I Miss the Old Internet (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#91

Post by pixl97 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:17 PM UTC

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…

The bullshit asymmetry therom predicted this. Filtering bullshit is so hard it's easier making money selling it yourself.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#92

Post by kristopolous » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

barney54 wrote: post #60

This sentiment of missing an older internet is one reason like like Hacker News. Slash dot was great in the day. Digg was so great in the day. Then the early days of Reddit were great. I’ve been her for over ten years and Hacker News is still good. So thank you to the team that runs Hacker News and everyone who comments for making it a good place to come to.

Hn, unlike the rest, doesn't have a business model they strongly encourages them to make the site a dumb as nails tabloid

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#93

Post by cdrini » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

evgen wrote: post #9

Strange, as this author misses the internet that they remember from the mid-90s and I miss the internet from the days before people like the author even knew what it was.

I never got to use the internet before the mid-90s; what do you miss about it?

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#94

Post by xwolfi » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

zubspace wrote: post #40

I just watched Inside [1], where Bo Burnham creates a wonderful, funny, sad and thought-provoking "Special" about our internet culture. Highly recommended. This is one of my favourite songs now: [2] It's a bit crazy when I think about how different our generations grow up and it makes me a bit sad that our children will have a completely different understanding of what the internet is. For me it was a place of wonder…

But to be fair, while it was a cheap wild west pioneer experience for us, it's also because we were drawn to this in the first place. Once it become cheap and accessible enough for most people, it turned into the utilitarian network it is today.

I mean, there was frankly no other way forward. Our kids will either be drawn to the next frontier, or wont be bothered like MOST KIDS when we grew up :D

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#95

Post by grishka » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

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".

Regarding the word from the sponsor, I can't recommend the SponsorBlock extension enough.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#96

Post by bufordtwain » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

torh wrote: post #52

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 ...?

I have been playing with the idea of making good old internet portal. A curated list of links to the good stuff. No FB, medium, Instagram or anything like that.

I had the same idea, I think this is the ultimate solution. Would need to be easy to add links and allow moderators to approve submitted websites and provide a good search capability. Would only include quirky websites.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#97

Post by npteljes » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

jcfrei wrote: post #47

failwhaleshark wrote: post #5

"I miss old ATX." "I miss old [X]." There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always missed. You can't go back without a time-machine.

I feel like a lot of those nostalgic posts are made by people who were simply happier when they were younger. And they conflate this general decline in happiness with a perceived decline in quality (of anything, be it the internet, television, music, etc). But in most cases it's just that things change and they no longer fit their desired qualities - they haven't become worse per se. For a lot of people who are young…

That's absolutely the case. It's also them encountering the first X, and then the millionth X. And a bunch of other biases also come into play, like survivorship bias. The good old refrigerator that's chugging along just fine for the twentieth year. It's not like today's shitty refrigerators can ever last this long. What's unseen though is the huge pile of discarded refrigerators on the landfill.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#98

Post by mattlondon » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

To a certain extent, Wikipedia has replaced a lot of the old Geocities sites for a certain subject.

The sort of nerdy/obsessive detail is still there, it's just kinda centralised on a fairly bland website. Your opinion on if this is an improvement or not depends on your affinity for animated GIFs I guess :)

The Geocities style stuff still exists, it is just the discovery is harder now as you will find the Wikipedia page first and then probably stop reading.

Things like webrings we're kinda cool for discoverability.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#99

Post by koheripbal » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

barney54 wrote: post #60

This sentiment of missing an older internet is one reason like like Hacker News. Slash dot was great in the day. Digg was so great in the day. Then the early days of Reddit were great. I’ve been her for over ten years and Hacker News is still good. So thank you to the team that runs Hacker News and everyone who comments for making it a good place to come to.

Many of us here followed the same path. HN is good for now, but it has been changing. It's unlikely we'll still be here in a couple years.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#100

Post by driscoll42 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #72

cik wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who cannot process video, agreed this is genuinely insulting. To me, the majority of knowledge distillation is quickly becoming like cheap snacking - you get a bit, it leaves you wanting, but is ultimately bad for you.

There are tools to download the automatic captions of youtube videos as text. I do this with a lot of videos.

That's useful, but ultimately you can't search captions in Google/DuckDuckGo if you're trying to find out if the video even has the info you're looking for.

Plus it sucks trying to copy code to reuse