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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

#221

Post by sharts »

HaloZero wrote: post #183
monk_grilla wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

HN these days is like the tech chat-rooms of old internet.

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

#222

Post by lukan »

phs318u wrote: post #211
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 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.

Even family can be challenging ...

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

#223

Post by BrenBarn »

friendzis wrote: post #191
BrenBarn wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There were plenty of people using the internet, but again, they were nerds or nerd-adjacent. So, maybe the LLM-ification of everything could end up being like a huge filter, where all the non-nerds no longer see the point of anything and move on to gardens with even higher walls. 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 pat…

As far as I remember, huge portion of the "old web" web was self-curated list of human-to-human channels: be it blogs, BBs, rss, news/usenet, heck even irc, or whatever personal oddities. I will never forgive Google for killing Reader to promote g+. The facebooks of today make it effectively impossible to self-curate attention. Social media is the publishers early internauts tried to get away from. I disagree with yo…

I agree the web-of-trust model is a good idea for the future. Lobsters has something sort of like it in that you can see a tree of who invited who. I don't think it has a fully fleshed-out system for reputation flow on that basis though.

I don't think the old web was really a walled garden, though. It was just a sort of isolated garden that was harder to get to. There was nothing outside it threatening it. Now the garden needs walls because there are a lot of dangerous things outside.

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

#224

Post by stbede »

apsurd wrote: post #154
tavavex wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have seen. Too late to edit it now...

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…

Try "I am not old enough to have seen"

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

#225

Post by sodapopcan »

Razengan wrote: post #213
sodapopcan wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess that's what I was getting at, I think that (as usual) there is more nuance here past "people pretending to care" (which I think is extremely uncharitable, btw).

Back then there was a forcing factor to making your own website. Not just personal sites, but bands, artists, interest groups, etc. Now everyone just uses facebook because (or whatever) because it's easy and everyone is there. Even during the transition was better as myspace allowed you to customize the crap out of it with CSS and, as we were just discussing, DiaryLand gave you full access to do almost whatever you wanted (in the confines of static pages).

It has a LOT to do with billion dollar companies throwing their weight around and influencing politics. Tom never did that shit! (although given time, who knows... he did sell out).

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

#226

Post by AuthAuth »

inigyou wrote: post #171
AuthAuth wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most niches dont have to self censor. Even the ones that do still have no trouble communicating their message. I follow a lot of military channels and they post uncensored versions of their videos off yt but there is little reason to go because seeing the gore is not why im watching the video. I still get the entire value of the video from youtube even though you might argue its self censoring.

There's a lot of people who want to talk about things like Gaza or Luigi Mangione more, but can't because of platform rules. The new web has been successful at changing society at large by preventing discussion of these things. Even here on HN I have to be careful how I describe this effect, because an account that is flagged a few times in quick succession is automatically rate-limited, which is effectively a ban.

There is plenty of discussion on Gaza or Luigi. If you find youself being "censored" consider that your views and "solutions" are far outside what is accepted on the platform. On the old web you could also get banned if your views did not align with the platform.

Dont compare wanting a pro terrorism fourm with niche interests its so disingenuous.

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

#227

Post by Gormo »

inigyou wrote: post #113
Gormo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much how IPFS works.

Did they ever solve the problem where requesting a file took ten minutes

There are probably mitigations they could come up with, but variable latency in actually obtaining files seems like it may be an inherent characteristic of requesting data by content hashes rather than specific locations.

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

#228

Post by Gormo »

clickety_clack wrote: post #62
Gormo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'd say "old web" is early '90s up through about mid-2000s or so. Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, lots of standalone web forums, the early blogosphere, no social media, etc.

Pre-social media is probably the watermark. That’s what sucked all the content out of the web and into walled-garden platforms.

Back in the early 2000s, we were encouraging all of our friends and family still using AOL to come over to the open web. Little did we know that they'd provide the impetus for the open web to gradually turn into a new version of AOL.

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

#229

Post by Peacefulz »

I don't know how I missed such a cool redirector back in Web1.0.

The Old Web was, as most people here state, left behind in favor of the Walled Gardens of social media. The barrier to the watering hole was so low. I don't blame technical people for following their friends and family into these places. It kinda sucks that they let their marks on the web fade and expire.

That didn't have to happen. My personal site is going to live on the web as long as I do, and hopefully further if I can manage it. I don't care how much traffic I generate.

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

#230

Post by ErigmolCt »

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.

Agreed… yet I meant "needs" in terms of product features, not maintenance or moderation
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