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The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

buzzfeednews.com

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Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#71

Post by rchaud »

decasteve wrote: post #35

More than a dozen comments on this article and none reference the actual content of the article and miss the point of the article entirely. It's a headline the evokes different ideas but it has nothing to do with the Internet not being what it used to be. The sorry state of platforms is an issue, for sure, but it's not what this article is about. Commenting on headlines is another sorry state of Internet discussion.…

I remember bookmarking a great article critiquing the style and content of the Economist, a publication I read regularly. I was reminded of that article recently. When I went to look up the bookmark, and the site was dead. No redirect to a new domain, nothing.

Fortunately I used the URL to pull up a copy on Internet Archive, but there's a wealth of good info that isn't being archived.

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#72

Post by ekianjo »

hans1729 wrote: post #45
ekianjo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we gotta ban collecting & monetizing user info anything that runs across a network can be monitored, and such data is valuable when you are able to merge it across several data sources. It's very unlikely tracking can even be banned or un-monitized.

>It's very unlikely tracking can even be banned [...] How so? It's just politics - no more, no less. I don't even consider it highly unlikely that it will , letalone can, be banned, at least in the EU.

Because whatever flows in networks is a fundamental properties of the networks and it's natural for it to be available for anyone/any entity running centralized or decentralized services. Tracking is a natural consequence of operating networks.

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#73

Post by ekianjo »

shantly wrote: post #68
ekianjo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you make monitoring logs illegal? Because that is pretty much enough to start tracking users.

You don't need to make IP logging illegal to make collecting user info that's not absolutely necessary to a transaction illegal, and to make selling or using any necessarily-collected data for anything other than e.g. auditing or further service to the transaction (returns, say) also illegal. I don't know how this became about Apache logs or whatever. [EDIT] my point is there's a ton of info being collected that goes…

> absolutely necessary to a transaction illegal,

"absolutely necessary" does not mean anything. For example, tracking in banking systems has very good justifications such as fraud detection. That alone means banks have a blank check to connect tons of features about their users, and not for nefarious purposes.

[EDIT] to your EDIT point: even with server logs you could start building user tracking and if your net is large enough you can derive a massive amount of data just from that. Pattern analysis, sites/services users connect to, geolocation, etc... even without the most sophisticated tracking systems this is already good enough to build business value.

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#74

Post by 34679 »

Buzzfeed did not watch and do nothing, they actively participated in creating its replacement. The author of this article is so tone deaf that he rails against social media giants dominating the netscape in an article with "Tweet" and Facebook "Share" buttons at the top.

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#75

Post by shantly »

rasengan wrote: post #65
icedchai wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual "old" Internet is the stuff that predated the web: Gopher, IRC, Usenet, MUDs, Public Access Unix systems, telnet...

I agree with this. It was when we designed protocols with consensus thru RFC, and apps communicating with those protocols.

And companies started dropping that when it became very important to their business model that they maximize the amount of data they can collect about a user. 3rd party clients for my service? Unacceptable, can't spy on the user as much there, and can't advertise at them. Communicating with users on other services? Unacceptable, I need those users on my service so I can spy on them too, and besides those other services won't talk to mine for the same reasons.

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#76

Post by chongli »

zozbot234 wrote: post #24
shantly wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we want a (return to the) boom in open-source and paid standards-based solutions, we gotta ban collecting & monetizing user info. Monetized user info & related advertising paying for "free" walled services are keeping those down. We won't see widely-successful standards-based social networks or messaging services until that option is gone. [EDIT] and wide success/adoption matters for those in particular because mu…

The "old" internet was all static or lightly server-rendered pages, that can be developed and hosted at minimal cost today. Back in the day we didn't expect that "everyone" would sign up for whatever niche forum you were hosting, it was enough to have "everyone who's into that niche". These services don't need "monetization", they can be kept up with minimal amounts of crowdfunding, while federating through well-know…

The problem isn’t hosting, it’s discovery. Discovery was easy on the old internet because we weren’t yet drowning in spam, link farms, and cloned/scraped pages. To bring the old internet back we need search that filters out all that commercial noise and we can’t rely on Google et al to build it. Why not? Because those companies have a conflict of interest due to their ad-driven business model.

A new “Old Internet” needs to be non commercial. I don’t know how we do that.

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#79

Post by shantly »

ekianjo wrote: post #73
shantly wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to make IP logging illegal to make collecting user info that's not absolutely necessary to a transaction illegal, and to make selling or using any necessarily-collected data for anything other than e.g. auditing or further service to the transaction (returns, say) also illegal. I don't know how this became about Apache logs or whatever. [EDIT] my point is there's a ton of info being collected that goes…

> absolutely necessary to a transaction illegal, "absolutely necessary" does not mean anything. For example, tracking in banking systems has very good justifications such as fraud detection. That alone means banks have a blank check to connect tons of features about their users, and not for nefarious purposes. [EDIT] to your EDIT point: even with server logs you could start building user tracking and if your net is l…

Cool. Can't sell it, can't leverage it against users (e.g. use it to select which products to try to sell them). If you're doing that on any significant scale it's gonna leave a hell of a trail and enough people will be involved that it'll be found out.

"waaaah but we need to share it with 'partners'" hahaha OK whatever, but bet you don't though. Illegal. Figure it out. Bet you can.

Re: The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

#80

Post by gravitas »

The Buzzfeed article seems to focus around a particular user usage pattern, in that these were sites I personally did not use that horribly much. My "old internet" was Digg, Slashdot, GeoCities, HowardForums, ISP `~username` pages, Usenet, IRC and a multitude of others I've long forgotten. The Consumerist has a better version that speaks to me: https://consumerist.com/2015/03/20/where-did-everyone-from-t...

In any case, we all agree Eternal September was the beginning of the end. :) http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/AOL-.html

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