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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

#361

Post by 0x445442 »

cblconfederate wrote: post #338
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…

> HN moderates against politics

I would push back on this quite a bit. Many of the posts and discussions on HN are political masquerading as science.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#363

Post by mrlemke »

squarefoot wrote: post #258

Slightly related: I may want to contribute to the cause by building a very small personal site on a broadband connection (unfiltered public dynamic IP plus DuckDns) after I solve some health problems and relocate, hopefully within a few months. If I'm lucky I should get a better connection than the roughly 60down/22up I have now, which would seem ridiculous for that use, but I'd make a strictly static site, no Javasc…

Apache with server side includes (SSI) will allow you to quickly and easily template websites without adding new tools or processes. I find this to be a decent balance between a static site and DRY. I don't care for most static site generators since I prefer to write my site content in HTML as much as possible.

For example, your index.html may look like:

  
  My Website
  
A bunch of content
top.html could be something like:

  
    
      My Website
And for bottom.html:

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#364

Post by epicide »

neutronicus wrote: post #354
unsungNovelty wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from privacy concerns like Twitter and Reddit sharing your data with FB (Maybe they share with Google too, not entirely sure), you create a healthier community in a forum than Reddit, Twitter etc. This would be different if you are in a subreddit for a niche topic, sure. But there are higher chances of creating healthy online interactions in Forums than a subreddit. You meet with regulars more often. Knowledge…

Yeah, and I'll jump in with a contrary opinion. I think people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on forums, and nicer on Discord than either. My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in. The fact that this kind of thing gets quarantined to a downvoted sub-tree (on Reddit) or just scrolls into the past, accessible only by search (on Disco…

I think parts of your comment and your parent's comment are correct.

IMO a lot of it isn't about technology, but the size of the community, the people within it, and the norms of that community.

For me, the biggest heuristic on whether a subreddit/forum/Discord has the potential to feel like a community is the size. For various reasons, subreddits tend to be larger than a forum. The larger the subreddit, the more it feels like yelling into the void of Twitter. It's hard to "know the regulars" when there are thousands of people talking in the same place at the same time.

Smaller subreddits have no guarantee to feel like a community, but they have the potential. If there are regulars that show up and moderators that fairly moderate[0], subreddits basically "fall back" into being a forum.

Of course, there is the elephant in the room of Advance Publications, Inc. [1] wanting to make economic profit and, therefore, push for Reddit to grow and overcome the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Most forums never really had/have the same dreams of world domination.

Overall, as someone who has been a moderator on a larger forum (about 10-15 years ago) and seen tight-knit subreddits and Discords, my advice is:

Regardless of the wallpaper, pay attention to the people and the customs of your community and strive to improve those. There's no guarantee it will flourish, but it cannot if enough people don't act similarly.

[0] e.g. delete spam, lock flame wars, and generally contribute to the well-being of the community. [1] The effective owners of Reddit.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#365

Post by jchw »

ahefner wrote: post #252
jchw wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do agree that the "old" internet is not totally dead, but in my case communities I used to be in and even a couple I had direct involvement in were gutted because people left in favor of participating in communities via websites like Twitter. IRC channels I was in dwindled in numbers, draining instead to massive Discord servers. The thing is, the "old" Internet was always somewhat anemic compared to the "new" Inter…

What's the deal with these wiki sites that seem to consist entirely of user generated content, but absolutely bury it under mountains of ads? How do these places exist, and why do people continue to contribute to them?

Wikia started out very differently. It became what it was slowly, over a long period of time.

Miraheze is now the preferred wiki host of community-driven sites, I hope that it will not eventually transform into Wikia/Fandom.

Many of the other “wiki” sites on the net are just rehosting GFDL content and slapping ads on them, then trying to SEO to get ahead of real wikis. Blame Google for not coming up with a good solution on that one, IMO.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#366

Post by mymythisisthis »

yakireev wrote: post #227
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 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. My personal experience does not match that. There was a time (2010-2012 or so where I used to live) when communities were migrating from older "forums" to new and shiny "social networks" - and inevitably ceasing to be communities. One of these communities was niche enough (…

I find that community groups that started before Facebook, or have avoid Facebook, have done better/do better. With Facebook you get locked into using the platform and the group doesn't grow. In fact the group just get worse over time as original member leave. Content and group information is locked into the platform.

Even if a group just sticks to using email, it is better over the long term. People in the group are forced to take on responsibilities of maintaining the email list and content. Passing that information on as they leave. You can also scale up the organization, make it more formal. Start collecting dues, and paying for server space. People take pride in their roles, and the organization.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#367

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

yvdriess wrote: post #297
jhoechtl wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Old internet is where entering the name of a product would yield reviews or discussions about the product. New internet is where any useful information about said product gets buried in marketplaces and producer pages, following half a dozen paid-for ads.

Old Internet was where the primary content was content.

Ads appeared as a curiosity in 1994 but didn't start taking over until around '96, which is when the ad networks started to become more industrialised with tracking and ROI metrics (of a sort).

New Internet is where the primary content is ads and behaviour mod. Virtually all big-reach content is only there to make the ads and behaviour mod work.

And of course the goal of Meta is to personalise ad delivery even further and make it even more intrusive and impossible to ignore.

This isn't just a technical difference. There's a huge difference in culture and motivation. Old Internet was about exploration, play, and sometimes debate. New Internet is about exploitation, driven by psychological and emotional manipulation.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#368

Post by Mezzie »

naasking wrote: post #331
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was one of those humans, and it's more that the algorithms were initially designed under the assumption that we would keep doing that work for free, forever, but once the communities we were doing it for were destroyed, why bother?

Also there was a lot of pushback and poo-pooing the human element; lots of well-regarded (at the time) people saying that there was no future in human-curated content, and I know that I (as a young person) believed them. Look at the cool stuff they were making; they have to be right! They're smart adults, they would know, right?

It just stopped being fun to curate.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#369

Post by questiondev »

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 think they are referring what we use to be allowed to say in chat channels and on forums. it was a lot more raw, a lot of offended people starting getting online and treating the internet like it was real life, part of the beauty of the internet was how non-regulated it was, granted the quality has gotten better, safer spaces for things like business, finance and other sensitive information but we also lost the jokes that the internet use to have, on the main channels at least. back in the day you could get kicked from a mainstream irc channel but it too a lottttt to get banned from an irc network or even an online forum. which granted you can still find sub communities like you mention that still cater to hacking, off jokes and crazy information but it’s not tolerated on the main channels of communication like before, which is fine for people who weren’t into that stuff because it didn’t change for them. but overall there has been changes, not terrible but def not the same as irc/usenet/bbs’s during their hayday. information was widely accessible but a lot of it is a paywall these days, also torrenting was a lot more common and i could call someone a moron without getting flagged. but yeah we still got some freedom and there are better quality services in some ways, i guess it just depends on your personality and how much it has limited expressing ones self authentically.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#370

Post by vmception »

lpcvoid wrote: post #337
vmception wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

Very few blockchains cause carbon emissions more than say browsers. A smart contract deployed on one that uses a proof of work system with a lot of competition can be deployed on another that does not, vote with your code
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