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Facebook technically kills the whole internet

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Facebook technically kills the whole internet

#11

Post by greatemployee »

More or less true. I think a lot of the early enthusiast web-places have either disappeared or are inactive.

But this is predictable. When hordes of normal people come online, of course Facebooks, Tumblrs, Instagrams are the result. A lot of the people primarily interested in using social services such as these frankly aren't on the web to learn things or explore. They use the web insofar as it resembles or enhances the lives they have outside of it. Even some of my old IRC / BBS friends are basically Tumblr zombies today. This is the nature of things-becoming-popular.

What I'm interested in is, is there any rendezvous for the curious today or are all mediums of communication now machines for self-promotion, passive indulgence, etc.? I want to believe that there is something else, but I think the transformation that occurred, where everyone is given a voice, is something that happens once and only once.

The curious will always be able to discover new things, but for now it looks like these things will be more about the author or human source than about the content or things theirselves. And since the content we find is inextricably tied to the profit of some other personality, we may continue to find content that is less risky, controversial, dangerous, etc..

Objectivity is a precious thing that our cultures don't seem to value today.

Re: Facebook technically kills the whole internet

#12

Post by notacoward »

kyriakos wrote: post #10

It doesn't kill the internet - a more accurate description is that it killed a part of the web. For me for example it has killed forums which were abundant before Facebook became popular.

I miss forums. You could talk about a subject, and people you don't already know would join in with different opinions - more or less intelligently, more or less civilly, depending on the forum and its moderators. They had sophisticated ways of tracking where you were on each topic or sub-forum and showing you only the new content. There's nothing that checks all of those boxes any more. What forums are left are full of trolls, or they're severely topic-limited, or their interfaces are absolutely unusable. I follow literally hundreds of sites, mostly via RSS, and all of them together yield maybe one comment thread a month worth participating in. So people turn to Facebook, only to find that they can't pierce the walls of their own private echo chamber to get the kind of conversations that used to be everywhere - from Usenet to BBSes to M-Net and its ilk to any number of Invision/vBulletin forums. The OP might be incoherent, but the point that the internet isn't a real communications medium any more has a certain truth to it.

Re: Facebook technically kills the whole internet

#15

Post by meira »

The ratio developers/ratio most be in a historic low level (at least here in Brazil). Everybody is a consumer of a siloed technology nowadays, producing content for them for free (or earning scraps), while not getting the internet bigger picture.

Re: Facebook technically kills the whole internet

#16

Post by xxtjaxx »

marak830 wrote: post #5
ernestosoo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen these websites before? If you know any subculture internet user in 1990's or early 2000's, you should ask them what they think of the internet now! Unless you have the experience, otherwise you can't tell the difference. http://www.deviantart.com/ http://rateyourmusic.com/list/novocaine69/the_great_obscure_... http://www.novaexpresscafe.com/main.html Today, my Uber driver was a DJ and he mentioned how s…

Deviant art I only really started seeing pop up in the last few years, (I guess my styles are changing as I fet older). I wouldn't know about silicon valley. A)I'm not American so it doesn't really effect me, b)well I guess a summed it up haha. I socialise with all my mates using voice comms recently, we try out new games and leave messages on steam. I frequently read new and interesting news and science pieces from…

Technically what used to be bulletin boards with all their maneurisms and excentrics has now been moved to reddit.

You still have flourish of subtopics and categories and groups you can post to on reddit just like you were able to do on usenet bulletin boards. However for the most of places there the problem of an eternal-september is in constant effect in so far as everyone with an internet connection and an account can post, which makes moderators (unbiased ones especially!) all the more valuable

Re: Facebook technically kills the whole internet

#17

Post by kyriakos »

notacoward wrote: post #12
kyriakos wrote: post #10

It doesn't kill the internet - a more accurate description is that it killed a part of the web. For me for example it has killed forums which were abundant before Facebook became popular.

I miss forums. You could talk about a subject, and people you don't already know would join in with different opinions - more or less intelligently, more or less civilly, depending on the forum and its moderators. They had sophisticated ways of tracking where you were on each topic or sub-forum and showing you only the new content. There's nothing that checks all of those boxes any more. What forums are left are full…

I miss forums too, I used to run two medium sized ones (1million posts+) a decade ago which slowly died out with the explosion of social media. I think Google+ groups was an attempt on that concept but failed because the rest of the network was a ghost town. Some Facebook groups are very targeted and feel like forums but they miss the content persistence we had with forums e.g if I remembered something I saw a month ago on a group there's no way I can find it again.
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