61–70 of 99 posts
I'm just confused about how the average person is supposed to navigate the internet. Is the assumption now that everybody knows about ad blocking plugins?
When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it. This is a lot different from today, where any sort of journalist/writer/artist/filmmaker is basically dependent on making content th…
Wouldn't work, because it's chasing after the dollar that has ultimately destroyed the internet. Because the internet means income for so many people, doing whatever it takes to get your website to the top of search results matters a lot. That means that the hobbyist making a website cannot compete with the businesses who's lifeblood depend on edging those hobbyist pages off the search results. What made the old inte…
Are there no more hobbyist-curated lists of good content on whatever is their topic of interest? Are they just impossible to find on modern search engines, or have the communities just given up on maintaining them?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't work, because it's chasing after the dollar that has ultimately destroyed the internet. Because the internet means income for so many people, doing whatever it takes to get your website to the top of search results matters a lot. That means that the hobbyist making a website cannot compete with the businesses who's lifeblood depend on edging those hobbyist pages off the search results. What made the old inte…
Maybe we just need a search engine more dedicated to surfacing the hobbyists over the spammers.
Unless the search engine aggressively curates it's target pages, I can't see how it wouldn't end up falling down the same trap as search engines of the past. Much like all social media sites end up overran by grandmas.
I'm just confused about how the average person is supposed to navigate the internet. Is the assumption now that everybody knows about ad blocking plugins?
Privacy on the other hand...
When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it. This is a lot different from today, where any sort of journalist/writer/artist/filmmaker is basically dependent on making content th…
People struggling to pay the bills couldn't afford to be on the old Web. There were as many (or more) desperately poor people in the world 30 years ago, but they were too poor to get online at all. The needed hardware and service were expensive, and online stuff was unimportant to everyday life. So the early Web was dominated by university students and people with middle class careers at established institutions.
Today it's a lot less expensive and a lot more universal to communicate electronically. Many desperate scrabblers now use electronic communications in hopes of making money -- whether it's offshore scammers trying to defraud American retirees or "mom bloggers" enticing you to click on their unoriginal and unneeded "awesome diaper brands" article.
In absolute terms there are still a lot of people who don't need to make money from writing and therefore write things that are as interesting and commercially unmotivated as the best of the 1990s Web. A couple of examples that frequently show up on HN:
Ken Shirriff's blog https://www.righto.com/
Daniel Lemire's blog https://lemire.me/blog/
There are also some bloggers and substack writers who do get income from writing, but write about topics that are sufficiently far removed from product placement that their writings remain lucid, engaging, and untainted by desperation. A couple of examples:
Bret Devereaux's blog "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" https://acoup.blog/
Hannah Ritchie's substack "Sustainability by numbers" https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/about
There's still more good writing published on the Web than there are hours in the day to read it all. The thing that's harder now than in the 1990s is filtering out the commercially motivated writing. That's one of the things that keeps bringing me back to HN -- discovering interesting writers who aren't making "content" as a substrate for ads/promotions. (And yes, there's a lot of commercially motivated content here too, but that's not the part that keeps bringing me back.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just discovered what a corporation is. Corporations have "boards" that decide what is "good" and can invest in those things to develop them and sell them or give them away with approval from this board. The corporation receives funding from customers and investors to keep going.
I guess? But clearly this corporate model isn’t really being used to make the kind of content people wish existed.
These "privileged" netzen who were able to shoot web for free because they had other sources of income could also be accused of knowing things.
We now have [for example] content creators who build their own workshop and make an effort to figure out something interesting. This is different from people who already have a workshop where they do practical things. The later will teach you stuff that is applicable, useful and/or marketable. It is deeply baked into their soul.
I'm just confused about how the average person is supposed to navigate the internet. Is the assumption now that everybody knows about ad blocking plugins?
Belive it or not, but the Internet is usable even with Ads. I'd even say that Ad quality has gone up without adblock users noticing, I don't see fullscreen or 1/2 screen Ads anymore. Privacy on the other hand...
I don't know, I came to the internet (IRC/News) ~1990 and the WWW ~1993, when I wrote my first "homepage". I lived through the dotcom boom ~2000 with my own startup. Sure internet was great back then, but I find it great today too. I create my own content on the internet just like 10 or 20 years ago on my website. I talk to people who send me an email about content on my website. I meet great people on LinkedIn. I'm…
I think their thesis was that as a whole the internet has become a more shit experience for the people using it. If you sampled 1000 random internet users decades ago they would have an experience closer to yours, if you did the same today I think it would be a lot "shittier"(to a lot of internet ysers, Facebook/twitter is "the internet")
I'm just confused about how the average person is supposed to navigate the internet. Is the assumption now that everybody knows about ad blocking plugins?
I think they're just used to it, or genuinely don't care that much. To them, reading an article through the four-line letterbox between the autoplaying video ad and the "you might also like..." box is just what the internet is.