What I think can improve the situation is "curation", particularly manual, effort-intensive, thoughtful and reasonably timely curation by a person or people with good taste. That's asking a lot, with many subjective variables, but it's what keeps bringing me back to Hacker News, the consistently high signal-to-noise ratio.
What I want from the internet
71–80 of 114 posts
Re: What I want from the internet
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You just gotta get out of the browser. I agree with this. The internet is a great tool. The web is extremely problematic and growing less useful over time. Too many people think that the internet and the web are the same thing.
Firewalls pretty much have made the internet and web the same thing, as discussed on HN in many threads. About the only services on the internet that are not wholesale blocked are DNS and HTTPS. The internet's usefulness as a tool has been greatly compromised because of this.
This is a gift. Technology to keep corporations out of your space is usually a lot more expensive and a lot less reliable.
Re: What I want from the internet
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been on HN a lot of years. Lots of people here have money and as a group most of them consistently object to essentially any means to monetize content, pay content creators, etc while denying that this amounts to expecting slave labor from writers and also decrying the tragic lack of good quality writing. I used to try to consistently point out such patterns while being personally attacked, told to stop whining,…
Well let me respond, since maybe I'm one of those guys. You've fundamentally misunderstood what I want. If a "writer" wrote it as part of their job, I don't want to read it. I mean, I might, but that's not what I would be "whining" about here. I've kept blogs most of my life. I'm after similar content to what I would post. I don't care to read whatever you want to get paid to write. No offense, I'm sure it's great an…
You seem to be assuming some things different from my reality.
I make very little money from blogging. I took ads off years ago. It's not some kind of paid gig shilling for some product or whatever.
I have a Patreon that makes too little and I take tips. I try to write what I think is meaningful.
My writing has repeatedly made the front page of HN, often without making a dime.
I've stopped posting it here. I'm tired of feeling kicked in the teeth for "self promoting".
Journalism is in trouble. This undermines political freedom. Etc. And yet people just expect high traffic to pay the bills, which it can if your monetization strategy is ads, but the HN crowd is fond of ad blockers and vocally critical of ads.
Anyway, I don't care to argue it. You asked a question. I replies. This conversation is most likely a waste of time.
Adieu.
Re: What I want from the internet
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you keep using the term "whining" to reference the article?
I've been on HN a lot of years. Lots of people here have money and as a group most of them consistently object to essentially any means to monetize content, pay content creators, etc while denying that this amounts to expecting slave labor from writers and also decrying the tragic lack of good quality writing. I used to try to consistently point out such patterns while being personally attacked, told to stop whining,…
I would love to see a viable micropayment model (a la Jaron Lanier's years of suggestions) that takes the baby steps we've already made (e.g. Patreon, Substack) and accelerates us to a place where all value is compensated.
Re: What I want from the internet
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been on HN a lot of years. Lots of people here have money and as a group most of them consistently object to essentially any means to monetize content, pay content creators, etc while denying that this amounts to expecting slave labor from writers and also decrying the tragic lack of good quality writing. I used to try to consistently point out such patterns while being personally attacked, told to stop whining,…
I would love to see a viable micropayment model (a la Jaron Lanier's years of suggestions) that takes the baby steps we've already made (e.g. Patreon, Substack) and accelerates us to a place where all value is compensated.
Micropayments of just a few cents is basically how many ads work. I've already stated that HN hates ads.
You can currently pay as little as a dollar via PayPal and it's like 67 cents for the recipient (or was last I checked). Lots of people just feel that's not micro enough and not frictionless enough.
Re: What I want from the internet
#76Where is the RSS feed on your site? I tried /feed and /RSS and .RSS none of which work. There is also no visible link that I was able to see.
Assuming I'm correct in my assumption that there is none, I find the lamenting the loss of "the structure that a personal website, can-to-can structure, an RSS feed, and a browser provide" (emphasis mine) deeply ironic.
And no, email newsletters are not a valid replacement, no matter how much you benefit from pushing them.
Maybe you should contribute to the internet you want to see?
Re: What I want from the internet
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently googled something like "modal fabric weave diagram". On my phone I was given five places to buy modal clothing and a message that "x other similar results have been omitted". I persisted, I rephrased. I was asked if I was a robot, I clicked on CAPTCHAs, and now Google is willing to give me some results that are relevant to textile design but I still haven't been able to find out what weave patterns are com…
In 1997 there wouldn't have been 50,000 spam responses in the query. In 1997 there would have been some place that made it, or someone interested in it that would have made the site for their own interests in spreading the information. Today there are countless entities looking to scrape a penny from your view in any way possible, and will create an ocean of spam in order to capture that revenue. At least with search…
> In 1997 there wouldn't have been 50,000 spam responses in the query.
If what the GP wants exists, and none of the given options are any bit similar to it, why do you think the amount of spam is relevant?
If Google couldn't find a real thing between a mountain of invented low quality content, you would have a point. But Google keeps pushing unrelated results instead.
Re: What I want from the internet
#78it's rambly, but it's still not clear 'what is it that they want from the internet'. "you could find a point in there somewhere, but really, you had to"
Re: What I want from the internet
#79I mostly buy Eternal September, or as rephrased by David Foster Wallace: "[The internet] is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." Like, the internet is banal because we're (the rich world) all on it. It's not a weird little niche anymore. So it's now subject to all the (…
That quote really nails the problem.
Re: What I want from the internet
#80> And the internet used to be more work to experience. Today, it’s more work to avoid. Since the author likes analogies, I'll add mine: the internet now has become roads, bridges, towns. The internet used to be forests, rivers to ford, camps. There used to be an exploration-aspect to the internet, not sure what you would find if you took this trail or that one. Now we all seem to travel the few, well-worn roads to th…
These days, the internet is more a city from a cyberpunk movie where everything is covered with ads, everywhere. So much that some of use filtering glasses to hide ads from us. Tracking devices are everywhere and your every move is recorded and stored in a database of a company that produces very realistic sounding androids.
Oh yeah, and anyone with enough holodeck processing power can make an artificial video of you saying and doing anything they want.