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I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

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Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#211

Post by imiric »

fabbari wrote: post #34

I miss text. It seems now that whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things. A 10 minutes video with the usual 'subscribe and hit the bell icon', a word from the sponsor, a long winded introduction and then "click on menu, then click on this item, then select the size".

Or even if there is a text article, it's obscured by cookie consent forms, ads, "subscribe to my newsletter" popups, padded intros and outros, and most likely scraped instructions from elsewhere. It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky with random search results.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#213

Post by raffraffraff »

ryandrake wrote: post #195
andrepd wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How ironic. I agree, downvote-based discussions invariably lead to echo chambers / monocultures. See the dumpster fire that are reddit comments. At least on old-time forums there was no such bullshit (except post count :)).

You can’t crowdsource quality. Comment voting systems only tell you what is popular, not what is high quality. So many sites make this mistake, including HN.

You reminded me of a failed experiment I did a while back with music tags. I still purchase music monthly (Bandcamp when possible), and I always tag music. I have a bunch of multi-value tags including 'instruments' and 'moods'. It works really well with a huge collection. I can quickly find songs similar to the one I'm listening to, or generate playlists.

Anyway, a few years ago I thought I could speed up the tagging process by pulling tags from Last FM and filtering out the shite by only including tags that matched an instrument name or mood. Luckily I backed up before running the script on my whole collection. The data was absolute garbage.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#214

Post by cesarb »

scambier wrote: post #176
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you not skipping the bullshit? I feed most of my youtube addiction through mpv and have configured several key combinations which allow me to quickly bisect the video. These videos are always full of comments like "why did I have to spend 20 minutes on this", while they never take more than 15 to 20 seconds from me. By the way, with a proper youtube-dl config in place you don't even have to open the browser:…

> Why are you not skipping the bullshit Honestly? Because I was expecting to hear something interesting at any moment. When I saw the length, I expected to see a technical explanation, a step-by-step how-to, a live example with the ffmpeg CLI. Anything remotely interesting. What I absolutely did not expect was a 6 minutes long "introduction" out of a 8:30 minutes video. All of that to finally say "it's 2 videos stitc…

> out of a 8:30 minutes video

A friend of mine who has an youtube channel once explained to me that he had to add more content to one of his videos which otherwise would end up being too short, since there's a minimum length before youtube can monetize the video. IIRC, the minimum length was something like 8 minutes.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#215

Post by imiric »

papito wrote: post #30

Please sign my guestbook...

I miss guestbooks. It was great to see comments from visitors thanking the webmaster; it made it feel like each site had a small community around it. Nowadays such a concept is hidden behind CAPTCHAs or happens on external forums, so feels much more disconnected.

Also, hit counters were rad.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#216

Post by doogerdog »

fuckwarmweather wrote: post #174
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you not skipping the bullshit? I feed most of my youtube addiction through mpv and have configured several key combinations which allow me to quickly bisect the video. These videos are always full of comments like "why did I have to spend 20 minutes on this", while they never take more than 15 to 20 seconds from me. By the way, with a proper youtube-dl config in place you don't even have to open the browser:…

Can you elaborate on the key combinations thing? Is it just for jumping around in the video or is there more to it than that?

I also prefer text to videos, but there are many times when you need to churn through six lousy vids to get the one thing you need.

I use Movist Pro (Mac-only) for videos that work with youtube-dl. Once you set it up it's like magic. I can set keys for any speed or jump size I desire.

I have gotten pretty good at watching fast and jumping around to see if this vid is worth a look, or will cover the information I need. When I'm away from my computer and have to wade through vids on another machine it's like torture.

By the way, the modern internet is way better than the 1995- 2005 version. Everything you could want is there, you just have to learn how to get past the fluff and BS. I have fond memories of 1997 internet because for the first time I could access so much information from home, but I would never go back.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#217

Post by selimthegrim »

joshspankit wrote: post #188
scambier wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are you not skipping the bullshit Honestly? Because I was expecting to hear something interesting at any moment. When I saw the length, I expected to see a technical explanation, a step-by-step how-to, a live example with the ffmpeg CLI. Anything remotely interesting. What I absolutely did not expect was a 6 minutes long "introduction" out of a 8:30 minutes video. All of that to finally say "it's 2 videos stitc…

Is there enough of a market for extremely short YouTube videos so that people could make a living just making “It’s 2 videos stitched together”? Honestly, my heart wants it to be true.

Pretty soon the industry will be reduced to bunches of three preteen content creators in a trenchcoat.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#218

Post by ______- »

Some Tor hidden services, or `Onionland` as it's called are very similar to the early web. For some reason a lot of the pages look like Angelfire[0]. I can't figure out why though. Perhaps the technical challenge of setting up an .onion was so hard that the webmasters were glad just to have something hosted and the bulk of their energy was spent on the hidden service and they didn't spend 5 hours creating a Javascript single page app in their free time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelfire

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#219

Post by hashkb »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #168
npteljes wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I think HN in the perfect combination of the old internet, with the text-only posts, and the web 2.0 way of doing likes and threaded conversations. And, of course, the moderation keeping it all in check. I'm grateful that I can come here every day.

Includes the very worst part of echo chambering though. Don’t like someone OR their comment? Just do your part with three other people and it’ll be faded, once it’s faded other people will join in hiding the bad man who said the bad thing - and gone! No more contrarian opinion, we protected other people! Everyone agrees now. How wonderful.

They'll also go through your recent history and downvote any comments you've made that are still fresh enough. Downvote culture has some clear drawbacks that I have never seen validated, let alone addressed, by any community mod/admin. Dang responded to me once, but not with validation, and not to my follow up. It's the best I've ever been treated by a mod. I must be a bad person with evil opinions.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#220

Post by j_wtf_all_taken »

titzer wrote: post #61
j_wtf_all_taken wrote: post #46

Its still there, its just buried under all the other crap. As more and more people generate content, more and more bullshit exists. Unfortunately, Google etc. - despite all their big announcements - can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit. Where's the semantic web that was promised? I wonder if we're still paying for the mistakes that were made with the whole XML stuff ...?

> Google etc... can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit. It's worse than that. They are shoveling bullshit. They turned on the bullshit magnet and lit up the bullshit bat signal. They created a bullshit attention economy and sold bullshit tickets to bullshit artists. Literally everthing about Google and Facebook is creating one opportunity after another to jab you in the eyeballs w…

Yeah, bullshitting was always the easiest way to get people's attention. Specifically if the bullshitters believe their own bullshit, I mean, they're sooooo confident in what they're saying, the gotta be right, right?

Just seems like a human weakness, always believe the person that appears the most confident, no matter what they say. And a bullshitter will say anything that people like because they need positive feedback because they're so convinced that what they have to say is pure greatness, and they don't even realize that they just always say whatever gets the most applause. And man, these people are good in that specific respect (and literally nothing else). They perfected their bullshit to a degree that its really really hard to see through it, at least it will take time. And then the next bullshitter comes along and one's fooled again because fuck they're good.

And yeah now we got a system called social media putting those people on steroids. Its not like that didn't happen every time we invented a new way of communicating. But every fucking time we believe this time it's different and people are better now and all that shit won't happen.

And of course then you get in a competition between those bullshitters, so they have to turn the heat up more and more to beat their fellow bullshitters. And what gets the most heat? Well, hate and fear and division and polarization of course. And now we are where we are and have to deal with fucking QAnon bullshit.

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