I think we are approaching a dead-end. If you, as many do, consider where we are to be "late-stage capitalism", where do you go but backwards? There is no forwards, because we are at the end.
Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
121–130 of 157 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#122Its likely a combination of many factors. i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever. ii) The fact that the past keeps growing . The body of interesting developments keeps growing and while some stuff is obsolete / nostalgic, other stuff is totally not. In fact revisiting the mindset and vision of past decades is many times very inspiring and educational. iii) T…
> i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever.
Yeah or YouTube or TikTok.
> iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available.
100% agreed!
We thought we were building a better world. We were so wrong.
I'm convinced that what went wrong was monetisation related though. The internet was great when people made things for fun and to educate each other. It was the perverse impulse of monetization that caused recommendation algorithms, the push for 'engagement' caused the bubbles and the inflation of anger posts. The pervasive tracking. The bait and switching. The enshittification.
This is one of the reasons why I block all ads and never whitelist anything.
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#123Its likely a combination of many factors. i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever. ii) The fact that the past keeps growing . The body of interesting developments keeps growing and while some stuff is obsolete / nostalgic, other stuff is totally not. In fact revisiting the mindset and vision of past decades is many times very inspiring and educational. iii) T…
(i) Do anyone knows where that would be, or you know specific Discord servers? I would very much like to see how younger generation talk about tech, programming, entrepreneurship
It's very sad they hang out on a hostile platform that exhaustively monitors its users though. It will cause a big generation gap because I won't join them there.
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
>While a decentralized internet may host extreme views in certain pockets, Facebook and Twitter are a pretty damned big pocket.
If someone is saying something you don't like on those platforms, just unfollow them / mute them / block them. Nothing is said on those platforms, by the way, that hasn't been said a thousand different times in a thousand different forums, chat rooms, or blogs that preceded them. But I digress, I both support the liberty of people to speak freely on the internet and wish the centralized apps would die off.
As a hyperbolic example, I've created a support group called "the summary execution of people with the username chrisco255 group", you're free to block the group and ignore us, but all 255,000 of us are very angry people looking for vengeance...
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#125Its likely a combination of many factors. i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever. ii) The fact that the past keeps growing . The body of interesting developments keeps growing and while some stuff is obsolete / nostalgic, other stuff is totally not. In fact revisiting the mindset and vision of past decades is many times very inspiring and educational. iii) T…
>Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available.
I disagree. Tech was never a "force for good". It's always been a tool, a physical manifestation of the science we pursue as part of our species desire for knowledge of the world around us.
It can be used for good or evil, whatever your definitions for those are.
Right now it's used for a lot of evil things because the people in charge of using it are not altruistic. By and large, the people in charge of government at all levels in the US are elderly and grew up before the space age began. Their focus is not on bringing technological benefits to anyone. It's on bringing all benefits of any kind to themselves.
Tech will be a force for good if we can change ourselves and our country to make it that. It will be used for evil, too. Like any tool, it's on us to use it correctly and wisely.
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#126Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am old but would talk in discord if it had a better search and if it saved archives online so I can find past convos. It’s painful how much really good conversations and tech info gets lost when someone deletes a channel.
I think we’re partially returning to the ephemeral era of human communication. Discords, slacks, decentralized app channels, and self hosted forums all cease to exist quite easily. The semi-permanence of the web may be remembered as a brief era destroyed by spam and toxic social trends.
It's because fat clients (like WLM, which was Discord's DM UX before Discord) lost because they're not profitable.
Thin clients, however, mean you're data minable and get to pay for things that, instead of occupying your and your friends' machine (like custom emotes, animated avys, voice clips), now occupy valuable company server space.
My historiography here spans from the present to 2000, though; I have no idea how IRC worked or what people did pre-Yahoo! Messenger or WLM.
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#128With every passing moment the ratio of the past/future increases so there is just more past to talk about then there used to be.
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#129By the past you must mean ChatGPT 3.5? ‘Cause HN has become AIN recently.
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#130I can only speak for myself. My life is in the gutter, and for a variety of different factors, when and if that changes is out of my hands to an abnormal extent. I don’t have friends or anything to alleviate my current isolation with, and until I get a job again, little prospect of gaining any.
I don’t want to focus on the past, because the thought of the future, of making up for and crushing that sucky past, was what kept me going. But what else is there to focus on? Focusing on the future isn’t really an option when you are in this situation. I am not even going to have the money to go to the gym anymore soon. I might be living on the street by then. Focusing exclusively on the present will mean breaking myself mentally staring at the screen, simultaneously praying for and dreading the next interview that comes. If I break down now, I eliminate any prospect of escape. So I have to do whatever is necessary to prevent that, however counterproductive in other areas it is.