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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

#391

Post by idiotsecant »

agentultra wrote: post #145
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…

> There are plenty of examples of people doing this important work because they legitimately believe that a world where fiat control is divorced from the levers of governmental power is a positive change. Regardless of their intentions this is a bad idea and deserves every line of criticism it receives. Governance, law, and financial regulation exist for reasons that programmers have no place or reason to replace. We…

>Regardless of their intentions this is a bad idea and deserves every line of criticism it receives.

That's a fair criticism, even if I don't agree with it. I don't think it's possible to imagine a world where consensus is shared widely enough that 'mutually assured destruction' of the financial network prevents transaction censorship, particularly when zero knowledge based networks allow validation of network transactions without knowledge of who is transacting, what transaction is taking place, or when it might occur.

>Governance, law, and financial regulation exist for reasons that programmers have no place or reason to replace.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that governance, law, or financial regulation should go away. Those things seem important. The governments of the world can enforce those things like they always have. They just lose the ability to manufacture more money when it's time to fight a new war or pay off one special interest or another (but only if most of the people participating in that society buy into the idea that the government is not a good steward of that power)

Imagine a world where the people ruled by a government have some say in whether they're doing a good job with monetary policy or not. I certainly don't have that today - I get to punch the 'RED GUY' or 'BLUE GUY' button on my voting ticket but neither of them are particularly interested in changing something that fundamental.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#392

Post by gitfan86 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #390
kravens_last wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qui…

git is a distributed crypto chain technology. No one is saying it is a scam. It isn't the tech that people are calling a scam.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#393

Post by OkayPhysicist »

bri3d wrote: post #194
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…

Hmm. I have pretty much the same kinds of interactions on private Discord servers which I had on IRC 20 years ago. It's harder to find particularly skilled or like minded people in some niche areas or fields, but with simply more people online, this seems inevitable - more haystack to sift through. Of course there are worrying corporatization or centralization arguments vs. IRC, but ultimately the end result doesn't…

Yeah, IMO Discord (putting aside the whole open/closed software thing) is a pretty good upgrade on IRC. My problem is when a community that either used to have or would have had a forum 10 years ago is now using Discord as the primary communication hub. Discord's ephemeral by design, well suited for engaging in on-going conversation, but goddawful for finding past information, or longer ongoing conversations.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#394

Post by agentultra »

idiotsecant wrote: post #391
agentultra wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are plenty of examples of people doing this important work because they legitimately believe that a world where fiat control is divorced from the levers of governmental power is a positive change. Regardless of their intentions this is a bad idea and deserves every line of criticism it receives. Governance, law, and financial regulation exist for reasons that programmers have no place or reason to replace. We…

>Regardless of their intentions this is a bad idea and deserves every line of criticism it receives. That's a fair criticism, even if I don't agree with it. I don't think it's possible to imagine a world where consensus is shared widely enough that 'mutually assured destruction' of the financial network prevents transaction censorship, particularly when zero knowledge based networks allow validation of network transa…

> particularly when zero knowledge based networks allow validation of network transactions without knowledge of who is transacting, what transaction is taking place, or when it might occur.

Sounds great if you want to buy things law enforcement would be interested in tracking down.

> Those things seem important.

Understatement of the year.

> Imagine a world where the people ruled by a government have some say in whether they're doing a good job with monetary policy or not.

Assuming you live in the US, then you do -- it's called democracy.

But giving power to a handful of rich people and asking them to make monetary policy is an oligarchy and it's not a good idea.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#395

Post by kderbyma »

toto444 wrote: post #274

How many of you mourning the old internet frequent neocities or have their own personal website ? I don't think the the answer is 'a lot'. Everyone on HN complains about everything being turned into a business but everyone also wants to create their own start up and turn it into a unicorn.

I have have a couple sites that I have both hosted locally, cloud, static, WordPress.

I think the future is modern tools + old school feel

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#396

Post by unsungNovelty »

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 people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on forums, and nicer on Discord than either.

The medium is different could be one of the reasons.

> My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in.

But that can be reddit as well. :)

---

But you should also define what "nice" is to make sure we are on the same page. Arch linux forum is notorious for being known as hostile and rude. But they are just direct. They are damn helpful and cares a lot on helping. They expect you to do your due diligence before asking help is all. This is 100% direct towards help vampires which are bad for any community. But help vampires are going to rant on twitter and other places how horrible Arch folks are. Which is not true.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#397

Post by amatecha »

wizzzzzy wrote: post #343
amatecha wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I love that the top voted comment is someone mentioning Hotline. I'm logged into my friend's server - one I've been frequenting regularly since it was started in 2001 - at this very moment! I also ran my own server for years, of course. I really want to build "IRCCloud but for Hotline" sometime. I mean, just a basic self-hosted thing to start with. One of these days... haha Recently I've started noticing people h…

Which Hotline client are you using out of interest? I have nostalgic memories of using Hotline as a teenager and just assumed all clients are now dead in the water.

Usually Hotline 1.8.5 on Windows, Nostalgia or Frogblast on OSX. 1.2.3 on OS9 or earlier. hx on bsd/linux CLI :) I usually point people here to find a Hotline client to use: https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#398

Post by yakireev »

executesorder66 wrote: post #316
yakireev wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (…

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

In theory it would, but the practical answer is that for non-English-language community in 2010 migration to Reddit could not have happened.

The community in question was Russian, so it migrated not to FB, but to VK, which is essentially the same. It did not migrate there because members found VK to be a better platform for their community though - they just started using VK to communicate with their peers, were spending their time there and gradually stopped visiting forums.

Reddit never gained much traction in Russia, and in 2010-2012 it was for the nerdiest of nerds. One was way more likely to frequently visit some forum than Reddit back then.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#399

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

bloak wrote: post #271
piokoch wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

None of what you mentioned sounds particularly onerous. Just don't ask for personal data and advise users not to post it. Let people delete their own posts and have a way for an administrator to delete a post if it might in some way be illegal (probably nothing to do with GDPR), and if people want to download stuff, tell them to use "wget --mirror". On othe other hand, dealing with spammers and eccentric/mad troublem…

The data protection requirements themselves are not onerous at all. But the path to compliance is scary and complicated to anyone who isn’t a lawyer or is retaining one.

What’s needed is a “fast track” compliance package for individuals, small businesses and online communities. Something like a cookie cutter privacy policy along with a rule book for simple applications without trackers and where all PII is personally and transparently entered, edited and extracted by the data subjects themselves, like in your example.

That’s good enough for most applications, and great for entrepreneurs to not have to think about GDPR until they have enough momentum to warrant getting lawyers.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#400

Post by guessbest »

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 think spam, random DoS attacks, and hackers killed the old intenet. Not many people want to keep up with moderation and software security updates.
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