What I want from the internet • Hacker News Board

Re: What I want from the internet

#81

Post by pixl97 » Mon, May 08, 2023, 10:46 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #77

pixl97 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Define "real thing". Again in the past it's really easy, people didn't put much "fake" content up. Now there is mountain of documents that have 'content' that matches your request... How much energy are you going to put in to determine if its low or high quality content? I did the search that OP did and I got tangentially related documents, but not the exact think that OP was likely looking for. And this defines the problem, there is far more noise than signal, and the ancient internet did not look like that at all.

Re: What I want from the internet

#82

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, May 08, 2023, 10:57 PM UTC

camgunz wrote: post #29

I 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 (…

You list social issues and then list a collection of privacy-oriented technology as if it's a solution.

Those two domains are orthogonal. Perfect privacy won't make racism or banality go away. It may make it harder to be targeted by ad farms, but it will make it easier for scammers and other bottom feeders to infiltrate and exploit online communities for personal and sometimes political ends.

Instead of being flooded by spray-and-pray spam, users in online spaces will be targeted by more sophisticated attacks based on estimates of psychology and interests derived from their public posting profile.

The DFW quote sums it up nicely. There is no technological fix for a lowest common denominator culture which rewards predatory greed over sincere mutuality.

Re: What I want from the internet

#83

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, May 08, 2023, 11:05 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #75

chrbutler wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point would be micropayments without the ads - which are mostly noise anyway.

From the creator POV YouTube and Kindle Unlimited approach this model. So does Spotify, to an extent.

But the payments are much smaller than the value generated. And creators are at the mercy of gigantic centralised content distribution machines which can destroy your career on a whim, or because of an unfortunate outbreak of stupidity and bureaucracy.

There isn't anything like a federated micropayments system which would offer aggregation and payment services, but would be run at cost - a bit like the cultural equivalent of a credit union.

Re: What I want from the internet

#84

Post by chrbutler » Mon, May 08, 2023, 11:09 PM UTC

_Algernon_ wrote: post #76

Where 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…

Hmm, there is an RSS feed. https://www.chrbutler.com/feed.rss

Re: What I want from the internet

#85

Post by efficientsticks » Mon, May 08, 2023, 11:10 PM UTC

Thank you for the article. During lockdown I made a search engine that you might like to try: https://highbrow.se/

No special algorithms and just the plain slightly spammy but endearing internet :)

Re: What I want from the internet

#86

Post by chrbutler » Mon, May 08, 2023, 11:19 PM UTC

lioeters wrote: post #71

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.

Yes, I think this is a good point – it certainly reflects how I find the things I value most. People I know or have come to "know" by following for years have always the best sources of information for me.

Re: What I want from the internet

#87

Post by _madmax_ » Mon, May 08, 2023, 11:54 PM UTC

There's no way to turn back time, if there was, I would probably be living in 1997 forever.

I'm all for a bit of nostalgia, but we must admit that the internet is indeed dead, we surf an encyclopedia thats mostly a money machine poisonning everything it touches. It ruins everything, everywhere.

Re: What I want from the internet

#88

Post by giantrobot » Mon, May 08, 2023, 11:55 PM UTC

danrl wrote: post #63

camgunz wrote: post #29

I 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 (…

Gemini:// is a protocol that currently feels a lot like the geocities-era web. It is not yet September there. You’ll find how to get in if you try hard enough.

Gemini threw the baby out with the bath water by disallowing in-line images and styles. It's not like GeoCities because there's very little if any ability to express yourself artistically with the medium. Half of the "Geocities" pages people harken back to were themselves artistic content.

None of that is really possible with Gemini.

Re: What I want from the internet

#89

Post by hattmall » Tue, May 09, 2023, 12:09 AM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #66

pixl97 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> About the only services on the internet that are not wholesale blocked are DNS and HTTPS. Really? I'm so happy and fortunate that hasn't been true for me. If the only thing I could reach was the web, well over half of the usefulness of the internet would evaporate.

So what are you using?

Re: What I want from the internet

#90

Post by giantrobot » Tue, May 09, 2023, 12:19 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #73

qup wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

For me the problem is not ads but the inevitable AdTech pushed under the guise of "ads". Too many sites want me to enable what they call ads but are really incredibly invasive spying systems. Many are compromised and actually deliver malware.

The whole situation is made worse by the "ads" serving up a bunch of shit I didn't ask for. The text content of some article is a fraction of the size of the tracking scripts and auto-playing video. Everyone could save a lot on costs by not serving me a multi-megabyte video next to a 30kB blog post.