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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

#261

Post by taubek »

aeturnum wrote: post #171

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…

I do feel nostalgic about old days (I got on Internet in mid 90s) but as Internet has grown and matured so have I. I've never played MUD but I've used IRC a lot :)

Internet is now so much more than it used to be. Before you had to have much more knowledge to accomplish some things. It was not hard to learn but it was not accessible to everyone.

I see it like fetching a water from the creek or turning on the tap in your kitchen. You will get water in both cases. The first one requires more effort.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#262

Post by jhoechtl »

aeturnum wrote: post #171

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…

Well, the old internet was much about communities and enthusiasm. And these communities were diverse. It was feasible to operate your own blog server, where original content was published.

You either knew your communities through hear-say or search engines (read "The" search engine) found them. For a long time advertisement or the "attention economy" was not a thing.

Nowadays original content is hard to find and very much concentrated: Reddit, Stackoverflow. As search engines no longer seem to find relevant content from sites which do not pay add fees, there is no traffic to these sites.

In a sense money made the internet thrive and ruined a lot at the same time.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#263

Post by Gareth321 »

jabbany wrote: post #32

I feel like this article doesn't address the reason why people moved away from the "old" Internet --- most people only care about their _content_ not the particular technology that backs it. In the old times, you could only host content if you were really good with the technology. The people who had websites were people who knew how to set up and run a web server, and to compose the HTML content that was being served…

I fully agree. Technical people often get lost in the weeds. I recall someone trying to extoll the virtues of a self-hosted YouTube alternative (the name escapes me). To him it was clearly superior to YouTube. So I installed the solution, and spent an hour trying to set up and subscribe to the required indexing services. I gave up and went back to this person and explained that no one is going to spend even 10 minutes messing around if they just want to see funny cat videos.

I've built my career on trying to explain this human element to technical people, and if anything, my job security only improves year over year. I see this same attitude in the Linux community: a willingness to work around UX issues because of perceived benefits in other areas. This is why Linux remains such a niche OS for consumers. No user should ever, for any reason ever, have to open a CLI to install a program. But try arguing that on any distro forum and expect a world of hurt.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#264

Post by piokoch »

aeturnum wrote: post #171

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…

I do understand such people. A lot of forums died, they were moved to Facebook groups, since this is so simple to create a group. As a result some communities are not accessible or annoying to use for those without Facebook.

In Europe GDPR was the last strike, nobody is going to maintain forum while being forced to be responsible for "Integrity and confidentiality" of registered user's data. Who will risk huge fines because phpBB has some bug and "precious" user data like first and last name were leaked? Who will deal with "right to be forgotten" requests, who will respond with requests to download user data and so on - even if software has such capabilities, responding to user requests is time consuming and big no-no for hobbyists.

End result is that everything that is happening, is happening on Facebook, maybe Reddit, obviously there are niches, like HN, but there is less and less of them.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#265

Post by nuccy »

jhoechtl wrote: post #262
aeturnum wrote: post #171

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…

Well, the old internet was much about communities and enthusiasm. And these communities were diverse. It was feasible to operate your own blog server, where original content was published. You either knew your communities through hear-say or search engines (read "The" search engine) found them. For a long time advertisement or the "attention economy" was not a thing. Nowadays original content is hard to find and very…

For me the enthusiasm part was very important in car DIY forums, communities of which nowadays moved not even to facebook groups but to messengers. Which in a first glance sounds great, since you can be assisted in real time. But in reality what was created in messengers remains there never being indexed by search engines so the knowledge cannot be shared with non-members.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#266

Post by graycat »

yyyk wrote: post #245
graycat wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>a convenient, low overhead, way to move many small amounts of money to pay for Internet usage. AKA digital currency. For this we can simply use a digital currency (crypto or otherwise). NFT is irrelevant here, an extra unnecessary complication when the same thing could have done with the ETH chain it's already based on, or a new side-chain or many other methods.

Thanks!

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#267

Post by onion2k »

as late as 2015, 2.1 million people were somehow still using its dial-up service

That number is how many AOL Dial Up customers there were in 2015. It's from this article - https://www.cnet.com/news/more-than-2-million-people-still-p...

Paying for the service is not the same as using the service. There are many reasons to pay for a redundant dial-up connection in case of an outage with your main internet provider. There are probably lots of people who had a dial-up account but forgot to close it. Some people probably did still use it, but for things they don't need broadband for (email, IRC, etc).

You can't use the existence of a handful of dial-up connections to claim we should be building web software for people on dial-up. That just shows you haven't thought about things enough.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#269

Post by usrusr »

arvinsim wrote: post #195
matheusmoreira wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. That sense of ownership has been lost. Now corporations own everything. Nobody wants a domain, they want a @name on some social media platform. Nobody wants their own website, they want to post on social media. ISPs have cgNAT now, nobody is directly connected to the internet. Everything is just so boring .

I am pretty sure a lot of people want their own website and domain. It's just that a lot more inconvenient to have and manage one for most people.

The subjective reward has gone down though: back in the days of webrings and the visit counter gif cgi, writing some content and then maybe fill in one or two "under construction" placeholders some months later you could easily delude yourself that you were on track to an amazing future. Perhaps not altavista.digital.com amazing, but maybe becoming something like a respected resource in your niche of a niche. Today there are so many lower hanging fruits luring from inside the walled gardens...

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#270

Post by skinkestek »

root_axis wrote: post #259
skinkestek wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An analogy that works here is "used all the oxygen in the room".

I don't think this is an apt analogy either because it still suggests that something was lost, when that's not the case, rather the internet grew in new places that have come to dwarf the places that came before. The overwhelming majority of users on the new internet didn't exist on the old internet.

> I don't think this is an apt analogy either because it still suggests that something was lost

Here we disagree and you are wrong ;-)

Of all the old forum lore most of it is lost for the overwhelming majority of internet users.

Some copies exist on old drives here and there, some exist in the internet archive but nothing has been migrated to newer platforms.

Mailing lists were for a long time conserved by Google but forums just disappeared.

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