This does not mean that there aren't wonderful things available in today's web environment, too. There is no one to blame other than the natural evolution of a system. But something was lost, and it is ok to miss it.
Is that a regression, though? I mean the state pre-ES was basically that the unwashed masses weren't able to use a special service for their more-refined betters.
To me, it's essentially the difference between a country club and a public park. Certainly, the country club is better maintained and more pleasant for its members than a public park. But there's, at minimum, a strong case to be made that a park that all may use is a greater social good than a country club limited to a few.
https://ineedcoffee.com/the-coffee-house-a-history/
They rapidly became a place where people from all walks of life could, and did, come for lively discussion. And their rapid increase in popularity caused them to collapse from their own success.
Early access to the internet was, by definition, limited to people who were on academic or military networks. But by the time BBS culture came about, it was the thrill of finding like-minded folks from wherever they might be- it was not a culture based on exclusion per se, like what you would find at a country club.
"All walks of life" is a polite fiction. The September in "Eternal September", after all, refers to university intake. "Wherever they might be" is a bit of a cop-out, because they weren't really "wherever", they were in other universities.
It wasn't a coffee shop, it was a strongly walled garden which only very specific groups of people could reasonably access.
Yes, but it was the introduction of easy-to-use 3D printers which actually, rather than theoretically, democratised it. As it was with AOL and Usenet.
[edit]- I found an article from 1987 talking about how amazingly fast (and cheap) the new 2400 baud modems were. I had to chuckle, as I still remember going from 300 (slow enough that your reading speed was baud-limited) to 1200 (wow! I can barely keep up!) 2400 and above was a speed that seemed almost decadent.
But the online services were really freaking pricey.
Here's a price list of online services from the 80s.
Compuserve was $11 an hour.
http://i53.tinypic.com/2janfrd.jpg
http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=1...
Can't both sides be correct? There is certainly a host of good feelings one gets when they're a part of something that is exclusive. (Not saying it's morally right, just making an observation.) Whether those feelings are altruistic or not is besides the point. From that person's point of view, they no longer have those good feelings when their club is no longer exclusive.
From the view of the larger public, the ends justify the means as the happiness of all is larger than the loss of happiness of the few. But for those few, it's still worse.
Global Climate Change is just one big Tragedy of the Commons.
Speaking just for myself, here, but this has not been my experience. In my opinion, that interest in the early internet was a niche was essentially orthogonal to what it offered. It just so happened that the mindset of folks who would be attracted to the early offerings was a small portion of the overall population. But it wasn't the fact that the group was comparatively small that was what was interesting.
But it's a different feeling than it was before, because of how things work. And some of that works against the process of forming smaller, tight-knit communities than how it used to be. And it's ok to lament loss.
Does that make more sense?
Now that UUCP time has come and gone, I wonder if Usenet might have returned to its once former glory. It would be a really good place for technical conversation.
It's a decent ready-to-go forum. I only used it for the clojure groups, but then the clj community discovered slack. All that useful topically categorized awesomeness now must be mined from worthless slack logs.
In fact, it's something I really appreciate here on HN, the tone of discussions is rather pleasant and on topic and it's very rare to see people intentionally driving it into the ground, although in contrast to something like a Facebook group it's a lot less personal.
But then you add the internet, and all these radically bad thinkers find each other and their ideas almost seem normal amongst their type. They not only normalize bad thinking, but they also push for even more radically bad thinking in an effort to out-do each other. End result, you end up with a vociferous contingent of town idiots who don't realize they are town idiots because they only listen to fellow town idiots. Add advertising companies who function on a metrics-first approach, and those town idiots dictate how companies act.
Someone with anorexia or another illness that destabilizes your perspective may find support in an online community. But they can also seek out and find communities that catalyze the destabilization.
Today people with stupid ideas are the ones who get most practice in rhetorics. And practice makes you good.
As a result you find very specific kinds of stupid. If you know Nassim Talebs IYI (intellectual yet idiot) there exist supermutants of that phenomenon. For example I just argued with self proclaimed Marxist who managed to have opinions of fascists straight from 40's. He had absolutely delusional view of multitude of things like not believing in industrial revolution, or that machines could outproduce people when making bulk materials. Yet he could muster huge array of minutiae from history, usually correct and supporting whatever weird point he was making. This dude actually was rhetorically decent and very passionate about.. I don't really know what.
Such individuals are far from stupid despite their stupid ideas and they seem to be able to shut down intelligent discussion on niche boards. Specifically because nothing seems to stick: they are not trolls, not really malevolent, not really belonging to any definite camp. Just really twisted, bored and eager to engage others.
Is this really a bad thing? Do fascists become less objectionable with time? I'd say they still hold the same abhorrent ideas as they did in the 40s.
>not believing in industrial revolution
As a Marxist myself, that's an odd thing for a Marxist to be saying, but Marx himself does not use that term, so there could be some confusion there - we should be careful with terminology, since they can and do convey particular histories and prejudices and ideologies.
>or that machines could outproduce people when making bulk materials
That's absurd, since Marx makes exactly the opposite point in the first 3 paragraphs of Capital.
Now before you categorise me as twisted, bored and eager to engage others, I'd like to do it first - I really am bored, and at least eager to engage others. When I see a post on a topic I'm relatively familiar with (in this case Marx) I feel the need to comment on it. Now I pledged that I would do that less, but I felt a kind of draw to reply to your comment. Why, I'm not even sure. Perhaps to correct the record on a topic I feel passionately about. But I hope you don't see me as shutting down intelligent discussion, anyway.
Since getting into philosophy I've started to become skeptical of calling people stupid if I don't have any grounds to disagree with them, even if Taleb would group such people, ideas we often think are bad or false at first sight can actually be very reasonable once we peer under the ideology.
Instead, we know that there's been great effort to purposely troll and manufacture dissent for political and other purposes. It's really just coming into view as a sustained, organized, and scaled effort but, looking at the tactics on display, it's easy to believe that it's likely been going on much longer.
So, this trashing of the Internet has been deliberate and effective. Hence, the wastelands that YouTube comments, Twitter, FB, et. al. have become.
So what we've now got is weird, but certainly not fun.
In other forums I think it's easier to detect that you've been shadow banned, and that the reason only certain people are responding to you is that they're the only ones who can see your rants.
We need more people to be loud in the center.
Unfortunately, politicization is inevitable when double standards exist in moderation. If you're going to have rules, they need to be applied evenly. We've seen that several of the internet giants are incredibly inconsistent in their approaches to banning content or users from the two sides of the political spectrum. Nowhere seems to be safe, including HN.
When I was growing up, my father was a diplomat for the US Foreign Service. He was a small-d democrat. His best friend was a small-r republican. They both greatly valued each other's thoughts and opinions, and each allowed the other to sway their positions across convivial dinner-table discussion. I know such approaches are possible because I saw it on a regular basis, and I would like it if we could get back to said approach.
Uh, that's not what those mean, unless your father was a monarchist and his friend a believer in dictatorships?
"Small-p Partyname" is used to differentiate the actual word that the party's name is from the proper noun. A small-c conservative is someone who holds conservative beliefs, regardless of whether they support a Conservative party.
Could you give some examples?
Dave Rubin(https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/24/17883330/d...)
Jordan Peterson(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCGewQc9ktA)
And so on. But are these meaningful examples? I would argue both yes and no. No, because it's difficult to argue that the people calling them out are not a minority of activists who are just pushing their own political agenda.
Yes, because even if it's a minority viewpoint, it's effective - people apathetic to the given issue are likely to take the word of the activists as gospel, which leads to deplatforming.
A very visible example of the effectiveness of this tactic is Charles Murray and The Bell Curve. Regardless of the validity of more sophisticated criticism of his work, he has been effectively denounced as a racist and deplatformed.
This also leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where speakers presenting their ideas find themselves shunned by group X, and supported by group anti-X. As X step up silencing/deplatforming efforts, either the speaker fades into obscurity, or receives enough support from anti-X to continue their work, but now they can reliably be demonized via guilt by association(Jordan Peterson and the NBC news piece is an example).
>Charles Murray
Is a member of a right-wing think tank and the serious criticism of his work often alleges him of using scientific racism. Is it a far stretch to say that a proponent of scientific racism is himself a racist? Is it wrong to denounce people on such matters? Perhaps the critique can stretch beyond the mere empirical validity of the results and into the philosophy of what the authors are arguing. These methodological issues are in the purview of critical theory too.
>his also leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where speakers presenting their ideas find themselves shunned by group X, and supported by group anti-X.
I'm skeptical of the idea that the only reason why such people are supported by anti-X is because they have been shunned by X.
Also, could you please stop posting rude comments?
There are a lot of "left" policies that are unthinkable and unspeakable at a national discourse level.
That's not accurate. And there are Americans who are very far to the left. Anybody making blanket statements starting with "all Americans" or "no Americans" is guilty of generalization.
Most Canadians steadfastly believe in health care for all, and they'll defend that. They might quibble a tiny bit about the edge like "Should there be any private health care at all?".
In Europe, in many cases, the farthest right parties aren't even as far right as the Democrats in the US. Standard government policies are complete heresy to discourse in the US.
Try talking about Unions in the US. Even in California, that bastion of the Left on the Leftest of coasts. At which point, you're likely going "Yeah, but who worries about Unions in this day and age?", which is exactly what I mean. The rest of the developed world does. A lot.
It's not a generalization, the window of allowable discourse does not encompass much of the spectrum in the US.
> Most Canadians steadfastly believe in health care for all, and they'll defend that.
Setting up a Canada-style single payer health care system is well within the window of allowable discourse in the USA.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Healt...
The Obamacare reforms brought us about 3/4 of the way to a German-style multiple-payer universal health care system, and those were widely supported as well (enough to be passed into law!). A majority of Americans consistently support at least some type of health care reform that approaches universal coverage: https://www.kff.org/health-reform/poll-finding/kff-health-tr...
> In Europe, in many cases, the farthest right parties aren't even as far right as the Democrats in the US. Standard government policies are complete heresy to discourse in the US.
The last presidential campaign included a debate between the Democratic candidates where both candidates effusively praised the policies of Denmark, which one candidate identified as “socialist”. The Prime Minister of Denmark replied, “Denmark is a market economy”. https://www.thelocal.dk/20151101/danish-pm-in-us-denmark-is-...
> It's not a generalization, the window of allowable discourse does not encompass much of the spectrum in the US.
Bullshit. Half of the country is falling over itself trying to turn the US into a replica of Europe or Canada.
If anything, it’s the opposite—only in the United States is a full, wide spectrum of allowable discourse present. Not only can you find lots of Americans who support virtually any policy commonplace in Europe, but you can find many more who hold views unthinkable or at least unsayable in Europe.
When was the last time you found yourself questioning capitalism in the USA? That tends to be the center in Europe, and is unthinkable by the general public and national discourse in media in the USA.
Obviously, I am not defending generalizations and recognize extremist political factions exist in the USA. I am not going to get into a semantic battle about what someone else said when the general idea is there and was just expressed poorly, and the poor semantics are used to somehow disprove the actual idea.
You might have missed this since you've been living in Europe, but questioning capitalism is extremely popular in the United States ever since 2016. In fact, many European countries are far more secure in the turn-of-the-21st-century neoliberal consensus than the United States is.
* US judicial precedent establishes a constitutional right to abortion on demand early in pregnancies, and some states, including most recently New York, extend this right to any point before childbirth. Most European countries only allow abortion in the first or sometimes the second trimester.
* The United States also recognizes a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, which is not at all recognized in Italy, Greece, Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Switzerland, and Northern Ireland.
* US corporate taxes and regulations are within the European norm. The Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index (https://www.heritage.org/index/) (which defines "economic freedom" as embracing the right-wing economic policies the Heritage Foundation tends to advocate for) rank Switzerland, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Iceland above the United States while ranking the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, and Luxembourg within one point of the US rating.
* In terms of civil liberties, the US is virtually unique in recognizing an absolute right against self-incrimination and an exclusionary rule of evidence, where evidence collected in contravention of anyone's civil rights is admissible in court.
* One of the biggest controversies in recent American politics is whether to overturn the constitutional standard of jus soli birthright citizenship--the notion that any human being born on American soil is unconditionally an American citizen. No European country has this policy at all, let alone enshrined in a written constitution.
* The US does not have mandatory military service. However, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Norway, and Switzerland all do.
* Unlike many European countries, the US has a virtually complete lack of media censorship by the government.
* Austria, France, Belgium, Germany, and Bulgaria have all outlawed face coverings, while Switzerland has banned the construction of minarets. France prohibits the wearing or display of "conspicuous religious symbols" in schools, a law targeted at hijab-wearing Muslims. The United States has no equivalent laws, and any such laws would almost certainly be ruled unconstitutional.
With the left vs right message the up vs down battle has been mostly forgotten.
It was actually in September 2013 when it started ... or was it September 1993 ...? Uh, oh, how time flies, never mind.
Or I maybe just lost my internet innocence, seeing Big Game come in and decide on a whim to toss in the bin the place where I spent most of my after school time. Also where I learned how to un-ban myself by editing the right registry key. :D
I've been a member here since 2008, 10 odd years! It has been quite consistent, and an almost daily visit for me since joining. I don't know how they do it but I am glad that they do.
Can you help me understand your argument by giving examples of what this means? What is "politicising" and what communities have you seened ruined by "some minority of users politicising it for attention?"
> Given the misogynistic reputation that the community has, I think it would be good for people to go out of our way to send a message or say something about how her coming out is a positive thing.
Que the comments being about this inflammatory statement and not about what the post was meant to be about, and for good reason. People that criticised OP were met with angry replies and stuff like this:
> Lotsa male white fragility all over this thread.
2 hours later another user made a solid post highlighting nothing but her, her achievements and detailing just how influential she has been and still is for the community, the comments were nothing but praise, positivity and celebration.
IMO a pretty good example of something being politicised for no reason and directly being a detriment to the community.
Twitter (and to a lesser extent, Tumblr).
What does "politicising" mean, and how do you know their motives? If you mean what I think you mean, i.e. women for example standing up for their right to be included in historically male-led organizations (say, a SDR club), I must admit skepticism - perhaps what you are witnessing isn't "doing something for attention," but instead "demanding to be treated as an equal?"
Example right here. For better or worse, some people will try to make everything about their pet issues. It doesn't really matter if their motives are good when every single discussion gets dragged into the 2010's version of Godwin's Law.
The OP gave no example, so I had to make a guess. In my experience, people that complain about "groups getting politicized" generally mean "a minority joined and was upset when we weren't inclusive."
Perhaps I should have simply left it at the question, but the internet is a frustrating place to have dialogues like that - clarifying every tiny point before running out of space for a counter argument.
> MySpace showed the world that if you make powerful and complicated tools (like coding) accessible to anyone, people are smart enough to figure out how to use them.
My own experience with MySpace was that every page I landed on looked like a dumpster fire. I can't recall a single person who exhibited competence in using the tools MySpace gave you. Everything was always poor contrast with a cockeyed layout.
Reading this, I finally get what people mean when they say "But Snapchat is supposed to have an unintuitive UI".
I was big into editing Myspace HTML back in the day. There were simply so many possibilities. The design was an extension of your style, howrver crude and unfinished it might have been.
Do you have any advice on finding it?
It's a difficult problem to solve.
• Discourages long-running discussions by burying (and ultimately locking) older content
• Discourages coversation in favour of fire-and-forget comments by making it impractical to continue where you left off
• Gamification of content (not quite as bad as some sites that grant extra privileges for scores, though)
• Numerically larger groups can bury content they would prefer others not see
E.g. a typical comparison between forums and reddit: A hobby forum often has a "I just bought X" megathread or two, where people post new things they've bought and want to share their excitement about, but that don't warrant a full thread. On hobby subreddits, a large amount of the threads can be "I just bought the thing everyone always recommends and everyone has seen 20 times this week, can't wait to use it!". Similarly, what would have been a single post on an old thread in a forum needs to be it's own thread on reddit, loosing context and making search harder (even if people try to link other relevant threads). Which in turn leads to more repeat questions etc.
For me, as with HN, I don't like the inherent stress of commenting on submissions before they fall off the front page. The earlier one comments, the higher the chances of getting eyeballs/responses. After that short ~24 hour window, people may still read the comments, but submitting new comments seems futile.
As opposed to older "style" forums, even today, threads often stay open, allowing people to post months or years later to revive "dead" threads.
I'm sure this approach also eases the moderation burden, and I'm pretty impressed overall with how dang handles things. So maybe it is a simple workload necessity. It does strike me that HN could be quite a bit more if these two restrictions were loosed.
How? I can't even search for shit anymore without being drowned in results that have nothing to do with what I searched for, but are kinda-sorta similar and get visited a lot more often.
new ~lands have:
- no regulations (yet)
- lots of unknowns
- very few hidden motives
I've read that some antique cultures believed in burning things to the ground. I wonder if that's not a useful thing.
Less room for fun, more room for tracking and click through rates.
Anyone tiktok-ing around couldn't care less about MySpace and the codeblog rant.
The real fun is, that you can make the internet fun. So the codeblog's shoot was a nice PR stunt, but that's it.
The internet was a lot smaller and inhabited by curious nerds - to find similar fun and weirdness, just find a community today that shares those properties. Packet radio, infosec, crypto, gaming, music production, etc. - there's plenty of weird and fun to be found if you look for it.