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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

#381

Post by godshatter »

RF_Savage wrote: post #344
executesorder66 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason a subreddit wouldn't work for that community? Or is that not "forumy" enough? I'm genuinely curious.

Subreddits don't work well for long form stuff. Like for example a project log where you are restoring some old car, solving problems and sourcing parts. In a forum it is cleanly self contained. On a subreddit it would be a bunch of scattered posts you would have to take the care to link to.

The old PHPBB software (or whatever it was called) was much nicer. You could have a thread about restoring your old car, and there might be 50 pages, in order, that someone could look through if they wanted to or just skip to the end so they can see what's currently being discussed. They can reference a comment on page 42 and it will always be on page 42.

Reddit follows this infinite scroll idea, that everyone now seems to follow, that I absolutely hate. You can search for a particular topic but you can't see what topics were around it. But I guess it encourages quick one-off posts which increases engagement or whatever.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#382

Post by lioeters »

alfl wrote: post #350
alfl wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's this? http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNfXy5uCQjEWabnAsvJJPGkKNc6wSZu9M9w2cNx...

Latest is on GH: https://github.com/kubelt/whitepaper/blob/main/kubelt_whitep...

404 Not Found - That repo doesn't exist, or maybe is private

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#383

Post by HeckFeck »

godshatter wrote: post #381
RF_Savage wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subreddits don't work well for long form stuff. Like for example a project log where you are restoring some old car, solving problems and sourcing parts. In a forum it is cleanly self contained. On a subreddit it would be a bunch of scattered posts you would have to take the care to link to.

The old PHPBB software (or whatever it was called) was much nicer. You could have a thread about restoring your old car, and there might be 50 pages, in order, that someone could look through if they wanted to or just skip to the end so they can see what's currently being discussed. They can reference a comment on page 42 and it will always be on page 42. Reddit follows this infinite scroll idea, that everyone now se…

Discussions would last days on the old phpBB boards. There wasn't that same pressure to spend all day on the same website. You'd make your post and visit every few days. This encouraged effort and reflection.

With reddit and other modern platforms, if it doesn't happen in the same 12 hours then it's old news.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#384

Post by root_axis »

jefftk wrote: post #336
root_axis wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A worthy pedantic aside. Thanks.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#385

Post by root_axis »

agumonkey wrote: post #335
root_axis wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You get to decide the scope, so don't fill it with annoying things.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#386

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #379
martin_a wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could always hash the IP on the client side before sending it to your counter. That way you have no information which you can backtrack to a specific IP and therefore a person.

Except there's so few IPs (v4) you could just bruteforce it in not too much time.

There are different kinds of hashes. You can, for example, assign numbers to your incoming IPs. The first one to come in gets 1, the second gets 2, and so on. Numbers zero out at midnight, correlation between them and real IPs are at the load balancer. Good luck bruteforcing these.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#387

Post by agumonkey »

root_axis wrote: post #385
agumonkey wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You get to decide the scope, so don't fill it with annoying things.

that's not true, even if I prune it's still leaking and i'm never far from a 'web 2.5' revamp ala reddit

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#388

Post by godshatter »

HeckFeck wrote: post #383
godshatter wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old PHPBB software (or whatever it was called) was much nicer. You could have a thread about restoring your old car, and there might be 50 pages, in order, that someone could look through if they wanted to or just skip to the end so they can see what's currently being discussed. They can reference a comment on page 42 and it will always be on page 42. Reddit follows this infinite scroll idea, that everyone now se…

Discussions would last days on the old phpBB boards. There wasn't that same pressure to spend all day on the same website. You'd make your post and visit every few days. This encouraged effort and reflection. With reddit and other modern platforms, if it doesn't happen in the same 12 hours then it's old news.

Even with the relatively fast-moving ones you could still check in later and just quote a previous entry. Discussions tended to be deeper because of the format, less prone to quick little flurries of discussions that petered out once they were downvoted or not upvoted. Speaking of which, I don't remember any kind of upvoting of comments. The users on the board might show special icons if they were a mod and it usually gave an idea of how long they had been there or how active they had been. Discussions were expected to take a while, which encouraged more in-depth replies.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#389

Post by idiotsecant »

Miner49er wrote: post #125
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…

You can't trust Ethereum at all. When it comes to picking between their principles, and money, they'll always pick money. This is all shown by the hard fork when the DAO was was "hacked". The code was supposed to be law, until it meant they lost some money.

Ok... I'm just pointing out interesting developments in the space and not interested in a tribal crypto slapfight of the kind that is beneath the typical level of HN decorum so I'll just ask when you say 'they' reverted the network who do you suppose you're talking about?

It was the people participating in the network.

'They' decided on a course of action by doing what most of the people in the system thought was correct. That sounds to me like a feature rather than a bug. At the time the consensus was that the network was young and brittle and breaking things was expected and an 'undo' was appropriate, as evidenced by the fact that a small number of people didn't think it was a good idea, tried to fork the chain to test that sentiment, and pretty quickly faded into obscurity.

Any distributed system that relies on trusting a consensus of individuals will be vulnerable to the majority of those individuals deciding something you don't want them to decide. That's how consensus works (in Ethereum as well as any other crypto BTW) The reason crypto works is that once you hit a certain scale most of the users are interested in keeping the network working. The ETH DAO was an interesting time when ETH was enough of a 'toy' that dev environment stuff like the community agreeing to undo 'oopsies' was conceivable. For better or worse (probably better) ETH is no longer a 'toy' and those mechanisms for undos don't really work anymore.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#390

Post by idiotsecant »

kravens_last wrote: post #131
hunterb123 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're proving his point, there are also people with good/bad intentions working in "web2" and everywhere for that matter. Don't criticize the tech, criticize the individual bad actors, like you did with Theranos. One of the main talking points "web3" critics yell is "scams!", like they don't exist elsewhere. If you do want to criticize the tech, leave the moral crusade out of it and say technically what is wrong wit…

It's not an issue of simply having scams. The issue is that, by its very nature, the ratio of scams to legitimate functional work is likely 1 million to 1, and the entire ecosystem does not only revel in this, but actively encourages even more scam-like behavior. This all stems from blockchain as a concept's decision of baking in valuation to EVERYTHING. It's the purest distillation of the "greater fool theory" in hu…

'blockchain' doesn't have any point of view on whether something should be 'NFT'-ized or not - it's just a technology. That's like saying FTP encourages child pornography because it can be used to transfer files.

As in most things, the culprit is not technology, it's people. It's entirely possible to ignore the clear rugpulls and scams and just focus on the technically interesting parts. Quite a lot of people are quietly doing just that while everyone else is busy trying to scam each other and/or be religiously opposed to what amounts to a distributed database synchronization mechanism.

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