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Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

franzoni.eu

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Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo. I guess Wordpress is an example. It's got a hosted plan, which requires little more computer literacy than Facebook, and you can also leave at any time and self-host the software, which keeps the hosted offering honest. But it's just not as contagious as something like Facebook. That's the problem, Facebook isn't just more 'convenient' than self-ho…

I'd argue that, in terms of features, Wordpress is little better than Jekyll/Hugo. Social integration is the aspect that's missing. Chat, access control, tagging, push/pull update, etc. I envision this is a two part problem: the "back-end", one-click install or oauth register services to create your private space and identity (possibly a VPS or agglomeration of AWS services) for sending/receiving emails, direct messa…

and I kinda wonder how much of this ultimately falls on ISPs for not building out high speed internet... it's not inconceivable to imagine an always on "social network" box, or more options for home servers

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#232
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a tool that converts Twitter to RSS. I used to use it to get updates from a fantasy author who had neither a website nor a mailing list. It was self hosted but can't remember the name.

This ? https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

Not the one I used (it started with Tw), but useful nonetheless :)

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#233

Walled gardens and a "protectionist web" are the natural outcome of the legal structure we've chosen to put up around the internet. It's not a technical limitation, and technical solutions can not really affect it. Just this week there was a "Show HN" that combined data from Twitter et al in interesting ways. It was offline less than 24 hours later as all the comments indicated that it was a clear violation of the po…

> Just this week there was a "Show HN" that combined data from Twitter et al in interesting ways. It was offline less than 24 hours later as all the comments indicated that it was a clear violation of the policies of various content providers. I missed that. What's the HN URL? > Why should we care about those policies? Well, because under the CFAA, we've made it a federal crime to send packets to a server in a way th…

>I missed that. What's the HN URL?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14639451 ; looks like the linked site has come back online (for now).

>There are ways to avoid such oversight. Consider, for example, Sci-Hub or TPB or third-generation dark markets. What's hard is doing that at scale. And that, I believe, is a huge niche that's aching to be filled.

The TPB saga should scare all of us, because it shows how far corporate interests will go to remove a thorn in their side. TPB lives on because the swarm refuses to let it die, but its founders were rewarded with a witch hunt led by the top brass in the United States, exile, and imprisonment.

Anyone who wants to take this on: do not expect a more favorable outcome than TPB's founders got, especially if you live in the U.S., where they won't have to threaten sanctions against your homeland to get you brought down.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#234
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there have been an increasing trend in "reddit style" comments on news.ycombinator.com . Myself and other users have noticed, called people out, downvoted etc for the lousy comments. But the realities of the threading style & upvote democracy is that lowest common denominator spreads easily. Related discussion in same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699133

Out of curiosity, could you explain what you mean by more Reddit style comments? Because I don't think I've seen too many low effort comments here recently, or at least not much more than there were in the past. And while political threads get a bit out of control, my experience there is that the most volatile, disruptive posts tend to get downvoted to hell before they can cause too much of an issue. So even if a cer…

Here, 2/4 comments on this new post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14709907

jff 9 minutes ago [-]

If anyone else is using uBlock Origin, at least for me the page displayed completely blank until I disabled uBlock temporarily.

Nice one.

reply

sluggg 10 minutes ago [-]

what if I want two? I can't have two third thumbs

reply

piyh 44 minutes ago [-]

When I was a kid, I dreamed of having a functional third arm, this seems like the first step in that direction.

reply

googlryas 25 minutes ago [-]

This is what my ex-gf would call my manhood. Guess why we aren't dating any more...

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 10 second look isn't really enough to evaluate a service, now is it? Quip and Discourse are subscription products targeted at teams. They aim to make money. Lyra is a discussion platform targeted at a general audience. We're a nonprofit and aim to improve the quality and attentional demands of online conversation.

10 seconds was tongue in cheek, a longer look didn't show anything I missed the first look. Your platform isn't complicated or detailed. It doesn't take long to determine that while you have laudable goals, there doesn't appear to be a significant differentiation either technically or realistically that makes your product worth spending more time on. For one, the quality of conversation isn't a technical or platform…

We repeat:

Lyra is a discussion platform targeted at a general audience. We're a nonprofit and aim to improve the quality and attentional demands of online conversation.

There's nothing like this in the space.

We did not claim to be "new," "novel" or "unique."

If you would like to elaborate on what is "crappy" about the execution, we will be able to address your concerns more directly.

We're not aiming to be findable on Google via a search for "Lyra." Our execution of this requirement may be "horrible," but as it's not one of our requirements, we're fine with that.

We're already sustainable, which is in our opinion a mature funding model.

We would finally like to add that "sense" has a different meaning for each of the billions of people on this planet.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#236
post #7

> Once was IRC Seriously?

Uuh, despite the enormous attention, the article was written in just about an hour, and I'm not a native English speaker; that error slipped through the cracks. Thanks for pointing it out.

I was very tired when I wrote that, my apologies.

What I meant was that IRC is still alive and kicking.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#237
The internet is definitely getting noisier but I don't get his "solutions", especially about "blogging". What does it ever mean "I think most of us won't discuss about so many totally unrelated different fields. It's a change of mentality - we shouldn't write something just because we can."? He makes it sound as if there are tons of irrelevant blogs out there spewing nonsense and polluting people's experiences, while in fact the people who blog are still the absolute minority. I particularly agree with the idea of "blog small things", since no matter how "small" your experience might seem to be, there could well be somebody else facing a similar situation who can be helped by your article. Also I don't understand his "blog with focus" thing. Many of us are not writing blogs as commercial projects. We are just blogging whatever we find might be helpful to others and in this sense there's absolutely no point in overthinking it. Just blog whatever you want. I get that he might be unsatisfied with the rambling comments in many websites and forums. But come on, what does that have the least bit to do with blogging and "write just because we can"?

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#238
> Incidentally, this is not a call for the open internet; I could not care less if there's a leading provider for content, as long as such content is accessible in a standard way.

There is such a provider and it's called Facebook, that is if you don't care about the open internet is exactly what you get.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#239
post #227
post #113

This is partly what weboob ( http://weboob.org ) wants to solve, or at least work around. Its goal is to pull the web out of browsers (hence the name): - each website is handled by a module that does all the scraping, or uses the api if needed - each module provides one or more capabilities, such as "list an account transactions" (typically for your bank or your mobile provider) or "receive and send messages" (such a…

Interesting. I've thought basically the opposite for years. At one point it seems that the web was standardizing, more applications were able to run in the browser, things like XUL were developing; but then along came mobile devices and things split apart into Apple and Google siloes, and every company started to need to hire (extra) mobile developers to develop special apps. I've been waiting for the equivalent of a…

The real problem that weboob wants to solve is that websites tend to provide both the content _and_ the presentation layer, with no way to separate the two. Even though all the elements are standardized, it's impossible to fetch only the data and display it the way you want, unless the website provides APIs which is far from common. Weboon wants to provide that.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Google (almost; not everything is online). As a (presumably) end user, do you think that the interface provided by Google is database-like?

query; results. So yeah. It's easy enough to scrape. All this stuff about structured data is trying to find something that isn't there to begin with. If you want structure from unstructured data then use machine learning, don't try to sell everyone a "semantic data format" they have no incentive to use.

How do you do JOINs?
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