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I Miss the Old Internet

misc-stuff.terraaeon.com

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Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#61

Post by solarkraft »

zozbot234 wrote: post #50
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Start hosting your website from home. This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a pitiful 10 mbps. Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home internet gets hugged to death.

IPFS solves this. You only need to host an index of the content, plus the "seed" copy, for anyone else to download and mirror as they please.

I'm guessing this is being downvoted because after all, for unpopular stuff, you're still going to be the one hosting your content.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#62

Post by brandon272 »

elorant wrote: post #42

I don't miss the old Internet because it never went away, at least the part that interests me the most and that's communities. Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine. Even IRC is still active. What I miss is contextual advertising. You went to a video games site and all ads where relevant. Ads used to be informative and interesting. These days they're irrelevant, annoying and indifferent. And I c…

> Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine.

I wonder what the stats would be on the number of forums and overall forum activity today vs. 5, 10, or 15 years ago.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#63

Post by deadbunny »

ars wrote: post #14
notJim wrote: post #5

I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.) I think the old internet w…

reddit is 75% teenagers. You might get human thoughts, but you won't find high quality ones unless you filter carefully. (Teenagers, and yes I was one and I remember, usually have an inflated sense of their own abilities and knowledge, and they write that way.) What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Or at least highly targeted forums, where people spend years curating relationships, and shari…

> reddit is 75% teenagers. You might get human thoughts, but you won't find high quality ones unless you filter carefully.

Pot, kettle, etc...

> What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Or at least highly targeted forums, where people spend years curating relationships, and sharing knowledge.

You are describing the non default subreddits.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#64

Post by gaogao »

Semaphor wrote: post #54
JohnFen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not find Reddit to be a bit of a cesspool? I tend to avoid it for that reason, but how true it is probably depends on which subreddit(s) we're talking about.

Rule of thumb for reddit: You want a small community or a heavily moderated community and never a (former, I don’t think this concept exists anymore) default subreddit. Besides some intra-reddit jokes, the site is more like a directory of forums with a unified interface.

There are still the default subscriptions, but the front page has switched over to a more diverse selection of posts. r/askhistorians is I think my favorite example of a very well run and moderated subreddit.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#65

Post by therealmarv »

Any good tips&tricks to find this personal sites without exactly knowing what you are searching for?

The crazy part is I have google but I tend to visit my 5 (mostly more commercial) news&tech websites nowadays.

Gone are also the days with my well structured bookmark lists.

Only thing I do nowadays is to keep a personal list of Markdown notes for all important topics to look up.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#66

Post by function_seven »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #58
notJim wrote: post #5

I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.) I think the old internet w…

> I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries On duck duck go you can use !r to search reddit if you're so inclined.

Unfortunately that redirects to Reddit's own search engine, which is often worthless for what I'm looking for.

For example, if I'm looking for a comment that refers to my lat 2014 model of some widget, Reddit's search will fail to find it, and try to show me subreddits instead that are tangentially related to what I'm looking for.

Still a good tip, don't get me wrong. But I find that asking the search engine to do the search for me—with "reddit" as one of the search terms—often gives me the result I'm looking for faster than using Reddit's own search.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#67

Post by IanCal »

WilliamEdward wrote: post #45
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Start hosting your website from home. This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a pitiful 10 mbps. Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home internet gets hugged to death.

Any way around this? Surely i don't need an industrial setup to scale my home website

You don't, the reality is it's extremely unlikely this happens and if it does the worst outcome is high bandwidth use + the image doesn't load for everyone. Hardly the end of the world.

You can very easily host things on a paid server though, which these days cost very little, use another image host or S3/similar when if things went crazy popular.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#68

Post by chongli »

solarkraft wrote: post #56
danso wrote: post #41

> You have to enter the exact name of the website to find it on Google. MayVaneDay is also mirrored on I2P, TOR, and Dat...You have to look really hard for them now, and the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites Without getting into the argument of whether Google deliberately makes these sites hard to find, it doesn't really support the author's thesis that the old Internet was any better…

> The Internet of those days were limited to the extreme minority of people who were aware of the Internet and had access to a connected computer, nevermind took the time to figure out how to create for it. Exclusivity makes things cool.

That's disingenuous. Smaller communities are better because they tend to be more focused, on-topic, and familiar for their members. When they grow large they can drift off-topic and fall victim to status-seeking and other obnoxious behaviour. The only way to mitigate this (I don't believe it can be prevented forever) is heavy moderation.

HN has survived due to the tireless efforts of some very smart moderators. It continues to creep away from its sense of community, however, and political flame-wars seem to be becoming increasingly common.

Early sites on the internet had not developed the appropriate tools and social norms to moderate effectively against the deluge.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#69

Post by faissaloo »

buboard wrote: post #4

We don't have to "miss it". Let's just share it. There are many corners of the internet away from the spotlights. Let's just share some links, what are they ?

I created https://ratwires.space (nsfw) a crazy little javascriptless anonymous textboard with text effects that only permits 255 posts to exist at any one time and where replies eventually becomes threads in and of themselves. People often share links to various other small sites there so it's turned out to be great for (re)discovering the undernet.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#70

Post by icedchai »

travisl12 wrote: post #55

I miss the old internet, but if I had the magic to go back to 1997 to browse for a bit I'd be over it in about 30 minutes. Just like I'd be over Mac OS System 7.5 in about 10 minutes, or my SNES, or Darkwing Duck, and on and on. ...member chewbacca

The early Internet was less crowded and less commercialized. There were often local communities, organized around local BBSes and ISPs. That is what I miss.

I certainly don't miss Netscape crashing every 10 minutes, and waiting for downloads over my 33.6k modem.

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