We need create a new internet on the internet that does not search the new internet. DDG brings back content from the same sites google and bing does.
I want a new search engine focused on the passionate creatives who produce for the web. The early adopters of the web who have been overshadowed by the adwords and the interstitials and lightboxes.
I want content. I want a recipe site with the ingredients at the top and a list of instructions below it. Not 6 paragraphs of why you want to eat this food because of your grandma making it and then people come NO, just tell me what to put in it and how to do it and that's it and load in .1 seconds instead of 100 seconds and then stall every time I try to scroll because you need to tell your advertisers which part of your page is looked at the most.
Your advertisers are more important than your readers and it's not cool.
Serious question: Do you think the 'old Internet' still exists to such a degree? I'm not just talking about link rot (although most of my links from a decade ago sadly no longer work), but also things like outdated content, like a car review of a 2010 Toyota.
I don't know if the old internet exists anymore, as much as I want it. Sure, we are at an old internet site right now (Hacker News), but what more?
Today we have the concept of "user-contributed content", which means content produced without expectation of monetary reward, then uploaded to a site operated by an organization with an expectation of monetary reward. In 1992 these for-profit organizations did not exist: the services through which people accessed the content were created and operated without expectation of monetary reward, too.
It was glorious. There are some valuable content and valuable services that weren't produced in 1992 and would not be produced in the future if it became impossible to profit from producing it, so I don't want to remove the profit motive from the internet. But search results from Google (and its competitors) are now almost completely dominated by for-profit actors, and I agree with grandparent that we need a new search engine that essentially specializes in content produced without expectation of monetary reward.
I don't have any figures - that would be interesting - but I guess even today the 'vast majority of internet content' is produced not expecting any monetary reward. It depends how you count the stuff what exact figure you'd arrive at. 99.9% seems closer to what it might be than 50%. Maybe I'm super-wrong about that.
Of course there are middlemen today like Hacker News and Wikipedia that pretty much stay out of the reader's way, but they are the middlemen for closer to 0.1% of the user-generated content than 50% of it.
* Stack Exchange Sites
* Wikipedia
The internet really, really needs to be more reliable than this. Losing a domain name for an unknown reason should be impossible. Also, losing a domain name by accident should be a lot harder.
Its still there, but there is a lot less of it. Recently I've decided to go back to ownership of my music and rebuild my old (~20 000 track) collection. Some of the stuff is rather obscure so I end up on niche blogs with pixelated-animated favicons, no weird whitespace and sometimes almost bare HTML. Definitely makes for nostalgic feelings..
Because you'll try to put something up and you get flooded with spam/hacking attempts and whatnot
Because registering a domain, deploying wp, etc if not so trivial
Gmail and other "big email providers" are needed since there's no litigation against email abusers, and there's a constant flood of crap to the spam folder
Walled gardens are surely problematic but they're less trouble than going independent.
The OP wouldn't be talking like this if he were actually responsible for the "unlawful content".
And seriously, does Twitter lose its domain because someone posted malware or child porn or whatever?
Edit: So where's a safer place to register domains?
Maybe China?
2) Both have to do with site operators experiencing a sense of uncertainty due to problems with the ICANN landscape.
Is it really so hard to comprehend relevance? I'd tell you to try to keep up, but that's against HN rules & regulations, so I won't say that.
gnunet is an application. the fact that the development is hosted on a .org is entirely irrelevant. gnunet's function doesn't depend on it.
Cite: look up Mencius Moldbug or Curtis Yarvin. Alt-right 'darling'.
The tech itself has him residing as the root node, and able to 'kick anybody off the island'.
A domain being seized by law enforcement for hosting illegal content (even if it was put there by hackers) is nothing new and has nothing to do with the state of the modern web.
The only way to get good ddos protection is to centralize because it requires you to have close personal relationships across the world in order to get good bandwidth at every location.
And it's the same reactions to it on the internet that hurt and not the DoSes. Just run your website. If it gets DoS'd no big deal. It's not like you even need a single nine of uptime consistency.
I've run my for 20 years from my home connection, I've been a jerk on IRC, I've used it for gaming clans, I've hosted and continue to host tor onion services. I have never been DoS'd.
The first DDoS happened in 1996. Absolutely nothing to do with the current topic at hand, completely off topic.
Do a search, https://www.google.com/search?q=stresser
An attack that can cripple all but the largest networks can be had for $5-10.
Centralization is the issue. May it be registries, ISPs, hosting providers or anything else. Heroku and PaaS do not solve this at all.
Of course many people could fill out the ICANN paperwork themselves and run a server from their own home, but many people can do that now too. And if you do that, you still run into the issue of hackers being able to install malware on your systems. But instead of the police seizing your domain, they kick in your door in the middle of the night with guns pointed at your family.
Maybe it would clear things up if you could lay out for me the exact scenario that combines "the web of the 2000s is rapidly disappearing" with "registrar, ISP, and hosting provider centralization is the issue" and ends with "if that wasn't the case, this website would never have had to shut down". I feel like you're remembering the web of the 2000s very VERY differently than I am.
There were a ton of hosts back then, but there still are. I don't remember exactly when registrars became a concept, i'd guess that might have been 1999 though; I don't think there's that many more or less now. A lot more registries with .ninja and .bike and whatever.
I agree though, if law enforcement wanted your domain back then, it would be about the same as now. Although, maybe someone would have called/emailed you about it with whois contacts back then.
Actually it might just be easier to link to the Wikipedia article about ISPs serving the US because there are a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_broadband_providers_in...
Sorry, one of my pet peeves is when people say "the Web of [insert time here] is dead!" when the Web has never been more accessible both from a consumer standpoint and from a developer standpoint. The existence of Facebook and Google can be completely ignored if you actually want to. Emphasis on if you actually want to.
Again, it all comes back to the idea of some people "wish" the web of the 2000s still existed, but aren't willing to sacrifice the comforts of the 2010's web to make it happen. You can host your own lightweight website but Wordpress and Facebook is easier. You can search the web without tracking and Javascript but the modern websites don't work without it. You can pick from a huge variety of ISPs but they won't all be at 100 Mbps. Basically, you can have the web of the 2000s, but it comes at the cost of some of the conveniences of the 2010s web. A lot of people aren't willing to make that trade.
Nostalgia is hard. It seemed amazing back then but not many people would choose to go back to dial-up and phpMyAdmin. For those who say they would... what's stopping you? It all still exists today.
> I have considered shutting down this website several times in the past. But when another of my domain, susam.in, where I used to host my personal blog (archive) was seized and transferred to a law enforcement organization without any notification or authorization, it was the last straw. I do not wish to spend my weekends worrying about spam and unlawful content. I do not wish to maintain constant vigilance on my online servers to maintain ownership. It consumes time, more time than I can afford.
This is sad for WWW. We need more independently run websites, not less. The web of early 2000 is rapidly disappearing.