The Internet I Knew (2014)
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The Internet I Knew (2014)
1–10 of 122 posts
Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)
#2This description of the old days is actually a fairly accurate description of HN now.
Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)
#3And 10 years earlier we had irc and usenet.
But be under no illusions - I ran a Star Trek site in the late 90s that had adverts on, every month or so I'd get a cheque trough the post. In dollars. My bank were somewhat confused about how to cash foreign currency cheques into a child account.
Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)
#4This description of the old days is actually a fairly accurate description of HN now.
Kinda, except HN exists and is popular largely due to YC's popularity, which is very closely tied to the new style of ad-financed, VC-linked, revenue oriented social networks.
For the record, I don't think that's a good or bad thing. Just a reality of this community.
Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)
#5This description of the old days is actually a fairly accurate description of HN now.
On old forums (at least the ones I was part of) the community was usually small, and you knew most users and what they thought.
Instead on hn most of the comments I see are from people I don't think I ever read from before.
Also, here we don't officially have PMs or an official IRC channel, both of which were major parts of the communities I remember (most of the stuff actually happened on IRC, not on the forums).
Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)
#6And 10 years earlier we had irc and usenet. But be under no illusions - I ran a Star Trek site in the late 90s that had adverts on, every month or so I'd get a cheque trough the post. In dollars. My bank were somewhat confused about how to cash foreign currency cheques into a child account.
I ran a forum with a decent amount of users as a kid some 15 years ago. We had no ads but once a year when the bills came through we'd have a donation drive to cover the hosting fees and sometimes upgrade our (paid) forum software. Was always weird when people sent letters with cash from all over the DACH area to me ;)
Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)
#7And 10 years earlier we had irc and usenet. But be under no illusions - I ran a Star Trek site in the late 90s that had adverts on, every month or so I'd get a cheque trough the post. In dollars. My bank were somewhat confused about how to cash foreign currency cheques into a child account.
I ran a forum with a decent amount of users as a kid some 15 years ago. We had no ads but once a year when the bills came through we'd have a donation drive to cover the hosting fees and sometimes upgrade our (paid) forum software. Was always weird when people sent letters with cash from all over the DACH area to me ;)
I had a similar experience with my BBS. We did UUCP with some rather remote nodes and I had 11 incoming lines (the maximum BellSouth would install in a residence) so the bills were not trivial. Each month I’d post the prior month’s bill total and small checks and envelopes of cash would show up in my post office box soon after. It never made a wild profit, but there were only a couple of months where we couldn’t cover the bills.
Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)
#8OT: I don't get social networks.
Till today, I don't see any value in real name social networks like Facebook. They should present content I want but they don't, they show upvoted content from my connections which is wrong from a consumer and entertainment perspective.
My friends like or share mostly content of people because those people are kind of high-profile in their circles. Not because they post good content. The typical example, we all know, is some boring dude working at a VC that just raised a new fund who hourly posts really crappy content on FB and gets hundreds of likes every single time. Now, guess why. This happens all the time, everyday, every minute, just go to your FB feed right now and check how many of those high-status animals post again and again some random content which is liked and shared by too many likers.
So, the status of my connections determine which (lousy) content I have to see? No thanks and this is why I prefer interest-driven platforms such as HN.
Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)
#9The difference is who owns and pays for what. Running a centralized application for more than a few people on donations and goodwill is a challenge.
This is why I am a huge fan of distributed and federated networks. The idea of you and your buddies being able to split a dream host subscription, but instead of being locked into your own forum hangout, you can interact with a whole global network of fellow self posters and VPS renters. We are in the early days of high-quality federated interaction for non-nerds, but we will get there.
Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)
#10Our team (mostly cognitive scientists and engineers) is nostalgic about the past of online communication and concerned about its future. Our platform, Lyra, provides support for effective conversations rather than social networking and advertising. You can read our history of online convesation - and more about our approach - here: www.hellolyra.com/introduction