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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

#331

Post by naasking »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #279
AussieWog93 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I joined in the mid-00s and have to agree. Big social media and especially recommendation algorithms have ruined much of what made the old Internet fun. There's no longer the discovery or organic sharing; everything is just shoved down your throat by a soulless algorithm.

Ban algorithmic recommendation. It's the only way people actually start organizing and curating content. You know, like libraries do.

Interesting thought I hadn't considered before. Without algorithms, all aggregated content was curated by humans. With the advent of algorithms, a lot of this has probably stopped because humans just can't keep up.

Sometimes that's a good and useful thing, like with search engines. Clearly not always though.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#332

Post by no_time »

DoItToMe81 wrote: post #240

This is wishful thinking. The demographics of the internet have changed so much that you will NEVER get that 'old' back. You may get an imitation or evolution of it, but it will never return in full. The size of social media now is so gargantuan that almost every single member you get in an independent community will have been molded by it in some way, which is very different to how the webcultures of the day functio…

>their internet handle is their real life identity

I feel like the west forgot how to be pseudo-anonymous on the internet. If you take a look at Chinese or Japanese internet users they still mostly prefer distancing their meatspace self from their virtual identity.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#333

Post by naasking »

meheleventyone wrote: post #256
beej71 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'm misunderstanding. Wouldn't this just make us trust the people with the most money?

Being charitable I think they mean some sort of betting site where people put money behind opinions and lose it if they are wrong or gain it if they are correct. Giving a sort of wisdom of the crowds. This of course is still subject to some authority who can say what is right or wrong on any particular issue so doesn’t escape the trust problem. Also the credulousness of the current crypto users makes me question how…

> Being charitable I think they mean some sort of betting site where people put money behind opinions and lose it if they are wrong or gain it if they are correct. Giving a sort of wisdom of the crowds.

They're called prediction markets, and they already exist!

* https://www.predictit.org

* https://www.metaculus.com/questions/

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#334

Post by jeltz »

diamondage wrote: post #276
Gareth321 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 minute…

Whilst we can debate whether open source is better or worse code, noone debates whether open source has better or worse ux/ui. Clunky UI is what we expect from open source projects...if web 3.0 could create incentives for this phenomena to change.. It would be a lot more interesting

This is not true at all in all areas, especially not for tools aimed at devs. PostgreSQL has way better UX than any commercial database I have used.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#335

Post by agumonkey »

root_axis wrote: post #231
agumonkey wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say, with a very exaggerated tone :), it would be like saying you can still find trees in New York, so really nothing has changed since settlers came.

I don't think this is an apt analogy because trees were bulldozed to build the city, not true of the internet which has essentially infinite real-estate. Nothing was bulldozed to create the "new" internet, the new internet was created and new people joined it, the old internet just never achieved "web scale" and never could because it isn't a corporate product being driven by growth hacking and marketing spend.

fair enough, but even on the infinite web, i have a limited scope, and it's now filled with lots of annoyances, whereas in the past it was effortlessly chill all around

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#336

Post by jefftk »

root_axis wrote: post #231
agumonkey wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say, with a very exaggerated tone :), it would be like saying you can still find trees in New York, so really nothing has changed since settlers came.

I don't think this is an apt analogy because trees were bulldozed to build the city, not true of the internet which has essentially infinite real-estate. Nothing was bulldozed to create the "new" internet, the new internet was created and new people joined it, the old internet just never achieved "web scale" and never could because it isn't a corporate product being driven by growth hacking and marketing spend.

Pedantic aside: trees weren't bulldozed to build NYC, they were used for lumber and firewood far before the invention of the bulldozer.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#337

Post by lpcvoid »

vmception wrote: post #251
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…

(blockchain, smart contracts, people are experiencing this same feeling again there, many for the first time. they release something on a public utility that others can interact with, and a GUI behind a domain name)

It's just that there is nothing of value in regards to blockchain or smart contracts. They are a solution in search for a nonexistent problem, while heating up the planet.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#338

Post by cblconfederate »

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…

That's a very charitable assessment. The problem is the oversaturation of everything with politics (politics is the lowest-common-denominator subject that everyone can argue about). The loud politics minorities are so numerous now that they can easily sway the attention of even niche communities. You can see that most glaringly on reddit where pretty much all important conversations are destroyed by becoming the same old politics debates, like how /r/technology is politics or r/coronavirus is politics . Lots of people stay in HN exactly because it moderates against politics but HN exists because YC doesn't mind running an unprofitable site.

Most forums shut down because they are unsustainable, and the reason they are unsustainable is that the current mobile/social media vortex is hoovering all the attention. This leads to a negative spiral where people don't make good self-hosted forum software / community software anymore and so on.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#340

Post by lpcvoid »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #209
Melatonic wrote: post #66

I don't think Web 3.0 is going to be the kind of decentralization people are all hyping up now - we are still too close to Web 2.0 and the innovations are nebulous at best. However I do think there will be a Web 3.0 and it is going to come about when processing power, battery life, efficiency, global internet, and easy power generation all start reaching a critical point. Combine that with a general psychological bac…

What does the cheapness of power generation have anything to do with web3? If power was 1/10 the price, Proof of work blockchains would use 10X as much. But there is web3 and blockchains without proof of work

I think he means web 3.0 as a semantic followup to web 2.0, and not the useless crap that cryptobros want to push as "web3".
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