181–190 of 409 posts
"The Internet itself seems to many to have degenerated into a giant advertising tool. And, a high percentage of websites load as slowly as a sick turtle awaking from a long slumber." Is there a connection between these two statements?
Maybe he is alluding to the fact that adding megabytes of shit JavaScript to profile and serve ads is what is making the pages load so slow.
I don't think the old internet ever went away, instead the commercial internet exploded, in some ways good in some ways bad. If you want to create and showcase your own stuff you have a ton more options than you used to, it could be nostalgic HTML pages with blinking colors or some slick thing on a prefab site builder, up to you.
Most of it did. It was dropped from search engine indexes and died from starvation.
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…
I want my BBS! This text could blink
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> Discovery needs to be reimagined. Google search directs traffic but now everyone has a SEO manager to get their site to the top. If we want to see the Internet like before, original content needs to be prioritized over content like Pinterest, without needing to do anything special. Discoverability is a big part of why the independent web is struggling. And it's not just big tech's fault, people are really bad at li…
I definitely agree with this point. Discovery in the long-tail of content (without resorting to sort by new which is a nightmare) is a must solve problem in a independent/decentralized web. I have a feeling the "answer" is "all of the above" options; the ability to choose what discovery/recommendation mechanisms to use. Being intentional about which lens your viewing your recommendations through. Being able to easily…
Same problem with information discovery—trust, reputation, it’s all the same social mechanism. Any public signaling will be degraded by information asymmetry. My point is that content discovery is a hard problem.
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I'm no fan of NFT (non-fungible tokens) crypto and do not now, never have, never intend to own any, but, and maybe part of Web3 , am guessing at some useful purpose -- a convenient, low overhead, way to move many small amounts of money to pay for Internet usage. E.g., Sam runs a Web site and wants to charge each user some small amount, say, $0.001 up to $0.10, including users in foreign countries, for each visit. Sam…
This seems to be, disregarding the entire meaning of "non-fungible" ? NFT doesn't mean "token". If you just mean "token", say "token"? Unless you mean like, "tokens which represent a fractional share of a particular NFT" ? But why would you use this as the thing to denominate payment in? If Joe has $5 worth of something, and Carl has another $5 worth of the same thing, and outcomes are equivalent if they swap what th…
I'm a total novice in the world of NFT (Google says that abbreviates "non-fungible token"). You are way ahead of me. I'm such a novice that I don't yet even know how to use the words!
I don't yet fully understand your lessons!
Maybe roughly I have the scenario of Joe, Sam, and the long term investors correct.
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 barrier of entry was actually lower than that. We didn't need to stand up an Apache server. We could just sign up for a Geocities/Xoom/Tripod account and upload HTML or use the built in site editor to create content. Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content. These chronologically organized articles and content have d…
Consider that one of the premier features of the Jetbrains IDE is "search everywhere" which will search command help text for you as well and then return the command as a possible result - much easier to describe what you're trying to do and be led to the exact command, then try to understand the mind of the person who did the categorization.
I have never understood people who mourn the death of the "old" internet because I do not feel I have lost it. Particular communities come and go, as they always have, but I have found that the I can find the same sorts of gathering places for the same kinds of people I always have - in about the same numbers too. The thing that has changed is that a huge swath of new people have come online and, though some of what…
The thing is, the "old" Internet was always somewhat anemic compared to the "new" Internet. It was never all that big. IRC channels I was in that felt like communities would stay dead for hours at a time, and sometimes topped out at under 100 members. Yet, they had a feeling of community that I rarely experience much on today's internet.
With how many people are on the Internet today, you'd expect that this standard could be upheld even with minimal participation, but I find that not only are there less people participating in the "old" internet, but also in addition to that, the people still participating have far less of their attention and time dedicated to it. As it was, the "old" Internet was, as many things are, powered by the unpaid time and effort of a relatively small number of people. Those people still exist, but their attention is far more divided. There's just more stuff going on overall. The "new" internet allures people with more "passive" participation vs the active participation that was often demanded by forums and IRC channels.
As an icing on the shit cake, you link to Fandom/Wikia as a community hub. Fandom and its behavior has torn apart a lot of smaller communities with its practices. See, for example, what happened when the Touhou wiki's community collectively decided they no longer wanted to be on Wikia: old administrators were banned, new ones were appointed by staff, and now the site is effectively forked. Apparently, if a wiki is too important for ad revenue, the admins will literally just fork your site. Of course, I'm not saying they did anything illegal, but what they did is a major fuck you to the community that poured hours of work into the site. It would be like a forum host that decides to ban all of the admins and appoint its own in their place. Maybe a bit like Reddit...
While I don't know exactly how much and why the "old" internet is dead, I do have my suspicions that it has a lot to do with the evolution of monetization on the internet. My hope is that the patron model can help here...
> Just as radio stations, newspapers, and television networks were the communications gatekeepers of earlier generations, we now have Internet gatekeepers keeping us in line, on line--preventing our voices from being heard by too widely I am about the same age as the author of this piece. I think they are making a fundamental error with his comparison. "Back in the day", radio stations, newspapers and television netw…
I think it is a fair comparison they just did not state it fairly well. Back in the day you could create your own radio station too or make your own TV content and do it relatively affordably. But reaching a massive audience was multiple times more difficult and required help of one of the gatekeepers. With the internet you can be heard more widely and cheaper yet (comparatively) but again if you want to really relia…
This is not true.
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since they want to sell the more expensive business plan. And forbidding something in the terms makes it easy for them to cancel your account in case they have a different reason.
We make people pay for a business account and extra on top to get a static ip. The amount of support from people that know just enough to think they need to do home hosting is a multiple more than a typical home user. The people that actually know what they are doing have to pay more but I never hear from them.