungpulls designed to separate the gullible from their money. Ethereum, for example, is full of people building interesting things like off-chain low-cost trading using non-interactive zero knowledge proofs and actively working to make crypto less energy intensive and more useful. They…

> off-chain low-cost trading using non-interactive zero knowledge proofs As a layman, I’m not touching crypto until I know what this means.

Seems a little silly since one wouldn't expect most laymen to understand how TLS works, but enjoy: https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/05/zksnarks-in-a-nutshell/

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#100

Post by nullwarp »

aluminussoma wrote: post #31

The Internet today feels like a big box strip mall in suburbia. While visiting my home town, I looked for a local, independent hardware store. There was only Home Depot and Lowe's. Then I realize how few independent businesses were left. On the Internet, you have Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Much of the good content is hidden in their secret gardens (Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly Reddit). Discover…

Discovery really is hands down the biggest issue. I follow a lot of cool blogs and read a lot of neat stuff from them, but I found them mostly by stumbling upon them on Mastodon.

Actually side note one of my favorite ways to kill time is by going to https://wiby.me and hitting "Surprise me" and reading whatever comes up. I've really discovered some quirky but extremely fun spots on the web with it.

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