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The Internet I Knew (2014)

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Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#21

Post by jacques_chester »

lyra_comms wrote: post #10

Our 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

Speaking as one notorious-for-promoting-own-stuff type to another, you don't need to reply to nearly every thread. This top-level one was probably sufficiently.

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#22

Post by waytogo »

yoz-y wrote: post #18
waytogo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they did exactly what you were asking for No, MySpace and Facebook didn't what I was asking for because they didn't have any feed then. With MySpace and Facebook in its early days, I could just stalk profiles and both didn't serve me any content based on my interest. On MySpace I could browse through some music genres but this is not my understanding of an interest-driven site.

Twitter has had a feed from the beginning and served you content you wanted, as long as you subscribed to the right people. It still does, as long as you only follow a few people.

The grandparent post was about FB and MySpace, not Twitter.

However, Twitter is a different beast. They got better over time because Twitter evolved from a friends network to kind of a interest-driven network. At the beginning people were following friends and then you had the same dissatisfying outcome like with FB (nobody wants to unfollow a crap-posting friend and muting wasn't available then). But nowadays you rather follow people on Twitter based on interest or because you share the same industry, etc.

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#23

Post by dijit »

nimbius wrote: post #11

call me nostalgic, but i refuse to let go of that internet. There are plenty of alternatives that dont get a multi billion dollar TV ad blitz, and theyre worth checking out https://freenode.net for a classic IRC experience, free of charge. https://mastodon.social/about for a distributed open source twitter-like experience https://diasporafoundation.org/ for an alternative to facebook that respects your privacy.

I maintain to this day a personal IRC network. Many of us have been “together” for over a decade. In fact I just tried to advocate self-hosted communities at CCC. So I’m also stuck in the past and refuse to let the internet go. But I have two points I’d like to mention.

1) Forums are dead for almost all but the biggest communities that surround a product of some kind. Social forums are simply dead.

2) As an IRC-user mentioned at the CCC. Facebook is the new telephone number. It’s significantly easier to ask for a Facebook friend request than a phone number and that edge will keep Facebook relevant even if we saw a rise in self-hosted or segmented interest driven communities.

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#24

Post by slipstream- »

lyra_comms wrote: post #14
nerdponx wrote: post #9

The 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…

An open conversation service needs to be open to all, not just people with tech skills; we need to prevent large numbers of people feeling locked out of discourse, or left behind. Also, many of the distributed/federated services we've looked at have rapidly devolved into niche communities often centred around sexual content. These two reasons lead us to think that a centralised service is more open and approachable.

With regards to mastodon, there's at least one hosting service specifically for it already (https://masto.host), and people who don't know that much about the Linux command line/etc have set up their own instances using it.

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#25

Post by jancsika »

> Those "social networks" were small, and never made front-page news (or any news at all), and were more concerned with keeping to themselves than recruiting new members.

And I'm supposed to be convinced that those small forums weren't anti-social in their own important ways?

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#26

Post by lyra_comms »

slipstream- wrote: post #24
lyra_comms wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An open conversation service needs to be open to all, not just people with tech skills; we need to prevent large numbers of people feeling locked out of discourse, or left behind. Also, many of the distributed/federated services we've looked at have rapidly devolved into niche communities often centred around sexual content. These two reasons lead us to think that a centralised service is more open and approachable.

With regards to mastodon, there's at least one hosting service specifically for it already ( https://masto.host ), and people who don't know that much about the Linux command line/etc have set up their own instances using it.

I know it's hard to see it this way when one is into tech, but many of my non-tech friends (artists, philosophers, retail...) would balk at this.

We believe using a communication tool needs to be as easy as entering a URL and logging in - friendly, familiar, no new terminology.

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#27

Post by lyra_comms »

nofilter wrote: post #20
lyra_comms wrote: post #10

Our 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

But why does all the free and open stuff look so bad. I mean seriously, Lyra is in dire need for someone with a UX/UI background to join their team.

As a nonprofit, we operate on grants and revenue alone, not investment.

We'd love to hear some specific feedback on what you think could be improved about our UI :)

We also think we're not doing too badly compared to Reddit and Hacker News!

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#28

Post by lyra_comms »

jacques_chester wrote: post #21
lyra_comms wrote: post #10

Our 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

Speaking as one notorious-for-promoting-own-stuff type to another, you don't need to reply to nearly every thread. This top-level one was probably sufficiently.

Thanks for the advice, we've been staying under the radar on HN recently but we honestly feel really strongly about this. We're a nonprofit, have been sinking lots of cash into this project, and are not in it for personal gain :)

Re: The Internet I Knew (2014)

#30

Post by ukulele »

lyra_comms wrote: post #16
agentultra wrote: post #13

I recall being a bit confused about the terms, "social web," and "social network" when they were beginning to be bandied about to discuss Flickr and Facebook et al. The Internet was already a social network. You had irc, nntp, http, ftp, etc etc... communication protocols. For communicating with other humans. The only thing Facebook did, in my experience, was make the web anti-social . I distinctly recall when my gro…

It's absolutely hearbreaking to see the independence, critical thinking and self-determination that Western society has been building up since the Enlightenment, weakening under the forces of big data and targeted advertising. Communication should be open, profit should not be involved in discourse, and advertising should not corrode conversation. Viva la revolucion! www.hellolyra.com/introduction

> advertising should not corrode conversation.

You really followed this with a link to your website?

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