181–190 of 231 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There needs to be some kind of "murphy's law" for this style of comment. "For any comment on the internet where someone points out an issue they've encountered with technology, there will inevitably be a reply from someone else sharing that they haven't personally experienced it."
I think you get to coin it.
Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web. I am not saying old content needs to be preserved forever, but so much content has factually been lost over time. Old logs from text-based MUDs for instance, even for MUDs that still exist today.
> Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web. Let me introduce you to the alternatives: print media, film, stone engravings. That stuff tends to get burned and shattered and it takes FOREVER to make copies. I'm being cheeky but I don't know what design change you could possible make to the web to make webpages not die.
Here's a contrarian timeline: maybe the old web will return? My reasoning: when the "old web" was great, most people thought the internet was for nerds. Sure even casual users would forward funny emails to their friends, but when it came time for news most people would read the paper or watch the nightly broadcast. When they paid for their Big Mac they'd lay down cash. There were plenty of people using the internet,…
We're participating in it right now. HN is a living example of a simple website facilitating discussion between humans with a shared interest. That's why I come here more than any other news/social site now.
HN is a certainly a smaller but more targeted market but there's no reason to assume we're communicating with other humans here necessarily especially given HN demographics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
havent lived. “I didnt live long enough” means your life ended! past tense. hasn’t means its still going “have not (yet)”. I don’t know the formal rules behind it all though. its interesting because it sounds more correct to use have not yet because your life is still going on but its going on in the forward direction, not backwards in time to overlap an earlier HN state. So you could say its not right, but the sente…
> your life is still going on but its going on in the forward direction, not backwards in time to overlap an earlier HN state Wouldn't the proper tense be "I won't have lived long enough to see the entire lifetime of HN" then? > We like that you are still here with us. Same here, and it feels like a very "old web" kind of feeling, as we're expressing this empathy towards an anonymous stranger with a very deemphasized…
Here's a contrarian timeline: maybe the old web will return? My reasoning: when the "old web" was great, most people thought the internet was for nerds. Sure even casual users would forward funny emails to their friends, but when it came time for news most people would read the paper or watch the nightly broadcast. When they paid for their Big Mac they'd lay down cash. There were plenty of people using the internet,…
One difference I see is that in the (so-called) "old web" era, if you were not nerdy enough to navigate certain technical issues, the path of least resistance was to not participate. As you say, those people stuck to phone books and newspapers and TV. That meant that entering the world of the internet was adding something; you could still read the newspaper and watch TV (and most people did), but you had the internet also.
The insidious achievement of the Facebooks and TikToks of the world is to make things smooth enough and make participation widespread enough that nowadays its harder to not participate, somehow, in some facet of online interaction, than it is to participate. By doing that they created a flood of junky stuff, and now AI has come along to amplify that approach many times.
This means that now, what the nerds are trying to do is not to add, but to subtract. In the old web, you went to the web to get something you couldn't get from traditional media or communications. But now, if a "new old web" is created, it will largely be to not get things you are effectively being forced to get from the flood of social media and AI content. That doesn't mean it can't be done, and in a way I hope it is done, but it means it's going to have to be qualitatively different. Before, the walls kept you in and you hopped over to get out, but now we're all out in the wilderness, and if people build walls, it will be to keep the wild world out and keep yourself safe inside.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right? When I think of the old web I think of my Xena and X-Files fan sites on Geocities circa 1997
I was a few years late to the start (early 90s kid) but I am nostalgic for the vast amount of myfreewebs + dot.tk websites out there. Hit counters on the front page was mandatory of course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN is a good example of how little a website actually needs once you remove the requirement to constantly squeeze more engagement out of it. Though to be fair, its audience is unusually self-selecting :)
I don't know much about how HN is run but I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the need for human moderation here, and I assume that is a lot of work. A message forum is simple, old technology. Keeping it usable and useful for humans is not.
But there's nothing akin to personalised algorithms, resharing posts, multimedia content etc. I mean even text formatting is very lean :)
Here's a contrarian timeline: maybe the old web will return? My reasoning: when the "old web" was great, most people thought the internet was for nerds. Sure even casual users would forward funny emails to their friends, but when it came time for news most people would read the paper or watch the nightly broadcast. When they paid for their Big Mac they'd lay down cash. There were plenty of people using the internet,…
We're participating in it right now. HN is a living example of a simple website facilitating discussion between humans with a shared interest. That's why I come here more than any other news/social site now.
Basically every area that is either forgotten by the mainstream, or completely unknown, and make sure the author is a person and not a company and you'll be on your way to way more interesting discussions, texts, content and interaction, that the B.S. of facebook, twitter and commercial web sites.