
Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again - alanfranz
https://www.franzoni.eu/stopping-the-internet-of-noise/
======
d--b
As much as I really liked using IRC back in the day, I still think I spent way
too much time on it. I mean you got to know the people there, and after a
couple of years most discussions were like office conversations. Plus the
takeovers, the trolls, the noobs, the never ending screwing around with the
bots, etc.

I've never done much newsgroups because I didn't like public speaking without
anonymity.

ICQ and others were like today's WhatsApp and hangout. I didn't use a single
interface for them at the time, and still don't today, I don't see a big
difference.

Today, I'm off Facebook, I barely follow twitter at all. I'm fine with reading
hacker news, and other tech news aggregators.

I think you can lament on the disappearance of RSS, but to me, that's just
about the main issue.

I guess the big difference between then and now is that we used to control
better what we opted in. Now we're more force fed.

~~~
ueroc
I think a lot of the nostalgia is a result of being uncomfortable dealing with
people now being the "insiders" rather than the users. It's much easier to
call out the new generation of users or large companies and praise old things
than actually creating something relevant for today.

I've played around with creating a relevant version of things like usenet, but
at the end of the day it wasn't something I wanted to work on. A large part of
the work is correcting for flaws of the Internet that most "hackers" won't
recognize. And while you could certainly overcome those problems, I don't
think the end result would be worth it. Much of the "hacker crowd" these days
aren't, in my opinion, motivated by naive curiosity and shallow idealism (like
it used to be), but forced nativity to further their own interests and a
opinionated demeanor. That's why many of these alternative services don't work
out. Because they aren't motivated by creating something that is nice to use,
but to satisfy the convoluted criteria of the creators.

~~~
losteverything
Reading your comment made me nostalgic for trust.

It took a lot of effort to make a long post back in the rec. And alt. days.

I remember trip planning 19 years ago looking at trip reports. Got superior
tips for my once in a lifetime Yukon vacation

I dont believe todays internet noise partially because it is too easy to
opinionate. There is no effort required anymore.

------
netsharc
Great point about Twitter and FB not having the "I've seen this" flag
(although they probably have this info for their "engagement metrics"), it
keeps people addicted and returning. I remember being glued to Twitter during
the Mumbai terror attack, but the way it was designed, it was an endless
stream of the same info, repeated. And spam, since bots add trending hashtags
to their junk messages. I guess it's like cable news' rolling coverage, but
instead of the same info repeated every hour, we can now read the same thing
every second...

~~~
foreigner
How about implementing an RSS interface on top of the likes of Twitter and
Facebook by screen scraping? Would have to take authentication of course. Then
we could consume it via RSS readers just like the good ol' days. Does that
already exist? I would pay for that.

~~~
alanfranzoni
Most probably it would be illegal, against each website's TOS. If such tool
catches up, it will be removed - and you still need to account for upstream
changes that periodically kill the functionality.

~~~
jacquesm
Against the TOS does not make something illegal.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
Not yet - but people seem to confuse legislators and corporations more and
more frequently...

~~~
jacquesm
Clink or Hoosegow?

------
yosito
My own theory about why our ability to focus on what we want to on the
internet is Attention Capitalism. Our attention is the latest resource to be
exploited by capitalism, and each company is attempting to control what we
focus on for their profit. I've noticed this trend; very little software let's
me control what information I see anymore. It's almost all controlled by some
algorithm making me see what they claim I want to see.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _It 's almost all controlled by some algorithm making me see what they claim
> I want to see._

The algorithm is known as "doing what users want". Very popular with companies
and even open source projects nowadays. It works like this: you do some
"analytics" of your product, or look what sells for others, assume it reflects
what users want (and the things that are missing are obviously not wanted by
users), and do those.

This algorithm ignores the fact that a lot of the time, users don't get _any_
way to express preferences. Users buy/use what's available and what's popular.
Through this algorithm, producers make choices for the consumers, and then use
statistics to justify them.

~~~
dredmorbius
Or, worse: the discerning users or customers blot out the company (or its
website) and go elsewhere.

A/B testing can't test for the users who aren't present.

------
chongli
With all due respect, what changed since the 56k days (which I remember fondly
as well) is that people showed up. Before that, the only users on the internet
were early adopters. It's unreasonable to expect 'those people' to go away.

~~~
plaguuuuuu
The Internet is decentralized. It doesn't matter that all the 13 year olds are
congregating on Club Penguin or whatever; we can set up our own communities.
That's why HN is great (and other small communities). It's intrinsically
hostile to the wider internet simply by virtue of the subject and the format
of its content.

~~~
chongli
The issue is when the unwanted folks follow the cool kids around. This happens
a lot on Reddit. People will make a subreddit with the type of community they
want. Others will join. Eventually people will complain that the quality has
deteriorated. Then the cool kids will start a new one and migrate there.
Rinse. Repeat... _ad infinitum_.

 _Edit: I don 't know if there's a general name for this phenomenon, but I
believe it is related to network decay. [0]_

[0]
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay)

~~~
plaguuuuuu
Reddit really 'dug' (see what I did there) its own grave by aggressively
catering to casual users, in order to drive signups and grow the user base. I
can't remember exactly what happened at which point, but it all follows the
general pattern of appealing to the mass market. E.g. the curation of the
frontpage via default subs such as /r/AdviceAnimals that don't really contain
meaningful discussion. There's no real need to do this if one is concerned
with maintaining an existing community, or the standards of it. As a
counterexample, private trackers have been rather good at this, generally by
having interviews/invitations for new memberships, or even disabling signups
entire. Though these are really the most extreme options.

The other main problem is that like Digg, that there is a powerful cabal of
moderators in control of most mainstream subreddits, including those concerned
with serious topics like news and politics and they do a lot of "curation" of
content by removing stuff, rather than letting the users decide on which links
and topics are relevant to discussion (by, ya know... upvoting/downvoting)
with chilling effects on those respective subs. That this was allowed to
continue, without overhauling and maybe even democratising the moderation
system of default subs, was Reddit's choice. I can only suspect that this
either (a) plays into the hands of advertisers directly via corporate
censorship or (b) indirectly, by relegating content from users who fall
outside of the "mass-market" demographic to niche subreddits or other
websites.

~~~
SerLava
Curation of shitty content is also built right into the algorithm.

They'll hide behind "But people are _voting_ for this mindless content" but
that's not the full picture. A vote after 5 seconds is actually weighted
higher than a vote after 5 minutes.

It's specifically because Reddit the company is against too much engaging
content. They want people to smirk, chuckle, acknowledge, and move on.
Engaging content means fewer pages viewed, which means fewer ad views.

~~~
dredmorbius
A vote after 5 seconds _is weighted_ , or _acts as if weighted_?

If that's built into the algorithm, that's one thing. If the _social effect_
of early moderation is amplified, well, that's still a problem (and a major
one), but ... of a different sort.

Citations requested.

~~~
amsilprotag
The first graph linked below shows "hotness" as a function of time with
upvotes held constant. The equations are above the linked section. Compounding
this effect, there is a feedback loop where hotter elements are more likely to
be seen and voted, which increases hotness logarithmically.

So no, the algorithm doesn't intentionally punish dense material. But it does
happen incidentally.

[https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-
algo...](https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algorithms-
work-ef111e33d0d9#9e88)

~~~
dredmorbius
Right. Reddit definitely doesn't favour quality.

------
peterwwillis
Elon Musk said that as time passes, technology continuously degrades, not
improves, if people don't make a hard effort to keep improving it. The
Egyptians knew how to build giant pyramids, and forgot how. The Romans built
fantastic aqueducts, and forgot how. We built vehicles that landed on the moon
in the 60s, and the next vehicle we built could only go into earth orbit, and
then we no longer even had a vehicle that could do that.

Today, for some reason, everyone thinks that writing software for a platform
on a platform on a platform with no interconnecting standards or protocols is
a great idea. Instead of trying to improve people's lives, we're just making
things needlessly complex, buggy, and bloaty. You need 8 gigs of ram minimum
just to browse the web, and god forbid you want to do something like back up
your data. I was just in a meeting where nobody could get Google's video
conferencing to work.

Instead of building _internet_ technology, we build _web_ technology. The web
is harder to write software for. It's an ephemeral, inconsistent, difficult
thing. But if we try really hard, we can turn the tide on the unnecessarily
complex box we've forced ourselves into.

The proposed fixes are good ideas, but they're bandaids on axe wounds. There
are much deeper problems going on that won't be fixed by a feature add or a
pivot. We need a re-evaluation of all internet-based technology, how we
develop it, how we incorporate it into our lives, and what we want as a
society from it.

~~~
themacguffinman
I'm skeptical the Egyptians simply "forgot" how to build giant pyramids
(especially as pyramid construction seems to be well-documented today). It
seems more likely that the age of pharoahs ended and giant pyramid
construction was no longer an important skill. Technology hadn't "degraded",
it had adapted.

Just like we didn't forget how to build lunar vehicles, we just decided that
it wasn't worth it in its current state. It's still very possible to do
another moon landing, it will just cost a ton of money that corporations won't
risk and governments won't spend without a clear political goal like the old
space race.

Space technology isn't degrading, it's becoming more cost-oriented. A SpaceX
rocket only reached orbit but it was relatively very cheap. Cost efficiency
helps space technology reach more people and create greater impact, ultimately
making the technology more valuable to society.

It's the same with the web. You say that the web is bloated "instead of trying
to improve people's lives" but the reason the web platform is so heavy is
because the platform is rapidly adding features and APIs and tools that make
it easier for developers of all skill levels to make complicated applications.
Letting more developers make stuff in less time improves people's lives.
Maintaining backward compatibility at the cost of bloat also improves people's
lives.

Society has been constantly evaluating the web and it has consistently reached
the same conclusions: RAM is cheaper than developers, a slower platform with a
bigger audience is worth dealing with over multiple native platforms, and
weird legacy stuff is fine if it means we can run 15 year old websites.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Those two views are equivalent - humans don't _forget_ technology; what was
once invented can be reinvented (the more of the old invention remains, the
cheaper it is to reinvent it). So it's always about incentives. But GP (and
Elon) has a point here.

Infrastructure projects are important and what enables society to grow. Moon
landings were plain awesome and had important effects on both the zeitgeist
and growth of technology. That we're not incentivized to grow, _or even
maintain_ them, says a lot about us, and not much of it good.

And I do think GP is right when they say: "instead of trying to improve
people's lives, we're just making things needlessly complex, buggy, and
bloaty." Any actual improvement to people's lives that falls off this process
on the web is _incidental_. The conclusions you say we've reached, like "RAM
is cheaper than developers, a slower platform with a bigger audience is worth
dealing with over multiple native platforms" are not conclusions. They're
_excuses_. Excused for doing shitty engineering in order to get to the market
first. And anyone trying to do the things the right way moves too slow to keep
up with the hype train.

Ultimately, the complaints about the way technology develops today stem from
this: some people see the suboptimal solutions created by our incentive
structures, and also notice there are _much better_ solutions available only a
_small step_ from the path we're on - solutions we could reach if only we
could relax the market pressures a little bit. This is true as much for the
web (e.g. for interoperability issues and bloat issues) as it is for
transportation (where electric cars finally got viable after one player
basically started to shove a product into peoples' throats until the market
forces gave up and accepted it).

------
rakoo
This is partly what weboob ([http://weboob.org](http://weboob.org)) wants to
solve, or at least work around. Its goal is to pull the web out of browsers
(hence the name):

\- each website is handled by a module that does all the scraping, or uses the
api if needed

\- each module provides one or more capabilities, such as "list an account
transactions" (typically for your bank or your mobile provider) or "receive
and send messages" (such as HN or reddit or tinder)

\- applications plug into those capabilities and give the user
functionalities, regardless of the website. You can list the schedule for your
bus just as well as the schedule for carpoolings.

One of the applications is actually a daemon with the capability to send and
receive messages (with threading and all) and sends messages to the email
adress of your choice; you can also configure it as an smtp mta, which means
you can use any mail client and interact with all your discussion websites
without ever opening the browser.

Obviously this is not a perfect solution for OP's problems, but it seems to me
it's going in the right direction. Oh and it doesn't stop at websites; I use
it for sending RSS feeds to my email in the background.

~~~
xerophyte12932
Am I the only one who read the name and thought this was a porn site?

I think the service would reach a greater audience with a simpler name.

(Btw I still don't get how the creator wants me to read the name and what it
means)

~~~
CM30
I suspect the name was deliberate (look at the site's logo).

Either way, it definitely might struggle to get a bit more traction with that
name/domain. It's like a modern day Pen Island or Experts Exchange.

------
cronjobber
> But we need a common API ... so that people can use their favourite tools

Yup, that's _exactly_ what made the internet great in the good old days.

But how do you monetize users who get to use their favoirite tools _instead of
yours?_

~~~
Freak_NL
Perhaps some form of decentralized hosting to offload the costly aspect of
hosting an online community to its members? The percentage of people with
access to ample broadband connections at home is increasing constantly, and
bittorrent proved that distributing large amounts of data amongst peers can be
done without centralized hosting.

It would be pretty neat if everyone could simply buy or configure some low-
power hardware (like a router in both size, cost, and energy consumption) and
have that become their internet 'home'. When participating in a community that
supports the protocol used, that device simply allocates an amount of
bandwidth and does its share of distributing content to the swarm. All a
community would need is a central place to host the data needed to get
started. Anyone could set up a new community with a minimum of means.

If technique used is standardized (and open) and gained popularity, service
providers could even create hosting packages that do the hosting of your
internet 'home' for you for a small monthly fee, so you don't have to bother
with setting up your own device (although you could, and should always be able
to).

This kind of concept probably exists of course. The challenge lies in getting
it both technologically feasible for mass-scale adoption, and simple enough
for anyone to participate. Still, doesn't this make sense for a future were we
won't be as depended on a handful of commercial silos?

~~~
tnone
This has been tried in various forms, and always fails for a few reasons:

\- Spam. When the cost of bandwidth goes to zero, the most useless freeloaders
are enabled with no negative consequences for their pollution.

\- Media storage. There is a huge demand for storage of (pirated) movies, tv,
music or video games, which sucks up the vast bulk of volume. Entertainment
needs monopolize communication resources to the detriment of knowledge
preservation and freedom of expression.

\- Legal and other liability. Aside from the piracy, there's child porn,
private information, politically sensitive topics, etc. Society wants an
accountability mechanism and will destroy or discredit platforms that lack it.

Commercial silos tend to address all three. Social media in particular is
effective at #1 by leveraging the social graph as a filtering and reputation
system. Which means once people are invested in their profile or channel, you
can wield it as leverage to ensure compliance with #2 or #3.

There are still huge pieces missing to do this in a decentralized and
federated way. For starters, a reputation and identity system that is not
fully public and transitive. And also, a return to the willingness to tolerate
violations of #2 and #3 on a local scale for the sake of intellectual freedom,
which the contemporary web sorely lacks.

Email isn't even an exception. Becoming a reputable sender is hard, the data
volume is still limited, and the privacy protection is laughable in the wild.

------
kraftman
I'm going to write a chat app built on IRC that gradually uses more and more
RAM, and adds new features while breaking old ones.

Just as it has everything MSN used to have ill have it shut down, rename
itself and its website and start all over again.

~~~
ben_jones
Ping me. I'm really excited about this.

~~~
shakna
Pong

------
cyphunk
Did we get to this point of fragmentation due to smart phones and their walled
garden philosophy? People stopped making applications for the sake of
interoperability. ... if RealAudio™ was founded today it'd be king.

Or is facebook to blame? John Gilmore famously said "The Net interprets
censorship as damage and routes around it." \-- he was wrong, censorship just
has to wait for the right monopoly to appear. And with the success of monopoly
interoperability becomes its casualty

~~~
losteric
Amazon and Facebook, to me, are symptoms of a deeper problem: Technology is
still hard. We're building complex large-scale products because the non-
technical consumers can't use the simple small-scale products.

We're here because it's convenient, not because it's _good._

I always felt that Google should have created simple tools for web publishing
and creating personal walled-gardens - make the web personal for 7 billion
non-technical humans, and the brands they consume. Surely there must be
something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo.

G+ copied Facebook when they should have studied why people were using
Facebook instead of the open web. Don't make the problem worse, fixed _those_
problems; take the role of guardian of the internet. Create or support
standard APIs, release relevant IP/research, and bankroll SV startups that
build the tools to publish or consume through the open web.

Google is still an ad/search company that relies on the open web. They need to
protect it and drive further innovation. What happens after the coming
adpocalypse - micropayments? Subscription bundles? Who knows? Or, perhaps
we'll be chained to ads forever because we'll be locked into walled-garden
apps... what a hell that would be.

Are there any companies working in this space? Closest I've seen is
Squarespace, and even then... not really...

~~~
callumlocke
> Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo.

I guess Wordpress is an example. It's got a hosted plan, which requires little
more computer literacy than Facebook, and you can also leave at any time and
self-host the software, which keeps the hosted offering honest. But it's just
not as contagious as something like Facebook. That's the problem, Facebook
isn't just more 'convenient' than self-hosted tools, it also has your friends
tagging you in photos.

~~~
losteric
I'd argue that, in terms of features, Wordpress is little better than
Jekyll/Hugo. Social integration is the aspect that's missing. Chat, access
control, tagging, push/pull update, etc.

I envision this is a two part problem: the "back-end", one-click install or
oauth register services to create your private space and identity (possibly a
VPS or agglomeration of AWS services) for sending/receiving emails, direct
messages, tags (push), and friend posts, group updates, news subscriptions
(pull), plus APIs for search, access control, creating/managing your own
content, so on; and the front-end, a glorified RSS reader for using the above
services through standard APIs.

That's the challenge. The solution is _way_ more complex then the existing
offerings, like WP or other simple blogs, but all that complexity must be
buried away so it's at least as easy as registering to Facebook.

It's possible, all of the constituent problems have been tackled separately...
what's lacking is a unified standard, comprehensive tools, and stable
(corporate) backing.

~~~
losteric
and I kinda wonder how much of this ultimately falls on ISPs for not building
out high speed internet... it's not inconceivable to imagine an always on
"social network" box, or more options for home servers

------
anigbrowl
_I 'm not saying we should get back to IRC or to NNTP._

I am. Not in the sense of go back to using them for everyting (they're still
there if you want to), but int eh sense of building some new protocols on
those existing foundations. NNTP was _really good_ given its technical
limitations. TBH I think part of the secret of Facebook's success is that it
hews to the same ethos of standardization and simplicity, as opposed to
myspace which quickly feel victim to its own customizability and ended up
being as chaotic and hard to navigate as the web itself.

------
tovkal
"Nowadays we have people instead of topics. I have nothing against people, but
maybe, if I follow a great software architect, I'd like to hear what he's got
to say about software, not about other shits."

That's so true. I want to follow some people on Twitter because sometimes they
tweet very useful things, but the amount of "noise"/tweets I don't care about
is too high. Tons of people put very good info on Twitter because is quick and
easy compared to writing a blog post.

------
stuartd
Yeah, I'm old as well. Things change. Not for the better maybe, but you can't
turn back the clock.. the only way forward is to make something new and
better.

~~~
jasonkostempski
I'm still using RSS without issue. Funny thing is, i didn't really use it back
in the day, I've just gravitated toward the best UX available over the years.

~~~
gkya
This. Many stuff is still there for who want to use them. I use feeds, email
and nntp everyday. Also paper books, fountain pens. And also WhatsApp. I don't
get the need that the stuff I use to be justified by its popularity or its
newness.

------
dredmorbius
"There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for
keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should
allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-
four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New
York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to
vilivy, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race
for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the
scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the
property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

Anonymous publisher, as quoted by Hamilton Holt, _Commercialism and
Journalism_ , 1909.

[https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...](https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/20/mode/2up)

------
Mooty
Maybe what people want is a centralised web, not a "good practice" web ? This
is not what I want but as a matter of fact, that may be what majority wants. I
wonder how devs/techies people think they know the truth for other people.

What changed a lot of things are modern apps and their new features : push
notifications, infinite scrolls (attention killer) or adding a f... emoji (I
miss smileys personnaly). The rest is just filling empty boxes about what
people want/need : a chat for friend, a chat for work, a single feed and not
10's of website to search to have a single information. All I think is missing
is local web, all is considered as world and then maybe local, people don't
talk to each other in the bars, they prefer now to use Tinder and Facebook to
insult themselves.

~~~
hobofan
The people want a working web. They don't care if it's centralized or
decentralized, and most probably never even lost a thought about it.

"Techies" think that they know better because they are the first to be
impacted and have noticed the shortcomings of a centralized web.

------
cryptos
I think this is related to monetization, since the web gets "louder" to
attract advertising consumers. Most companies are actually advertising
companies and the users are just part of the product (sold to advertisers).
Maybe we need more paid services - and the will to pay.

I'm thinking about creating a hierarchical forum like the usenet, but I'm
sceptical whether this would earn enough money to work in the long run.

------
willhackett
I'm very much for this. I have five messaging apps, two email clients, three
file storage apps and a news reader all on my iPhone - just to stay in touch.
It's hard to stay organised when businesses use different technologies across
different platforms and there's no single place just for "Messages".

I don't care how the message is sent, I just want to make sure it gets to the
right person.

------
miguelrochefort
Don't worry. I'm in the process of solving this.

The solution was in front of us all this time. It's the semantic web. What was
missing is an accessible client, and it will be available soon.

Imagine one giant unified semantic decentralized database of everything. Add
smart contracts, quantified self, intent inferring, and binary input (à la
Tinder or Akinator). Organize this on a timeline, so that your OS becomes a
task management system. That's it.

Unfortunately, my strategy is to target kids that haven't yet be corrupted by
current communication paradigms. I think 5 to 12 year old is the sweet spot.
Older people will be able to use it, but I don't know if they'll be able to
grasp the full potential. Only time will tell.

~~~
Mathnerd314
> one giant unified database of everything

That's Google (almost; not everything is online). No need for the semantic web
at all, or to wait for your vaporware 'solution'.

~~~
WalterGR
_That 's Google (almost; not everything is online)._

As a (presumably) end user, do you think that the interface provided by Google
is database-like?

~~~
Mathnerd314
query; results. So yeah. It's easy enough to scrape. All this stuff about
structured data is trying to find something that isn't there to begin with. If
you want structure from unstructured data then use machine learning, don't try
to sell everyone a "semantic data format" they have no incentive to use.

~~~
WalterGR
How do you do JOINs?

------
balladeer
Whenever I come across a new Twitter handle I think of following I first run
it through [http://www.tweetstats.com](http://www.tweetstats.com). I check one
simple data there:

    
    
         Number of tweets per day (tpd); and also maybe tweets per month (tpm)
    

If the handle is churning out more than ~10 tweets per day I tend to stay
away. Because if even a couple of hanldes I follow crosses _30 tpd_ or so my
feed will pretty much become pointless unless I am glued to my feed all the
time and I would miss a lot of good content.

Another big problem is repeated content as the article suggests - I follow a
quite some literary Twitter handles and longform handles. Everyday I come
across just too many tweets that link to the same article. What is worse
sometimes the same handles tweet about the same articles repeatedly (to get
more views I reckon) with different texts. I usually end up unfollowing many
of those handles and that means I actually going to miss a lot of content that
I would have otherwise liked but in a _moderate dose_ , at a slower pace.

I request my friends/family members to remove me form there WhatsApp broadcast
lists and after sometime I simply tell them if they don't stop with that daily
"Good Morning/Evening" forwards and all that crap I am simple gonna block
them. I wish WhatsApp let me remove myself from all the broadcast lists I am
added to or let me choose that I don't want to receive broadcast messagegs at
all (if they can't/won't make it granular).

I've completed given up on Facebook. Sometimes it shows me posts that I've
marked hide like five times. It never keeps my friends photos, self written
text posts on top but all those video and silly article shares, those annoying
and mostly unfunny memes. In fact they have a limit I guess (haven't really
used them in a while) and the _personal_ posts get drowned in the mass market
noise.

Maybe the problem is we talk of Internet being decentralised but we are all
try to find that decentralized Internet at any one place or vert few places -
be it Twitter, or Facebook, Google. We are adopting the social networks,
content sources wrong... maybe.

------
narrator
I am excited at the proliferation of Mastodon servers. Every cohesive tribe
that can afford a $15/month VPS should set one up and ditch Facebook.

~~~
newscracker
Maybe that'd help ditch Twitter, but not Facebook. There needs to be a better
(de-centralized) solution for writing that's longer that also provides the
ability to add photos, videos, etc. The substitute for Facebook should be like
Facebook in almost every way in terms of features to get better adoption, with
improvements in several areas where Facebook is weaker.

------
SZJX
The internet is definitely getting noisier but I don't get his "solutions",
especially about "blogging". What does it ever mean "I think most of us won't
discuss about so many totally unrelated different fields. It's a change of
mentality - we shouldn't write something just because we can."? He makes it
sound as if there are tons of irrelevant blogs out there spewing nonsense and
polluting people's experiences, while in fact the people who blog are still
the absolute minority. I particularly agree with the idea of "blog small
things", since no matter how "small" your experience might seem to be, there
could well be somebody else facing a similar situation who can be helped by
your article. Also I don't understand his "blog with focus" thing. Many of us
are not writing blogs as commercial projects. We are just blogging whatever we
find might be helpful to others and in this sense there's absolutely no point
in overthinking it. Just blog whatever you want. I get that he might be
unsatisfied with the rambling _comments_ in many websites and forums. But come
on, what does that have the least bit to do with blogging and "write just
because we can"?

------
ianai
And apparently there are now state-sponsored sources of noise.

Wasn't there an RFC finalized recently for a site-independent comment system?

~~~
chrisvalleybay
Do you remember anything about the name of this? I am very interested in
contributing!

~~~
aybarshazar
I think that is called Web Annotation:
[https://www.w3.org/annotation/](https://www.w3.org/annotation/)

------
znpy
If anyone is wondering, Usenet is still alive.

~~~
rocky1138
Recommendations on a good Windows client?

~~~
kazinator
Whatever you use, make sure it's a dedicated NNTP client and not some e-mail
client that also "does" NTTP as a side stint.

~~~
lsh
how come?

~~~
randcraw
Because Thunderbird sucks, as do other email clients that claim to also
support news. As an email app it's below average, but as a newsreader it's
downright horrible.

A good newsreader needs to be able to thread and block and filter and preview
binaries. Few apps ever did this well, and many that did have since become
obsolete (Pan2, Unison, etc).

With the rise of Windows and the decline of Usenet, the demand for newsreaders
faded fast, leaving few or no supported freeware newsreaders alive today. Even
commercial newsreader apps are increasingly rare.

------
makecheck
Frankly I think what is missing is an understanding of statistics.

Even having “1000 friends”, which sounds amazing, is statistically
insignificant when we are talking about populations of millions or billions.
Think about the last “really long thread” you read on Reddit or something, and
think about when you tuned out: was it a few dozen comments, maybe a few
hundred? Still statistically insignificant, or at the very least severely
biased.

People are regularly exposed to, and worse _respond to_ , statistically biased
samples. This is a really, really bad thing. What we need is a way to almost
forcibly blend samples from many different populations so that the number of
comments you can “stand” is a more representative sample. That way, when you
get up in arms about “what people think”, it might actually _represent_ what
“people” think instead of “my friends” or whatever other biased sample is out
there.

~~~
incompatible
I'd like to see better moderation systems. Moderation done by people who are
actually good at it rather than just upvoting or downvoting comments depending
on whether they agree with them or not (moderating the moderators). Ways to
mark comments as duplicates so they are all grouped into one bundle. A way to
avoid the "first posts" effect, where the earlier posts are likely to be the
highest rated regardless of their merits.

Aggregators like Hacker News are already part of a solution; putting
interesting articles in one place so that we don't have to subscribe to 10^8
personal blogs and fringe tech sites.

~~~
ben_jones
Begs the question: what are the best moderation systems in software? Are there
any?

~~~
jalfresi
I always thought slashdot had a pretty good moderation system. Would in most
cases separate the wheat from the chaff leading to excellent comment threads

~~~
givemefive
Yeah meta-moderation, limited mod points and a secret algorithm for earning
mod points based on reputation works pretty well. Oh.. and a maximum score for
comments.

------
OliverJones
The internet era our author mentions was not dominated by companies whose
investors measure success by "engagement" \-- that is, by wasting our time.

FB and Twitter measure success by engagement. That means they don't have the
incentive to organize our information and save us time.

(Gotta go... Hacker News is about to tell me to get back to work!)

------
edgartaor
What do you think about Reddit? Topics are enforced and have an API.

~~~
btym
The same thing happens to every subreddit. It's good, people like it, it grows
very large, the quality of submissions goes down (or the same content gets
reposted constantly). People are incentivized by their visible "karma" score
to post mass amounts of low-effort content.

~~~
zeta0134
I feel like Hacker News is one of the only online communities I've
participated in where the score is handled appropriately. It's a good personal
measure of how well my posts and comments were received by the community, but
it's not bragging rights. No one else can see my vote tallies here, so I have
no real incentive to increase it.

I've seen this affect sites like Stack Overflow as well. At the bottom of any
popular question are usually very low-effort answers from posters who really
shouldn't have answered at all. I wonder if it's an example of their otherwise
well-executed reputation system creating noise that might have been avoided.

~~~
jalfresi
Out of curiosity, does any one know of any research or articles into
reputation systems in general?

~~~
dredmorbius
Randy Farmer's "Building Web Reputation Systems" is a good start:

[http://buildingreputation.com](http://buildingreputation.com)

There's a blog, book, and wiki.

Some keyword searches:
[http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3A+online+reputation+sys...](http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3A+online+reputation+systems&qt=results_page)

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=online%20reputation%20s...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=online%20reputation%20systems&btnG=Search&as_sdt=800000000001&as_sdtp=on)

------
catern
I still use NNTP every day. I've never used Usenet, but it's very useful
(through Gmane and Gnus) as a way to follow mailing lists. Also, the internal
forums at $DAYJOB support connecting through NNTP, which is extremely
convenient.

Likewise I use IRC every day, through Bitlbee, to interact with people on
Facebook Messenger and other platforms.

I can do all of this from my client of choice (I choose Emacs) without a
problem.

Admittedly this doesn't solve the problem of topicality, but I think things
are better than they seem.

------
beefsack
The problem is that it appears most people actually want noise, and it's
becoming especially apparent as a lot of these content channels become more
mainstream.

Anyone who's been on Reddit for the majority of the site's existence will
probably have noticed monumental shifts in popular content, which I feel is
essentially a movement away from serious diverse discussion towards
entertainment and self validation.

I don't think I'd be going out on a limb to say a large amount of HN readers
are interested in serious discourse, and I wouldn't be surprised to find there
are many like me who feel completely alienated by modern Reddit. Previously it
was enough to just ignore the default subs, but the momentum has become so
strong that it has become pervasive even in niche subs.

I've been thinking about it a lot recently, probably mostly stemming from
nostalgia of what Reddit used to be, but I feel something that is quite
important is identifying that different people are interested in different
content, an that nobody is really entitled to stop others enjoying the
category of content they want to consume.

I don't care about entertainment on Reddit, and I particularly don't care
about image macros, in-jokes and one liners. I absolutely love the high effort
informational posts and discussions though, and some of them are truly
insightful. I yearn for a mechanism to reliably filter out most of the
entertainment things and promote the high effort content. I'd love for it to
stay some form of voting mechanism though as it seems really effective when
the community votes using congruent inclinations.

The Slashdot voting system worked using a classification system (interesting,
funny, etc.) but that is hardly good supporting evidence for content
classification as it didn't work particularly well, perhaps because it was so
limited (votes themselves were limited in quantity.)

My current line of thinking is using emoji reactions might be an interesting
option like you see on GitHub comments. If I want to avoid the entertainment
posts I could filter out posts which predominantly have the laughing emoji.
There is evidence that emoji reactions themselves are compelling enough to be
used, and possibly more compelling than the style of categorisation that
Slashdot used.

I feel that it's fundamentally important that a system like this needs to
integrate into existing communities somehow, as there's no point having it if
there's no content to apply it to. This is probably the hardest part but
possibly also a very compelling part, having a content indexing /
classification system might also be a way to centralise a lot of this content.

This post got a little long winded and ranty so apologies for that, but I've
been wanting to get these thoughts in writing for a little while. If anyone
has any ideas around this general topic I'd love to hear. I've gotten to the
point where I'd like to invest energy into attempting to solve it.

~~~
sotojuan
My view has always been that after a day of work or school, the last thing
most people want to do is engage in a deep discussion. Instead they want to
scroll down funny content (I do this myself or just play video games, just in
case I sound like a snob).

~~~
TeMPOraL
In a way it's good that many people do that _during_ work/school time, leaving
some cognitive reserves for an actually productive evening.

------
nippples
Now we have great discussion forums and link aggregators where a small group
of moderators rule over a very large number of places and will frequently go
on power trips, dominate discussion (or coddle a power user) and, not rarely
enough, engage in doxxing.

One thing that keeps me returning to YC is that I'm not even reminded of the
existence of moderators over here.

------
cylinder
Indeed. I miss the days of IRC and such. The internet started feeling really
noisy after the iPhone was popularized.

~~~
pmlnr
This. It's because of smartphones. People don't write things on smartphones,
it's tedious.

~~~
cylinder
It also brought a lot of people online who previously were not. Desktops were
stashed in some room, one per household, and laptops were still seen as
somewhat nerdy or work related.

------
cookiecaper
Walled gardens and a "protectionist web" are the natural outcome of the legal
structure we've chosen to put up around the internet. It's not a technical
limitation, and technical solutions can not really affect it.

Just this week there was a "Show HN" that combined data from Twitter et al in
interesting ways. It was offline less than 24 hours later as all the comments
indicated that it was a clear violation of the policies of various content
providers.

Why should we care about those policies? Well, because under the CFAA, we've
made it a federal crime to send packets to a server in a way that displeases
the server's owner.

There is no technical limitation stopping people from collecting and curating
data from many sources and combining/filtering them according to their own
interest. The internet is _already_ open in principle (cue Schneier: "trying
to make digital bits not copiable is like trying to make water not wet"). The
issue is that we've given the Facebooks and Googles of the world the right to
hold our data and our personal networks hostage.

Start a decentralized, standardized protocol like email or IRC and companies
will cooperate insofar as they must to ride the wave, and then they will work
aggressively to corner things off into their own little world.

Understand, all software companies want one thing: lock-in. They want to make
it so that there is as much pressure as possible to remain on their platform.
It's the age-old story of someone who can't move to Mac, even though they
greatly envy it, because their greeting card program from 1997 won't work on
it. Instead of importable programs, it's importable personal networks -- but
now, with everything server-side, it's usually illegal to try to bridge that
gap on the user's behalf (insofar as doing so involves contacting the server
of a competitor).

The situation with potential copyright and patent violations was precarious
enough when it was all occurring on the user's local machine (WINE is in a big
legal grey area, for example; my instinct is WINE would lose if MS ever
decided to seriously try to squash them), but once you cross the line into
some company's IP space, all bets are off. The CFAA allows them to define
"authorized access" to their servers on their own terms, including "people
trying to access our server to provide data portability". This has already
been litigated with specific regard to Facebook in _Facebook v. Power
Ventures_.

As long as we give companies the legal tools to exert effective ownership over
user-generated data, we are destined to see well-designed, decentralized
protocols that maximize availability, resiliency, and portability get whittled
away by the overriding corporate interest in establishing some element that
can be used to keep users locked in.

The Halloween memos may have caused a stir in the late 90s, and they're all
but forgotten now, but their sentiment is more alive than ever.

~~~
mirimir
> Just this week there was a "Show HN" that combined data from Twitter et al
> in interesting ways. It was offline less than 24 hours later as all the
> comments indicated that it was a clear violation of the policies of various
> content providers.

I missed that. What's the HN URL?

> Why should we care about those policies? Well, because under the CFAA, we've
> made it a federal crime to send packets to a server in a way that displeases
> the server's owner.

There are ways to avoid such oversight. Consider, for example, Sci-Hub or TPB
or third-generation dark markets. What's hard is doing that at scale. And
that, I believe, is a huge niche that's aching to be filled.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _There are ways to avoid such oversight. Consider, for example, Sci-Hub or
> TPB or third-generation dark markets. What 's hard is doing that at scale.
> And that, I believe, is a huge niche that's aching to be filled._

TPB and BitTorrent helps move files. Sci-Hub helps move a particular type of
files (scientific papers). So maybe we need a TPB/BitTorrent for _data
streams_? Some way of moving around generalized access to and results from
APIs of server platforms?

~~~
chrisvalleybay
The question is whether we're fetching this off of the same APIs i.e. Twitter
themselves are using, or if we're scraping it from server-side rendered sites.
If we're attemtping to do it via their open APIs we're going to be hitting
rate-limits, and probably also face liability. What if there was some service
that you could run on different computers, that each had their Twitter API
tokens, and then we'd distribute the requests to different hosts, so that it
could not be tracked.

------
lyra_comms
We are working to restore the openness of online discussion with Lyra:
www.hellolyra.com. We aim to provide helpful services for conversation, not to
get users addicted.

We have made the choice to focus around people and conversations rather than
topics (because Lyra is designed to be harrassment-proof, and topics lead
easily to harrassment - you don't see this so much in the tech world but in
the mainstream it's a huge problem).

We are currently thinking about the best way to do notification aggregation
(Facebook does this very badly - several comments on the same conversation
will give you several different notifications) and marking-as-read. We have
several interesting options in test at the moment.

~~~
d--b
Just some thoughts: putting the full message in the discussion tree means that
people will tend to write shorter / comment-like messages, and not in-depth
argumentations.

On the other end, having only a tree of authors is a bit to slim, cause you
have to read the content of each message to know what's going on. I think
people who reply to a thread should give it a "reply title". You know it's the
same thread, but you can have an idea of the content with the reply title.

~~~
lyra_comms
Thanks for your thoughts!

Are you suggesting that every reply should have a title?

------
grogenaut
As someone who remembers being uber frustrated at having to use trillian to
talk to all of my friend, I disagree, there was major fragmentation back then
as well. Also for which BBS you were on, which friends were on AOL or other
nerfed internet.

~~~
elviejo
It was _possible_ to use and create trillian. Now I need to have slack,
Hangouts and WhatsApp web open independently

~~~
mehs
It kinda is possible. You can use Franz:
[http://meetfranz.com](http://meetfranz.com)

~~~
chrisvalleybay
Would trust this service, if I could read the source. I don't know what the
plan with MeetFranz is, but since it isn't open source, something tells me
that there at some point will be monetization involved. Monetization isn't
bad, but it also will at some point cause misalignment between it and the
users.

------
sergiotapia
Medium is quickly becoming the central place for programming articles, and
it's ridiculous they don't offer an API.

Check it out: [https://github.com/Medium/medium-api-
docs/issues/91](https://github.com/Medium/medium-api-docs/issues/91)

More of these website are just becoming data silos and not sharing their data.
Unfortunately I don't know of a better place to write programming content.
[https://sergiotapia.me](https://sergiotapia.me)

If you're a developer and you care about this, like I do, where would you
recommend we write articles sans-self hosting?

~~~
swiley
You could just push your stuff to github.io...

~~~
rmc
Or on your own website. Get your own domain! Host some static files!

------
niftich
It's not that these points aren't valid; they are, and I know some people
who've been rightfully hammering the exact same points for, well, decades, at
this point.

But we arrived here neither out of pure accident or grand overarching malice,
but simply out of the necessity of the now-commercial web and its lack of good
business models, and perverse incentives.

Back when most of the traffic on the Internet was academic, institutional,
government, or hobbyist, the incentives were to get the content out there and
interoperate with others, because the dissemination of the information was
seen as having intrinsic value, and the expenses were covered by out-of-band
means (i.e. not monetized through the content or the consumers).

On today's particular flavor of a commercial web, especially when your next
funding round depends on showing user numbers, easy out-migration is a
liability, easy in-migration is a feature, so even the use of APIs frequently
helps the product and the company more so than it helps the user.

When commercial entities started appearing on the Internet, particularly on
the World Wide Web, some sites were pure billboards containing only an about
page and contact information, e-commerce sites funded the operation through
selling actual wares, but news/media/entertainment sites brought with them
their previously trailblazed business model of giving away content and trying
to recoup some of the cost with advertising. Later, VC-funded content silos
took a page from early hobbyist web forums (that were mediocre reimagining of
BBSes) and created login-walled playgrounds that funnel the content inward,
making it easier to track, analyze, and monetize. It's no surprise that
today's four largest display ad servers are Google, Facebook,
Verizon/Yahoo/AOL, and Twitter.

Other business models only work for specialized players who can command some
brand awareness and attract a discriminating customer willing to pay for
quality (e.g. big-name or niche newspapers, streaming media sites, data
brokers); and, as the HN meme goes, micropayments get much more interest from
those who want to collect them than those who want to pay for them, so the
everyman's market is full of me-too sites vying for limited attention, or
captive content silos that re-create everything on the inside. The battle is
largely lost, unless realistic progress is made in the web monetization space.

Luckily, there are no technical barriers to people banding together and making
interoperable services like the way things used to be -- and keeping up the
protocols that make that a reality. It's just that they will have to contend
with the realities of playing in that space and competing with similar
offerings that don't. Havens on the old web, or the old Internet for that
matter still exist, just like amateur radio still exists along with public
access television. It's just not where the mainstream attention-hours go.

~~~
losteverything
As i read your well said reply i only know one thing: it will?change again.

------
sullyj3

      > Can't mark things as read
      > ...
      > it could resurface at any time
    

Except that you can't come close to consuming content faster than it's
produced on things like Facebook. That's what the news feed is for, taking the
massive stream of _stuff_ that your friends and pages are generating, and
prioritizing it. I don't think it generally shows you things you've already
seen before.

------
type0
> Incidentally, this is not a call for the open internet; I could not care
> less if there's a leading provider for content, as long as such content is
> accessible in a standard way.

There is such a provider and it's called Facebook, that is if you don't care
about the open internet is exactly what you get.

------
Semiapies
For all that RSS is "dead", it sure still seems to be everywhere. A few big-
name sites like Twitter shut their feeds down, sure. Out in the rest of the
web, I can't think of the last time I looked at a site or a blog that didn't
have a pretty usable feed.

------
Mathnerd314
If you want to focus on something, just google it - depending on what it is
you'll get Wikipedia, some blog posts, and maybe a book or two on the subject.

What Facebook / Twitter / Blogger / etc. are good for is providing context -
_why_ should I be interested in something. Generally it's as simple as "I like
Mr. X and he's interested in Y". They're also reasonable at finding new topics
to explore, although if you dive deep enough it turns out that everything is
interconnected and you'll find it anyway.

It's really hard to define "topic" or "noise" in a way that isn't based on
search keywords or (facets of) people.

------
clishem
> Once was IRC

Seriously?

~~~
alanfranzoni
Uuh, despite the enormous attention, the article was written in just about an
hour, and I'm not a native English speaker; that error slipped through the
cracks. Thanks for pointing it out.

~~~
clishem
I was very tired when I wrote that, my apologies.

What I meant was that IRC is still alive and kicking.

