Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

christianheilmann.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 187 posts

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#81

Post by laurex »

dEnigma wrote: post #57
grumbel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. As Youtube makes a much better places for publishing and archiving content than the rest of the Web. With Youtube you don't have to worry about URLs changing or domain names expiring or anything like that. You just publish your video once, get a unique video-id and don't have to worry abo…

Unfortunately when I look through my old Favourites playlist, which at some point reached the limit of 5000 videos, I can see how many of those videos are now private, deleted, or blocked in my country. The worst part is that in many cases I can't even recover the video title, so I have no idea what has been lost. A possible solution would be to store the titles separately, but I didn't think about this while I added…

I made our wedding playlist on YouTube, since I pay for premium, and about 30% is now gone after a couple years. It would be nice if YT at least gave some indication of things they do not plan to delete, i.e. it's an official source not an upload subject to the whims of DMCA.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#82

Post by trinsic2 »

I appreciate your personal account about where society is heading related to the Internet.

I avoid for-profit social networking websites because for the free flow of information because I realize that these sites only represent a small portion of what the web is about. I know the Internet is really best when I read from people that self-publish. I also publish articles on interpersonal work and the state of technology myself. As a "principal product manager in Microsoft working on tooling to enable people to do more on the web." I wonder what you think about Microsoft and Apple creating walled gardens in there respective OS's? I recently switched to Linux and [wrote](https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...) about why I think the biggest threat to the free flowing information of the net has to do with how we allow our technology that connects to the net to become restricted.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#83

Post by abitnegative »

I think the author misses the magic feeling of the early internet and is trying to rationalize their feelings, but hasn't quite figured out the real explanation. I really doubt that their inability to find old news is the source of their troubles; in fact, I doubt that they've struggled to find old news at all. It's not very hard to find. More likely, the author is facing the same issue as everyone else; it's harder to find or create something on the internet that feels really special, because everyone's already seen it all.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#84

Post by bombcar »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #49
nicbou wrote: post #5

It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. Encyclopaedia Britannica is still there, and it's great . But there's also an army of content creators are there to teach you just about anything. If one source doesn't do it, you have more to choose from. Yesterday, I read an article about North Africa that mentioned in passing Qaddafi's underground river. A few…

It may never have been easier to share knowledge but it also hasn't ever been easier to share misinformation. It also hasn't gotten easier to find information. Search results are worse now than 10 years ago because of Search Engine "Optimization". Google search needs uBlocklist[1] with a steadily growing list of manually curated domains just to poorly approximate usability. Additionally, sites load slower every day.…

I find that you used to find “silos” of information when searching - if you were looking for information on toilets say, you might end up on a love site [687] dedicated to plumbing, which would have a whole cornucopia of information and knowledgeable people.

Now you’re less likely do find that kind of thing and more likely to find a video or a SEO optimized site - which can be much more difficult to parse for verifiability.

[687] https://www.terrylove.com/crtoilet.htm

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#85

Post by bombcar »

AshleysBrain wrote: post #55

Blogs are still an underrated goldmine of knowledge, especially in tech. I find academic papers often too abstract or opaque, textbooks are good but generalized, and documentation is reference-like. Stumbling across a tech blog where someone explains some fairly specific and difficult problem they had, and an interesting solution they found, can be exactly what you needed to solve a problem. The web has its problems…

Blogs are wonderful and still there - they’re just much harder to find because there is so much OTHER content now. The web used to be almost nothing but blogs.

For example, this blog is pertinent to what I’m doing and I didn’t find it for weeks: https://www.northernbuilt.pro/ and only found it by a link to a YouTube video from another one from another one.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#86

Post by trinsic2 »

ricardobeat wrote: post #11
nicbou wrote: post #5

It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. Encyclopaedia Britannica is still there, and it's great . But there's also an army of content creators are there to teach you just about anything. If one source doesn't do it, you have more to choose from. Yesterday, I read an article about North Africa that mentioned in passing Qaddafi's underground river. A few…

I’m not sure you and the author are talking about the same thing. He mentions the fact you can’t even read the news from 10 years ago, the content has simply disappeared. No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The problem is not “everything, everywhere” or a lack of filters but the extreme commercialization of all content available, closed networks, the short life of URLs…

The "All content available" statement is a bit much. I'd go so far as to say there are a good portion of sites that have commercialized information. But I can easily access other forms of information not commercialized by avoiding mainstream views.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#87

Post by mikewarot »

If we all had the Memex that Vannevar Bush proposed[1,1*], many of the losses we all discuss in these threads may have been avoided. We now have massive local storage, and should be able to freely share data by hosting our own stuff on our own machines. We could have done what the editor of the magazine implored us to do:

"As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. — THE EDITOR"

We don't have that, and it makes me sad. We should fix this inadequacy, but there are now so many interests in the entrenched model that I think they would squash something that freely allows copying like a bug.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

[1*] https://web.archive.org/web/20220301051333/https://www.theat...

[edits - quoted editor's introduction, revised/extended]

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#88

Post by arcbyte »

mikewarot wrote: post #87

If we all had the Memex that Vannevar Bush proposed[1,1*], many of the losses we all discuss in these threads may have been avoided. We now have massive local storage, and should be able to freely share data by hosting our own stuff on our own machines. We could have done what the editor of the magazine implored us to do: "As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordin…

Is it ironic that I can read the article you posted because it's behind a paywall?

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#89

Post by _gabe_ »

> and I now work on the browser that comes out of the box with any Windows machine (working on a Mac most of the time).

Is this why Microsoft products are getting progressively worse every year? How can you work on a product and then never use it natively and expect other people to enjoy using it? Or worse, like with windows 11, it leads to the product morphing into something the users never wanted. Because developers want to conform it to what they're used to using. I don't know, it kind of baffles me the way most developers view the products they make.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#90

Post by VHRanger »

grumbel wrote: post #50
ricardobeat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure you and the author are talking about the same thing. He mentions the fact you can’t even read the news from 10 years ago, the content has simply disappeared. No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The problem is not “everything, everywhere” or a lack of filters but the extreme commercialization of all content available, closed networks, the short life of URLs…

> No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. As Youtube makes a much better places for publishing and archiving content than the rest of the Web. With Youtube you don't have to worry about URLs changing or domain names expiring or anything like that. You just publish your video once, get a unique video-id and don't have to worry abo…

> The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well.

They're not, though.

Because Youtube re-encodes videos every couple of years, with new "better" lossy compression algorithms. And each time the videos get successively worse.

Watching a 2008 Youtube video will not only look grainy because it's 360p, but it'll look actively *worse* than it did in 2008 because of all the lossy compression that was applied to it over the decades.

Post reply on HN