I sincerely hope that the “re-decentralization” movement is able to attract hackers and gain steam.
Of course people will just end up recreating TCP over HTTPS to get around these sorts of things, but I don't think we're headed toward a decentralised and opinionated (i.e. not heavily filtered based on traffic analysis) network.
I still remember the day that these assholes showed up and ruined a wonderful thing, and as you can see I'm not really over it.
Where things went wrong on the web, imho, was when business started leaning on people to put graphic corporate branding front and center, encouraging the abuse of things like tables and so on to create something that looked more like a magazine advert. Now, you could argue that such commercial pressures were got people to throw money at the WWW int he first place and rove technological development, and you'd have a point - the early web was pretty dull to look at. I wrote a book on how to use it for consumers around 1994 and every so often I take it off the shelf for a giggle at how primitive it looks in the screenshots. But at that time it was much better curated and the browsing experience was much more rewarding in many respects, although I'm obviously influenced by some nostalgia for a simpler era.
I really hoped to see the semantic web recapture some of the user-centric benefits of the early web, but development on that front seems slooooooow, and my ideas about a graph centric virtual space seem too sci-fi for me to even get meaningful answers from people I've asked.
It's hard to explain but it's got the same feel of people who tinker and enjoy technology for the hell of it. With HF you get communication all over the globe.
It's also explicitly non-commercial so it's stayed relatively undeveloped. Granted you'll never see the exponential of communication that the internet unleashed due to limited spectrum but that might be in some ways a blessing.
Thankfully K1JT via WSJT has been doing some awesome open source weak signal work. FT8 is pretty sweet and really exploded recently.
I think ham radio is split between the people who like the social/contest aspect of it and those of us who like to tinker(and a subset that covers people who like both). 97.1b pretty clearly lays out a mandate to advance the state of the art and I think it's pretty incredible to pick out a message -20db below the noise floor.
But there are two issues: FT8 is just a contact, with maybe a 73, so it’s even more impersonal than contesting (which is extremely popular, of course). Breaking a pileup is pretty much left to the computer, rather than due to operator skill.
And the old timers on 160 who earned their DXCC (100 countries - very difficult on 160) certificates the hard way using CW / SSB aren’t happy with the relative ease of getting an FT8 DXCC award. The ARRL can fix that, however.
Over in the SOTA community we're looking at a few potential solutions. There's nothing in the core FT8 spec that mandates the standard QSO exchange and there's support for free messages(at a max of 13 chars).
As someone with a KX3 I think anyone running more than 10W is at a huge advantage ;). You're right though, the right way is to split the awards by mode/type. That said I find the content stuff just as impersonal and find the relaxed atmosphere of SOTA much more appealing.
That's what makes ham radio so awesome though, it's all fair game. I just hate to see people try to squash things just because it's not the "old way". That part seems really counter to the experimental nature of the hobby.
Facebook, twitter had the same feeling of "exclusivity" for a while. Twitter lasted a bit longer because the capability to compose your thoughts in < 140 chars demanded a certain level of sophistication but then came #winning and shit-posting.
These days I find as a developer even, as that segment expands there's an increasing amount of noise but I've gotten into emacs recently and can appreciate the marked increase in tranquility there. Nobody's trying to make a buck off my questions and answers. Nobody has a commercial (or other) interest in keeping me clueless.
I still recall watching this change firsthand.
When i got my first modem, i was informed of a regional IRC channel on one of the big networks. And from that day onwards i would have my client set to connect to that channel, and fire it up alongside the email client right after the handshake completed.
But at one point the channel died, and the cause of death was twofold.
one part was the creation first generation social media services, and their web based chat rooms.
Another part, and perhaps a bigger part, was that Microsoft made a strong push of MSN Messenger with Windows XP.
This resulted in a more clique style communications form online, as you had to know people and get their account info before being able to contact them. With IRC you joined the channel and that was it.
I recall having on the fly conversations about TV programs on IRC.
[1] at least in Germany
The capabilities and features of web forums are also really dumbed-down and limited compared to what you could get with the mail clients and news clients of even 20 or 30 years ago.
Long story short, a lot of the large internet companies withhold or obscure functionality that users really want in order to keep them engaged and sell more ads. We have the technology to do a lot better than we are doing, but capital prefers to manufacture scarcity in the guise of abundance.
Yes, the tight coupling of progress to profits is becoming very counter-productive. Too many good ideas and products that get killed because they can’t make enough money (and the criteria for “enough” keeps rising unnecessarily and exponentially, i.e. something has to sell in tens of millions to be considered a “success” even if half a million would be profitable.)
We will need to rethink the role of money in human civilization if we don’t want it to become a corporate hell where every action is dictated by how much money it makes.
For example, Google only lets you get a few results at the top of their search. What if you want to get the whole 100,000 of them? Sometimes it's important, for science.
"This is one of the things that web-based forums have yet to get right. Email (and NNTP news) clients from 20 or 30 years ago are far superior in this respect, because they can intelligently deal with threading and folding. These features alone makes large conversations much easier to deal with than on web-forums.
To add to that, email (and NNTP news) clients even from 20 or 30 years ago have other powerful features that web forums have yet to catch up on:
- kill files[2] (which you can use to filter out unwanted articles/mails based on content or metadata such as subject, user, etc)
- scoring
- user-configurable anti-spam filtering or other "intelligent" filtering (such as bayesian filtering not just for spam/ham, but for interesting/unintersting content)
- tagging not just on a site-wide level but at the client level so each user can tag messages/articles the way they make sense to them
- other advanced filtering and scripting based on any of the above
Web-based forums are just incredibly primitive compared to this many-decade-old technology."
When I first saw that gmail starts a new thread when you change a subject I did not believe it at first; I thought I have made a mistake in replying. Text-based clients of old (tin, pine, etc.) still outperform current monstrosities by a wide margin.
And of course, there's nothing stopping anyone from building a web forum and offering an endpoint for third party clients, they just don't, mostly because web forums themselves have more or less been superseded by Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, and no one seems to care about them anymore.
The only pre-web feature that web forums can't really implement is decentralization.
One of the things we keep forgetting as we move forward is that client-control > server-control.
I'm not sure if we're forgetting it, as an industry we seem hell bent on removing user control. SaaS, cloud hosting, software walled gardens, invasive automatic updates, hidden software in hardware, etc. We're losing more and more control all the time. Around here it's nearly heresy to suggest the companies run their own servers.
There's a clear agenda to take back the power and voice that the computers are giving to the common man: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-com...
Plus, the clients had things like killfiles, so that one could ignore a troll or a subject (or even fancier stuff, like scoring: maybe a user tends to have worthless comments, but what he says about one subject is really worthwhile).
If YC ever decide to destroy HN they can.
With an HN Usenet newsgroup it'd be distributed across all the servers that carry that group. You could download software and host it yourself.
Less free speech, more control, less privacy and more ads.
* some people are unhappy because they feel constrained * topics are an illusion anyway, people do post off-topic messages anyway, depending on strictness of moderation. People interested by the original topic are annoyed by the inevitable off-topic talk.
"It might not seem like much now, but what that noise represented was the stuff of science fiction at the time: near-instantaneous communication at a planetary scale. It was a big deal."
I kind of yearn for the pre-web days... when the primary means of communication was mailing lists and newsgroups, without any commercial interest.
The creation of the web was when it all started to go wrong. Corporations started to flock to it like flies and tried their best to turn it in to an ad-laden, spyware-laden, dumbed-down, one-way broadcasting medium not too far from television.