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Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

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Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#211

Post by phs318u »

radarsat1 wrote: post #169
ErigmolCt wrote: post #149

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.

> I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the need for human moderation here

Bingo. As anyone that’s tried to run a Mastodon instance for more than just family and friends will tell you.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#212

Post by Froztnova »

sodapopcan wrote: post #135
tavavex wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't live long enough to see the entire lifetime of HN, but it's definitely part of the old web in my book. Its functionality is the same it's always been, it's rock solid, lightweight and simple. No personalization or engagement maximizing, no modern-style ads. Being spun off from something as big as Y Combinator meant they can run this site almost indefinitely.

The only thing not "old" about it is upvoting, which is one of those YMMV features.

I've really soured on votes in recent years. They promised a sort of crowdsourced moderation and I appreciated the cleverness of the idea back around the time reddit first came out.

But now I think that downvotes have just kinda become a sort of digital tomato for people to throw, a means of burying a post without putting any thought into an argument as to why the post is illegitimate.

And that's the best case. In the worst case it's a really easy system for bots to game. You don't even need AI. All it takes is a bunch of accounts "legitimate" enough to not get flagged by whatever botting heuristics the site implemented and you can produce a false consensus.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#213

Post by Razengan »

sodapopcan wrote: post #103
Razengan wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my gosh I loved Diaryland, and how you could customize your shit with some simple HTML, but I think they went through enshittification while they were still around anyway But..what says something like Diaryland can't be brought back now?

Did they? I think it was LiveJournal that enshittified. Diaryland is actually still around. I just checked it out and it now "Diaryland v2!" I actually last checked it out in the past year and it still looked exactly like it did back then!

Well there you go: The "old web" is still here or can be, but most of the people complaining about the "new web" don't really care about it anymore, they just pretend to

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#214

Post by radarsat1 »

another-dave wrote: post #188
radarsat1 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think the parent meant that it doesn't need moderation, but we've always had that in IRC/boards etc. But there's nothing akin to personalised algorithms, resharing posts, multimedia content etc. I mean even text formatting is very lean :)

that's absolutely true, it's also the fastest website i use daily, by a large margin

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#215

Post by marcosdumay »

samudrijan wrote: post #152
marcosdumay wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has the entire web 2.0 neophillia. Discussions stay for a day or so in focus, then they are gone. This one is almost gone already.

Were you even here?

I made my account here in 2011, I don't know how it was before.

But I understand the OP was talking about how HN is today.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#216

Post by sumtechguy »

Levitating wrote: post #31
sumtechguy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Archive.org is rather limited in what it keeps. I know of a very large site that recently disappeared. archive only has part of the web html part of the site. Everything else is either gone or non accessible.

That's not my experience

Most of the time it isnt mine either. But here and there there will be large swaths of some site that are just not archived. At one point if someone put up a robots text file history would just vanish. Have not checked lately if that still holds. But one company I worked for was just 'gone'. Because a webpage squatter put up a robots.txt.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#217

Post by AlecSchueler »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #208
HaloZero wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there a vested interest here for bots though to communicate here though? 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.

Does it matter? A 3rd world getting paid to post content, the bot that replaces the shill, and a first world office worker that's been indoctrinated by and is parroting either of the former are functionally equivalent as far as the next user cares because the text they put bore that next user's eyes is the same.

Talking with other humans actually has real world effects.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#218

Post by sodapopcan »

onion2k wrote: post #162
sodapopcan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing not "old" about it is upvoting, which is one of those YMMV features.

I have fond memories of Slashdot in 1998. It was the spiritual forerunner to HN, and had upvoting, and in a more complex form as there were categories of votes. I got lots of +5 Funny comments. Hard to imagine, isn't it.

Ya, sorry, I never read Slashdot back in the day (even though I'm well old enough to have had), so I'm very wrong here. I'm just generally annoyed how every forum now a days has it. But of course one of the reasons I dislike it is because I fall victim to its dopamine effects.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#219

Post by zem »

Razengan wrote: post #178
zem wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not "another thing", it means that your community forum lives on reddit (or whoever's) sufferance, and is subject to some corporation's capricious and arbitrary whims. this comment brings up a good concrete example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293553

This is a better comment on the same page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296018 Basically: "everyone has a different idea about what the Old Web™ was depending on when they first started using the internet, and when the community they liked was discontinued or changed"

that's a good comment for sure, but it doesn't address what I was talking about - specifically, in the "old internet" it was a lot commoner for a community to own its online spaces, usually by virtue of having one or two technically minded members who volunteered to run the infrastructure, and thanks to a lot of the required software being open source. sure, it's nice that anyone can just create a subreddit or facebook group now with no technical knowledge required, but there are definite ways in which living in someone else's space shapes your experience for the worse.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#220

Post by onion2k »

sodapopcan wrote: post #218
onion2k wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have fond memories of Slashdot in 1998. It was the spiritual forerunner to HN, and had upvoting, and in a more complex form as there were categories of votes. I got lots of +5 Funny comments. Hard to imagine, isn't it.

Ya, sorry, I never read Slashdot back in the day (even though I'm well old enough to have had), so I'm very wrong here. I'm just generally annoyed how every forum now a days has it. But of course one of the reasons I dislike it is because I fall victim to its dopamine effects.

Upvoted your post. Muhahaha!
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