I personally wouldn't call 4chan and its relatives fun, but they sure are weird.
There's dedicated, active, shitty phpbb forums for every single weird sexual fetish you can imagine.
And that's just the fun and weird patches of the internet that I happen to know about. There must be 3 orders of magnitude more. I'd wager that if you think the internet isn't fun and weird anymore, then you're just looking in the wrong places. The problem is with you and not the internet.
Nowadays heavily discouraged, and would probably be deleted as unconstructive; that one still exists because of historical significance/was grandfathered in.
To be fair it is unconstructive. If you read the question carefully, it is clear is can be solved using a regex because it is about identifying tokens, not about parsing them into a tree. Parsers typically use regexes for the tokenization stage - indeed, what else would you use?
The answers are ridiculing the OP for asking a totally reasonable question.
Regexes are indeed a perfectly fine answer when you have the guarantee no corner cases will show up in the content, and I did and still do use regexes to quickly extract data form well-known HTML/XML as a quick hack (curl|grep). Otherwise you're much better served by using a parser and select nodes with xpath/css.
The question doesn't specify if the file to match against is unique/one-shot or if it's a general case. Without that info you can largely assume it has to handle any input. The regex will get unwieldy since you have to account for corner cases like:
The second line is not a corner case, that is simply not legal XHTML. You cannot have an unescaped < in an attribute value. You will need to take comments (and DTD's and CData) into consideration of course, but you can do that in a regex.
In any case, how would you use xpath or CSS to identity self-closing tags? They operate on the parsed tree, not on the token level, and the question is about identifying specific tokens.
Maybe not very constructive, but I think it's a technically fair answer given the question. The person asking is not intending to match individual tokens one by one to feed into a parser, but simply to use a regular expression to extract all instances of a set of opening tags in a whole document. The trivial solution he proposes, while perfectly sufficient for some subset of documents, quickly breaks in the general case when you consider comments and CDATA sections. For that you need to maintain an understanding of the whole document.
That said, this answer frequently gets linked in discussions even where using regular expressions is an entirely valid approach.
How is it technically fair? The answer is objectively wrong - you can tokenize XHTML using regexes. You cannot use a parser, since a parser does not emit tokens but emit the element tree and abstracts away syntactic details like the difference between <x></x> and <x />.
A technically fair answer would be to point out that the regex would have to take other tokens like comments, CData etc. into consideration, so it is more like a five-line regex than a one-line regex. If someone recommended a XHTML tokenizer or other tool which could solve the OP's task, that would also be a great answer.
> How is it technically fair? The answer is objectively wrong - you can tokenize XHTML using regexes.
Yes, but that you can tokenize XHTML using regular expressions is not the same thing as being able to use a single regular expression to extract XHTML tokens. Remember that context free languages are a superset of regular expressions. I don't personally know enough about the XHTML syntax to say off the bat whether the syntax can be described with a regular expression, but generally a recursive definition of valid syntax is not possible to express with regular expressions.
> You cannot use a parser, since a parser does not emit tokens but emit the element tree and abstracts away syntactic details like the difference between <x></x> and <x />.
You can use a parser, just not any XHTML parser. The parser would need to be constructed with the objectives in mind, to parse into a data structure that doesn't abstract these details away.
That said, maybe an even simpler solution exists, such as to use several regular expressions to first remove comment and CDATA before matching. I'm not immediately aware of any other cases that would cause problems for the trivial match suggested in the question post.
I think you're missing the point - if anything the reasons you gave would be cause for it to be downvoted, because it's still an anwer, just a bad one. The reason it would be deleted as unconstructive is the creativity, which is discouraged in the push for professionalism.
But it is not downvoted. It is heavily upvoted despite being wrong and misleading. Because it is fun and snarky so lots of people upvote it regardless whether they even understand the issue or not.
>Parsers typically use regexes for the tokenization stage - indeed, what else would you use?
This is completely wrong. One can also just write their own tokenizer reading one character at a time with a state machine. It's trivial compared to the complexity of the rest of the parser.
A standard state machine with no memory (other than the current state) is equivalent in expressivity to regexes (in fact regexes with back-references are more expressive); even if the state machine is non-deterministic.
The question is not about parsing. It is about tokenizing XHTML. So you are suggesting to write a hand-rolled tokenizer instead of using regexes for tokenization? Why is that better? That is exactly the kind of task regexes excel at.
Regex is a family of languages each of which can have various implementations. You could have a regex implementation that instead uses mutually recursive functions etc.
What is true is that regexes are typically not turing complete and can be represented with simple state machines.
I was ridiculed for posting a query about a C++ concept I was trying to learn from one of the authoritative books on the subject - I just couldn't 'get' the syntax being explained.
I persevered and then someone chimed in that, hey, there was a typo in the book's example!
For a discussion group I might agree, but SO is supposed to be a repository of legitimate questions and their legitimate answers, not a place for general banter.
It's kind of the same as here on HN. If unconstructive comments weren't discouraged here, the comments section here would look like on Reddit.
If unconstructive answers weren't discouraged on SO, I'm quite sure the more popular questions would be full of flippant half-answers trying to be funny or people posting memes to grab attention.
Totally agreed. Weird, as always, persists in small communities. Not large. Weird is still alive and kicking, but it's just as hard as ever to find, and e.g. Google prioritizes large (normal) results over small (weird) so the normal tools are unlikely to find them without effort.
In the Good Old Days, you were weird simply by being on the internet, so as an internet user you found it a bit more easily. That's unlikely to return. Improvise, adapt, be weird.
I don't think that posting tiny communities into a large one is a good idea. In my experience exposure to mainstream usually ends up with the community flooded with people who eventually somehow make the original members leave for one reason or another, leading to a slow (years) but painful death of said community.
I've seen it happen here actually. Occasionally a thread will come up on Reddit of people looking for alternatives and HN inevitably gets mentioned. Then there's a flood of people posting idiotic comments and memes on the posts here.
Thankfully due to the efforts of the longer-standing community this stuff ends up languishing at the bottom of the comment threads but it seems like it's only a matter of time. It's certainly become a lot more prevalent over the course of the 5 years that I've been here.
It's sort of a social web of trust, similar to HN/Reddit but about as different from those two as HN/Reddit are from each other. The way the site works is interesting: There is no moderation or downvoting, but if you do something lame, you'll be filtered out, at which point that person won't see anything you post anymore. In practice, it works very well. The content on it seems to be an order of magnitude more intelligent and interesting than HN or Reddit, but lacking in volume and discussion because there are so few people.
I am not worried about it being flooded with noise because of the way it is set up. It lends itself well to creating isolated subcommunities, and tends to reward thoughfulness rather than lowest common denominator content. When the Reddit community was looking for alternatives several years ago, a lot of people ended up at Hubski. But Hubski never became vile like a lot of other alternatives ended up.
Posts are tagged, and you follow tags and people you are interested in. It's possible to follow only people. When they post something or vote on something, it shows up in your feed. The frontpage when not logged in is fairly boring: it's all the stories voted above a certain amount.
If you go there, be nice. Talk to people like they're real people.
I will thank you for the link, since I would not have seen this conmment:
"kleinbl00 · 29 days ago · link ·
Ahhh, the busker economy. I have an opinion about this, much to the astonishment of the assembled intelligentsia.
Patreon, Indiegogo, Kickstarter, GoFundMe, the lot of them are basically ePaydayLoans. They charge an absurd amount for basically acting as a payments processor. We've developed a Kabuki whereby the supplicant does the Kickstarter Dance so that their friends and relatives are cajoled into giving you money through the sheen of legitimacy. It also allows the supplicant to disregard the nonmonetary help of any and all comers - no less than four asshole directors I've worked with have turned down my assistance as a creative in favor of begging for my money so they can "afford" to do the work themselves.
And really - who uses these services? Generally people who do not have a product viable enough to stand up on its own. I really enjoy John Dolan's commentary but no, I'm not going to pay $5 per podcast to hear him ramble. 2,681 people do, though. That makes him one of the 1%.
Kickstarter is basically a business loan that charges you 20%. That's pretty fuckin' horrible terms. But if you can't find better because your idea is shit, go for it I guess. And I say this having underwritten three Kickstarters. In all three cases, they were ideas that would have been underwritten by conventional financing if only their creators had looked a little harder. Patreon? Patreon is a tip jar for people too introverted to sit on a street corner with an open guitar case... and I say that having supported a couple Patreons.
But it's shit, and it makes the world worse, and I hate it."
Point well made, however I'd like to consider shedding some light on "The problem is with you and not the internet. " -
For many people "the internet" is fbook. To some the net is what google says it is.
With F and B decided that some things should not exist at all, and other things should be downranked to basically never be seen, while promoting certain sets of sites -
I think the problem is more than the individual not really looking. It's more of an education problem where people don't understand the amount of censorship and how the down ranking and upranking is actually affecting the way most are using 'the internet' - which of course has the network effects of people only sharing what they (have been allowed to) see (and allowed to share) - sadly.
The time of web rings, less spam and less censorship made it more fun finding random things imho.
Times when tumblrs and torrents and geocities and others showed up in search results, along with click at the bottom to do a similar search with alta vista, lycos, etc..
was in some ways less weird, but more fun to surf and discover. at least for me.
Titled: How sex censorship killed the internet we love
I enjoyed here headings including:
When was the last time the internet made you feel good?
When was the last time the internet gave you hope?
When was the last time you felt free on the internet?
When was the last time you thought of the internet as a weird and wonderful place?
Glad to see others thinking of these issues. I worry that most people who connect online don't even realize the homogenized over pasteurized censored endless scroll publication is hiding stuff that multiple groups don't want to show - making so much basically not exist.
I think you're right. Two main reasons: the number of sites grew exponentially, and the ratio of "fun/weird" people seems higher to anyone that has been on the Internet long enough.
Why is that? Basically: because not everyone had access. So if you were there, you belonged to some sort of minority (privileged artsy, IT student, etc).
The Internet nowadays is a commonplace thing. Billions more are online. It's not surprising that the stuff you used to trip over everywhere is now not as prominent - that just reflects the ratio of like-minded individuals in the real world better.
But that doesn't mean weird/funny doesn't exist anymore. It just means that - just like in the real world - you'll need to know where to go to find it.
I think the reason is simple. Previously, the internet didn't have a real purpose, so everyone on it was mostly for the weird/fun stuff. Nowadays, as mentioned in the blog, it also has legitimate serious uses, so by definition the ratio of weird to serious is lower.
But I think expecting the internet to only be one way is not only naive but also unrealistic. You may enjoy it being that way, but not everyone does, and the internet is for everyone. There's something for anyone, you just need to find your corner of the web.
Agreed. The Internet is just as fun and weird as it always was, if not more so.
However, some of that weirdness has moved a level of abstraction "up" into mass platforms like YouTube, Reddit or Minecraft which some people might accuse of not being that under the radar.. yet the oddest subcommunities exist on such sites that few people are aware of. Amusingly, there are actually subreddits dedicated to unearthing such things on other sites, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepIntoYouTube/ :-)
True. But another issue I feel with today's internet and apps is that it has lower rate of serendipity
Most of our experience is controlled by an all-knowing black-box algorithms. The game is to converge all experience into a small set of patterns
An Example - youtube
Earlier I could spend hours on youtube and discover everything from new music to weird funny videos.
Today you literally get boxed into a list comprising of your history and recommendations that have hardly 1 degree of separation from your history
Every ML recommender driven website should have a control so you can adjust Straight <> Weird. People would love cranking the weirdness up. Instant dopamine hit (unpredictable reward function) and it would bust them out of their filter bubbles.
Let's be fair though, kids ran into that stuff all the time in the past and they turned out mostly fine. I don't see this as big of s problem as the people that get outraged make it sound.
The problem/fear isn't that kids run into this stuff, it's the media/lawyers blowing it out of proportion and negatively affecting the share value of Big Important Companies.
^ hah. that is a genuine problem
But on a serious note, mature services like youtube/instagram can do it - they know more about me than anyone else. How hard would it to be to filter by age!
I would pitch in https://lainchan.org/ and https://arisuchan.jp/ which are nice little tech image boards. They are that lovely blend of out there and slightly off kilter that I remember from the image boards of old.
I would not merely because the denizens of those kinds of boards are in some state of obnoxious wallowing in self-pity (not clinical depression outside of the actual one or two posters who actually might have it), unless you consider that "off kilter". Reading people incessantly moan about the "good ol' days" of everything is negative content. The discussion is all fueled by that wallowing and none of it is constructive or interesting.
I would argue that smaller *chan boards are much different from larger boards you are referencing in this post. Smaller chan boards are more akin to single topic forums with a distinct community. Lainchan for instance has a large lisp and functional programming community on it, and lots of positivity. You should try clicking links before you judge them.
I am not referencing larger imageboards, I am responding specifically about lainchan as I've lurked there for some time and sometimes posted there. Lainchan is nothing more than a hyper-focused /g/ with "cyberpunk" theme. In fact, lainchan split some two years ago into two different sites that are, content-wise, exactly the same because some of its members threw a hissy fit over a new administrator for childish and inane reasons - as if its old one was any better. Maybe one out of every half-dozen posts on /lambda/ is worth reading - most others are noncommittal sound bytes, wordy demonstrations of vocabulary, or nostalgia-chasing about the "good ol' days" of imageboards like 4chan.
I agree that the split was for a dumb reason (however it was inevitable with the prior issues) but that's why I listed both sites. Besides that though, communities split all the time and often for dumb reasons.
Also, on your comment that it's just a cyberpunk focused /g/, well ya that's kind of the point. It's a cyberpunk board. It's centred around a lot of the themes from its namesake. As for the value of the threads on /λ/, most of them are either fairly focused discussions of various topics in Computer Science or language discussions. There's obviously some noise in the posts but the moderation results in fairly reasonable quality levels compared to the larger chans.
As for your final comment, I respectfully disagree. It's not for everyone but that's expected.
Also in case there was a misconception, I am not threwawasy1228 and they are not me.
I see that kind of attitude even on twitter and large subreddits. I don't think its specific to imageboards, in my experience it's just a very popular attitude/outlook among those currently in their late 20s/early 30s.
That type of post is rather uncommon in my experience on these particular boards. Those types of posts are heavily self moderated and shut down by the community unless they are on /hum/ (The emotion/feels board). I'd give these small chans a chance as I find them fairly unique in the world of image boards.
I second this, these are some of my favorite places to go on the internet today. They are a bit slow in terms of posting speed but I like the slowness.
There’s a footnote giving context to the erratic design:
> This website is a wiki. All School of Art grad students, faculty, staff, and alums have the ability to change most of this site’s content (with some exceptions); and to add new content and pages.
Also funny how they link to https://usability.yale.edu/web-accessibility/accessibility-y... at the bottom of the page, but the link itself is almost unreadable because it's small, orange font on top of grey. Not arguing the page itself needs better accessibility - it's art after all.
The author seems to have totally missed Tumblr which allows for editing of theme htmls and is easy to share which fosters and exploring creative community.
Kids these days have significantly stronger design aesthetic and coding ability so it's less haphazard; though it still has a very personal style.
I completely concur. Some of the weird stuff I have stumbled upon in my internet explorations have defied description; many of those places have evaporated into the ether since then. I think when that happens, humanity has lost a bit of itself.
A useful feature of recording everything would especially be for TOS/EULA getting stuff that's hidden in scroll areas. I'd love to be able to revisit things.
It should be feasible. I've got multiple bookmarklets that do this for downloading blogs and webcomics for later offline reading (some are so heavily scripted it's impossible to just fetch them).
Add something to the above so that it inlines referenced files in base64, and you're basically done (I tend not to bother as I'm only after the text content). For actually interactive files, it gets more complicated; you'll need to save the current JavaScript state as well as the page resources.
Demoscene is totally alive and kicking, but I don't think it has the same following as during the PC / Amiga era. Many of the old demogroups are defunct (obviously!), but not many new ones have replaced them.
There are still many jaw dropping demos and I recommend that people check them out and give some appreciation and respect to those absolutely l33t guyz
The feeds of the internet, Facebook, Twitter and such don't tend to be weird because of course they are selective, by upvotes, follows and friendships, and reach a normalcy between the influences. So it won't be fed to you unless you have weird friends.
So, you need to search for it. Be active about your intetests and seek them out.
I dunno, there's plenty of twitter that is just plain weird. Full of bizarre dadaist humor and all sorts of super referential jokes that require like a bibliography unless you are up to speed in the relevant sub-communities where the original jokes circulated.
I think the OP doesn't think the Internet is fun and weird anymore because he's looking at it in relative terms, whereas you're looking at it in absolute terms (so both of you are probably right). It is true that increasingly more and more of the time one spends on the Internet is spent on a few key websites, but it is also true that the number of weird places one can check out on the Internet is much higher now than in the past. If you're looking for these weird pockets of the Internet, a good place to start is this collection: https://find.xyz/map/weird-corners-of-the-internet
Agreed - I appreciate the sheer variance in comment quality and the threads are easy to consume. To take something like /ck/ (cooking), you have a mix of some generally good advice, along with a fair amount of madness and absurdity. The mix works for me. I am glad they split off the "work-safe" boards to 4channel.
I agree that it probably has had little effect on the site overall, and huge quotation marks as you say. I am assuming they did it for more flexibility with advertisers or something.
For me it is more psychological--there is a fair amount of decent content there, but being one click away from /b/ and /pol/ can be a detriment if I want to share a link or show something to my girlfriend. "Here's a bread recipe that sounds tasty or some /diy/ project--but don't use your work computer and you might want to fire up VPN."
But that stuff isn't mainstream. SO is but not answers like that.
All this fun and weird stuff lives on separate disconnected islands from a practical point of view. Maybe it really has to do with coding becoming more elite - although by all rational means it got easier. On the other hand hardly anyone would dare to upload static html websites anymore without non-trivial css/js. That's a shame.
Maybe this also has to do with the general obsession for super clean and lean code. This design has to be like that as well, same goes for the whole gist of the endeavor.
FWIW shitty forums always have been there, but there used to be a lot actually useful forums. Now those have been eaten up by streamlined and polished high quality web or native apps.
There is probably even more weird stuff than ever however search engines are not the neutral tool they used to be, there is quite a lot of censorship at the search level. But this could present a great business opportunity.
I remember seeing a piece of code on dwitter where someone was trying to see if they can inject any code in the page. And it was working. So yeah, I'd very much rather avoid that website. Trying to allow users to put their own code on a page someone else is seeing is perfectly ripe for exploitation. Sure, it might be fun initially, for most people, but not anymore when someone uses that power to harm your website and other users.
And I agree you could work hard to try and somehow verify their code, but I doubt it's possible to let them do something useful and at the same time prevent any possible attack.
I went to visit dtwitter and first comment seen was ‘Yeah fuck off u goddam pollack piece of trash’. That is not the fun internet I am looking for, where ‘anonymous’ 12 year old write comments of this kind. What is good in FB which I do not use is that thay required real names so you would not hide behind a nick name to write comments like the one i pasted above.
Well, if the comment section (powered by facebook) on a number of national newspapers can be a sample, having real names associated with a comment doesn't do a lot to prevent nasty comments.
But few people know about any of that stuff. There are new subcultures on Mastodon/Pleroma, tons of small self hosted projects people are now trying out .. sure .. but the average user isn't going to find any of that.
Where once we had Lycos, Hotbot, Dogpile, Excite, Yahoo, et. al., we have a fraction of the various search engines today and most people just know and use the big-G.
Reddit use to have all sorts of communities. Then they started banning everything, a CEO edited comments and didn't step down and now it's all 'safe' and single opinionated (Even /r/unpopularopinions went away).
This is a cute project and I hope it's self-hostable, because I might give it a shot. So far it doesn't seem like there's any code released.
I think the future of the Internet needs to be distributed. We need more things like Sandstorm, PeerTube, Pixelfed; thinks that make it easier for people to pay to host their own content and have control over it.
Jarred was probably young when the internet was first taking shape, and every generation shares the feeling that things were better in their youth (aka the Golden Age Fallacy).
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.
...and sometimes, things really were better, too. Regressions happen, and the Eternal September is real.
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.
>Regressions happen, and the Eternal September is real.
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.
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.
I chose country club specifically because I think there has always been a strong fiction of meritocracy in IT and I was very specifically highlighting the exclusatory nature of the culture.
"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.
Modems have been around for a very long time. By the time the mid-80's rolled around, a 300-baud cuff modem was well within the range of a young kid who had some paper-route money, because that's what I did. And my family was not wealthy at all.
[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.
Oh, yeah, if local calls weren't free, BBS's would have never taken off the way they did. It was a thrill being part of a network where each BBS would make a nightly call to the furthest still-local BBS, which would then repeat the process... You could reach all the way across the country and back in a few days, for free! It felt like you were getting away with something. Exciting times.
Not all parents were OK with blocking the phone line with a modem when they have just watched a movie were a curious teenager almost started WW III by accidentally hacking into the Pentagon (speaking from experience).
I thought it was so cool to have an acoustic-coupler modem like Broderick's character in War Games. Never did find the number to connect to the WOPR, though.
In the mid-80s, only maybe 10% of U.S. households had a computer, much less a modem. You also paid by-the-minute long-distance charges for calling anyone (or any computer) outside your town.
That's why local BBSes that were part of a relay network were so popular. Communicating with folks far outside one's home range 'for free' was exciting!
I think what changed is less access to consumption, but access to making your own. When you wanted to host your own community, you need a domain and a server and some technical skills. That was a much higher bar than you need to create a Facebook community. That's ultimately what made the internet boring. Every special interest group used to have their own hand created websites that were a labor of passion. Now it's just another Facebook group or sub Reddit.
That's part of it, no doubt. I got started in the BBS era, pre-WWW, and the folks that set up their own bulletin boards were all interesting in their own right. Each board, even if it used the same base software as another, had its own distinct personality and flavor.
Access to a modem, a piece of hardware that cost hundreds of dollars, and obviously also required a machine that cost thousands. Unless you attended a university, which was also more exclusive in the early 80s than now.
Things changed very rapidly back then. By the time I was old enough to be part of BBS culture (mid-80's), a Commodore was a couple hundred dollars, and a modem not even $100. Penetration by % of population was low compared to today's ubiquity, but competent machines were readily affordable to the majority of Americans.
>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.
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.
I suppose it depends on where you are, but where I'm from many populist folks don't really believe in the Tragedy of the Commons. God gave them the resources to use, we can't possibly use them all up, humans aren't powerful enough to change the earth, yadda yadda.
Global Climate Change is just one big Tragedy of the Commons.
But 'Eternal September' describes what happens to a particular platform, as something moves from niche to mainstream. There are new niche things that take their place, but people are often at a point in their lives where they aren't seeking out the new niche stuff anymore.
>There are new niche things that take their place, but people are often at a point in their lives where they aren't seeking out the new niche stuff anymore.
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.
Right, but my point was that during that early internet period, you just happened to be in the niche group that was on it. There are new niche things out there now, but you aren't in the right group to be in that niche anymore.
Re-reading what I wrote, I see that I neglected to mention the other salient aspect- I don't find it difficult to find niche interests nowaday at all. Thanks to the internet, finding like-minded individuals for just about anything has never been easier.
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.
> Regressions happen, and the Eternal September is real.
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.
Usenet still exists independent of Google Groups. Google provides an interface for users to post on Usenet groups, at least until they decide to stop supporting it, but you don't need Google at all to get on Usenet: http://www.eternal-september.org/
A lot of online communities today are unbearable tho as everything's become so politicised. It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it for attention. It was probably something that also happened before that but it somehow became really prevalent, at least. And often that took the fun out of it. I kind of think fondly of those times. Now of course this is just anecdotal, but that's what I've experienced in most communities I used to frequent and perhaps lots of other people here did too.
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.
I distinctly remember a discussion about Something Awful's slogan ("the internet makes you stupid") and how it was actually a keen observation about the internet. Pre-internet you would have people with really bad ideas. These people were so obvious to any normal person that bad thinkers generally shut up because sharing their bad ideas meant being socially ostracized or at least getting shunned.
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.
What's very interesting and frightening to me is the mental health version of this dynamic.
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.
There is also more annoying version of this. Previously people with stupid ideas didn't get much practice in rhetorics. In live conversations you get demoralized very quickly when people don't respond in any way.
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.
>For example I just argued with self proclaimed Marxist who managed to have opinions of fascists straight from 40's.
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.
but conversely you might have the contrarian town geniuses also interacting where they would not previously. so I guess it depends on the relative size of the 2 groups and their respective probability of being ostracised in their home environment
This SMBC from 2013 illustrates the issue as well as anything. And all joking aside, I think it is 100% accurate, and a real problem that we don't yet have a solution for.
Yeah, and that's best case because it assumes that these are normal populations with normal a-hole distributions, but all acting in good faith--even the a-holes, as much as they can. By that I mean that these are people with genuinely held ideas, some of whom aren't the nicest IRL, and so are just expressing their beliefs "as best they know how".
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.
There's an information asymmetry that some multiplayer games have exploited to solve this sort of problem (namely, pit all the cheaters and troublemakers against each other), but I think it's that lack of global information that lets it work.
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.
There are people being loud in the center who are still incorrectly labelled as "far right" or some other meaningless label and targeted for deplatforming.
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.
A few years ago, I never would have thought I'd be sympathising with Reagan and his "I didn't leave..." quote, particularly considering that I lean left on most political decisions. But man has it been a shock to see how quickly the progressive side of the left shifted what was considered left and right here in the US. And I am dismayed by how all political opinions across the board are now considered shibboleths for a purity test rather than subjects worth discussing.
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.
> He was a small-d democrat. His best friend was a small-r republican.
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.
In my experience, the other guy has it right: "Small-d democrat" means someone who supports democracy (... enough compared to some base line in whatever context that it's worth discussing), not someone who weakly endorses the Democratic party. A small-d democrat may be an avid big-D Democrat, or a weak one, or not one at all. I'm sure a big portion of the Republican party are small-d democrats when the alternative is monarchism.
That was of a different era where politics anb religion wasn't discussed in mixed company. Now you need to yell which side you are on as virtual signage.
> There are people being loud in the center who are still incorrectly labelled as "far right" or some other meaningless label and targeted for deplatforming.
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).
They are not far-right or alt-right but they continually show sympathies with such ideas, and defend the same status quo that the right-wing wants to support. They are continually invited and supported by right-wing speakers. It's not as though these people are exactly centrists, and even if they were, there's a reason for a left-wing individual to critique them too.
>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.
It's a popular, or at least persistent, european meme to dramatically underestimate the political diversity of the American public. He believes that all Americans are on the right.
As an American living in Europe, it's actually a fairly accurate one. The American greater public is generally much narrower than in Europe, in particular due to Europe's history with Communism and the various degrees of strength of the labor class compared to America.
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.
The window of allowable discourse in the US doesn't reach as far left as the center of Canada.
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.
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.
It is accurate. Reread what I've said. "It's a fairly accurate portrayal of the national discourse and the court of public opinion," to paraphrase
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.
> 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.
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.
Here are some ways in which the United States is either within European norms or, at times, even further to the left:
* 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.
As someone who has been interacting online since FidoNet was a thing, I have to say ... this is a problem as old as humans. There were plenty of politicized discussions back then, plenty of contentious people, plenty of trolls. In some ways the vibe was different, but really, it wasn't better. Or worse, to be honest.
>It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it for attention.
It was actually in September 2013 when it started ... or was it September 1993 ...? Uh, oh, how time flies, never mind.
I remember it always being political. Back in 2002 most of the posts in the Command and Conquer Generals forums where various views on if Bush should invade Iraq or not. That community died the day EA banned political discussions.
The day EA killed Westwood Chat and it's active community and replaced it with their hideous in-game matchmaking was I think the day the internet stopped being fun and weird for me.
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
> In fact, it's something I really appreciate here on HN, the tone of discussions is rather pleasant and on topic
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.
>A lot of online communities today are unbearable tho as everything's become so politicised. It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it for attention
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?"
A recent example from reddit: An influential person in a small community came out as trans and preferred to live as a women now. The OP who wanted to bring this to the attention of the community and wrote:
> 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.
On the Internet you get a Covington Catholic school incident every other day. There's lots of extreme accusations (racism, homophobia, sexism etc) thrown around with little backing evidence. I think Jonathan Haidt explains it best, where the barrier to communication has moved from "reasonable person" standards (if someone says something that could be construed as extreme/hateful you give them the benefit of the doubt but get them to clarify) to "most sensitive person in the room" standards (anything that could be offensive, even if its not intended at all, is construed as the person being some horrible monster). It leads to extreme self censorship because people are scared to talk in case they something that could be taken out of context, treated uncharitably and used to whip up a twitter mob. Coming from a moderate position it seems to me that this has had a chilling effect on debate and lead to the public square being dominated primarily by the extremes of both sides.
Just exploring the subject here, please don't feel attacked: what would "not be tolerated" mean, and what sort of opinions could be considered "dissenting?"
>without some minority of users politicising it for attention
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?"
> What does "politicising" mean, and how do you know their motives?
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.
He meant you were the example. I am not saying it was your intention, but the way you mentioned a particular issue and then added your opinion on the issue in your comment is one way people inject their beliefs into otherwise unrelated conversation. I know you needed an example to make your point, but the grandparent was trying to make a point of your comment.
This is the most obvious Golden Age Fallacy I saw in Jarred's text:
> 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.
That's their whole point - each page was individualistic, people were trying crazy things and showcasing their own personal style. The one thing that it wasn't was bland.
> My own experience with MySpace was that every page I landed on looked like a dumpster fire.
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.
I think, weirdly, I have a harder time finding communities around that sort of thing now. I mostly read HN. Where would I go to find something like HN for, say, sustainable living? woodworking? cycling infrastructure? A lot of it is, if nothing else, subsumed in to a Facebook group, or a slack group, etc.
The best I've found is small subreddits. Which is not ideal, because discovery is a giant PITA. Much like the split between /r/trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts (the /trees subreddit was first founded by people who were talking about weed, and people who wanted to talk about actual trees were a little nonplussed at the whole thing, thus creating /marijuanaenthusiasts and using it for tree-talk) most of the better communities are using a name that is not immediately obvious, so that they aren't oversaturated from the get-go.
The bigger problem with reddit, in my experience, is that 95% of the comments on any given post are pure garbage filler. Joke chains as far as the eye can see.
HN is also quite bad to have long-term discussions about a topic, and suffers from the same constant rehashing of topics happening on reddit. It sort of works for news and random individual articles, where there aren't necessarily longer logical threads, but that's not what many communities need.
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.
Hacker news is 30x worse because you don't even see replies to your comments so the fire and forget mentality is very strong. Also very discouraging to reply to older comments because once it gets over a day old its likely even the person you reply to wont see it.
Moderation is definitely key to dealing with that issue.
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.
The two-hour edit window and rapid falloff on HN are two of my least-favorite aspects of discussion on this site. It is almost a daily occurence I'll come across something interesting here, get ready to type a contribution to the conversation, then realize that it's too late, and it won't be read. It is a little demoralizing.
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.
Most SO sites have too many moderators squelching any attempts at constructive, and deleting the unique as duplicate. Like Wikipedia it's become incredibly hostile to newcomers.
> just find a community today that shares those properties
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.
- no regulations (yet)
- lots of unknowns
- very few hidden motives
That said, the duration of this state is probably quantifiable. Everything has these traits at first, until human stay for a while, then organization naturally takes place, taking the virginial beauty off at the same time.
I've read that some antique cultures believed in burning things to the ground. I wonder if that's not a useful thing.
I think this is closer to what I think has happened. The internet is used by such a large percentage of the population that "weird" sites now are going to be smaller in relation to sites that appeal to "the masses." The ratio of "weirdos to non-weirdos" on the internet today is significantly smaller than the mid 90s. "The masses" were very underrepresented online back then. :)
There's been a real qualitative change too. It was October 27th, 1994, and it was Wired's fault. The same year those bottom feeding lawyers decided to bombard Usenet with their green card spam. The first banner advertiser was AT&T:
The Internet was better because it was not yet another way to spoonfeed culture to a complacent populace. The Internet was for interested people, now it's for everyone. It is not better now. I mean sure the video is HD but the content is usually garbage.
Maybe the internet was just new. And then it got old. Then your mom started using it. The first album is always the best. By the fifth album the band just sucks.
That Glitch is not as popular as My Space was tells something about what people that use internet want; and shows that the internet is still fun and weird for people that like fun and weird.
Glitch sounds amazing, and way better than the tools that existed back then.
But back then, Geocities was popular and loads of people had heard of it. I have never heard of Glitch. It seems like there's become a re-division between "people who like to tinker" and "literally everyone else". On the one hand that's great but it kind of feels like everything is AOL again now.
The last vestige of fun, weird and popular is probably Tumblr, which everyone agrees has the absolute worst user interface. But you can theme your Tumblr page to your absolute heart's desire.
The tinkerers were a larger proportion of web users in the 90's and hence had more visibility with their larger share of available content. Now they're drowned by the sea of services for norms to consume.
No joke, I do remember when Facebook came onto the scene, I liked it way better than MySpace. I absolutely hated how customized MySpace pages became. It was dreck. Sound would blast when you opened someone's page. You could barely read what was on the page at times. It was occasionally fun but more often than not really terrible.
Reading the article my thought was "one person's fun and weird is another person's loud and obnoxious".
These days people have to focus more on the content because the presentation is so locked down. This may be for the better, but it can definitely feel antiseptic and corporate. The sense of fun is lost.
When Myspace came along, it clearly seemed to be the cesspool of the internet; I never created a page and never visited it out of principle. There was nothing I wanted out there.
Facebook's clean design was what I actually wanted. Not some autoplay crap music.
In fact, back in the day, everything in Facebook was a search. I could click on your residence or your class/section and see everyone else in it. It was awesome and useful.
> [this] shows that the internet is still fun and weird for people that like fun and weird
Does it, though? Google used to give search results, now it gives Google Search Results™ and most navigation is dictated by what appears in social media feeds. The behemoths are able to enforce a sense of legitimacy in their own products while marginalizing any threats to their dominance. If they really can't stop a rising star that is pulling away users by squashing or copying them then it is no issue to throw some money at the problem and buy them out.
But Glitch isn't a way for a normal person to express themselves, is it? Sure, you can write code which can be viewed by everyone, but you can do the same with github, Glitch is mostly only used by programmers, and you can't express yourself through code like you can express yourself through styling your own social media profile.
They put a really strong emphasis on lowering the barrier to entry. While you're right that it still requires you to write code, so did the MySpace weirdness of olde. I think the difference is it allowed you to only write the code, and they would handle the rest.
Normal people already express themselves on mainstream social media, about normal things. Normal people aren't the ones wishing the web was weird and quirky again, and they couldn't care less that Facebook or Twitter doesn't let them customize their CSS.
Honestly, I can't fathom how you could make such a statement. Granted, most people can't express themselves through code - but that doesn't mean in general you can't.
When I am feeling creative, I need a medium that allows me to keep up the momentum. Coding requires too much thought for my creative process in a visual medium (for exmaple).
Sites like Glitch assume that you already have a good grasp of tech/software engineering.
The big appeal of the early internet was that anyone could make something neat with simple HTML shenanigans, and learn to code by hacking the HTML templates to their needs. Many coders got their start by hacking Neopets storefronts. (there were actual coding puzzles on Neopets too for their events!)
I think it is much easier for a non-technical person to put up a website today than in the 90s. Today you need absolutely zero coding knowledge, not even HTML.
Back in the 90s (at least in the second half) you didn't need how to code. You just used Dreamweaver or Frontpage and you got your site! The only technical bits were to use FTP to upload it to your free hosting provider.
Well, we've only been at this for a little while, and we don't even have a way to follow other people or invite your friends yet. :) Rest assured, we're planning to keep going. And probably with fewer Tila Tequilas, of either the MySpace or neo-nazi variety.
I submit that the reason the internet is boring is that these causes are all obvious to us, and this comment won't get upvoted:
1) apps created niche proprietary software everywhere that used to be free and open media
2) the declarative, idempotent roots of the world wide web have been replaced by imperative, brittle Javascriptified spaghetti code
3) Javascript build systems have largely obfuscated any code that can be seen
4) Web 2.0 introduced private social networks in walled gardens that in many ways offer fewer privacy guarantees than before (due to the profit motive of exploiting user info)
5) Monopolies and duopolies now receive the lion's share of funding for research (which tends to aim for increasing profits and attracting eyeballs instead of fundamentally advancing the state of the art)
I'll stop there. It's hard to say how many of these are fundamental impasses to having an open internet again..
I was on the internet in the mid-90's (I was 15 in 95 which I think is the year I got on the net, I'd been on BBS's for about 5-6 years before that) and it did used to be much more weird as a percentage of sites than now (though the number of sites was tiny).
As the grownups came along and commercialised everything a lot of that went away and back then if you wanted to say something online you had to learn HTML and what FTP was as a minimum.
So things were weird because quite a few early adopters were not techies by nature.
It's different now.
It's one of the reasons I don't use facebook, instagram, snap etc, they just don't stick for me.
I do use twitter but that is because it's a nice way to follow projects and programmers I admire so it has some utility to me.
I was an early user of reddit but since the redesign (on the back of cleaning up the community) the trend towards just another social network (EDIT: speaking of which https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19039571) is pretty clear at this point, it's utility is going down as is the quality of the average posts in the subreddit's I cared about.
HN has been fairly consistent since I join over the last 5 years, a testament to the effectiveness of decent moderation.
It used to be I checked HN after reddit but that switched over the last year or two.
I have been doing internet things since the early 2000s. I learned HTML and FTP and many other technologies back then precisely to say something online. I disagree that things are less weird now.
Things are more weird. Where there was one weird place, there are now thousands. Even if only 1% of today’s sites are “weird” that’s bigger than all of the internet of 1995 combined. Rising tide lifts all ships.
Want to talk on a BBS? Head on over to SDF. They got you covered. IRC is still alive and kicking, though now with far greater capabilities. GitHub. Think about what people used to have before GitHub. I uploaded things to SourceForge back when it was one of the few choices. Oof. Think about the kind of weird shit you can find on GitHub/GitLab/etc. today.
The thing is that the apparent problem is that non-nerds are now allowed online. The horror. I have found plenty of strange, weird, niche, 1337, whatever communities now and they are made better by the fact that you don’t always have to have a magnetized needle and a steady hand to use them. All you gotta do to find them is to look just beyond Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Hell, some subreddits are microcosms onto themselves.
But this nostalgia for the “good old days” when you couldn’t have a web page in Russian and Korean at the same time is just that, nostalgia. What has actually been lost that we used to have but don’t today?
I never said anything about "good old days" give me a choice between 1995 internet and 2019 internet and I'll take 2019 in a heartbeat.
Wikipedia alone would make that choice easy.
Throw in that I can get an answer to some obscure error code in some library to talk to an old piece of hardware in <30s and I'm completely sold.
I was just describing my experience between then and now.
> The thing is that the apparent problem is that non-nerds are now allowed online.
Now you are just projecting, I never said modern internet was worse and I definitely didn't say anything about non-nerds been a problem, the internet is a larger part of my mums life (nearly house bound due to arthritis) than it is mine and that's a good thing.
That’s fair. My response was partially to the general theme of the thread, and your comment described quite well the 1995 state of things.
My comment about the non-nerds being the apparent problem is not that I actually think that. It’s that this sentiment often comes up. But reality is that we have way more nerds online now than before.
And overall the whole article is basically an advert for a new blogging system. Which may or may not be fun to use, but pining for the days when XSS was a desired feature.
> Things are more weird. Where there was one weird place, there are now thousands. Even if only 1% of today’s sites are “weird” that’s bigger than all of the internet of 1995 combined. Rising tide lifts all ships.
Yes, this is the counterpoint to TFA. Sure, it's a lot harder to find "weird" stuff now. Especially because it tends to get pushed down in search results. But once you find something that's "weird" in your preferred way, there are often links to lots more of it.
Also, you'll find lots more "weird" on Tor onion sites, I2P and Freenet. There are a few reasons for that, I think. One is relative lack of censorship. Also, a lot of content is more or less standalone, generated by users using simple tools, on VPS or shared hosting. And there are constraints imposed by high latency and limited bandwidth. All of that is like the old Web.
So anyway, TFA is correct, if we're talking about the Web ("internet") as a whole. But not if we're talking about the absolute amount of “weird” content.
Also a testament to the sustainability of usefulness of having a business model that isn't directly about monetization, which means it's probably really hard to copy.
HN is a PR project for an accelerator/venture capital firm. Since its purpose is to make ycombinator look awesome and generate leads for them (providing indirect monetary value), we all get a fun place to hang out and discuss stuff so they can project that image, but I have no doubt that without that fairly unique situation it would quickly devolve into some variation of what we commonly see with social networks that have to find a way to pay for the services they provide.
The technical side of HN isn't insurmountable, the moderation side is harder but the community side is the hard part.
I could build a HN, I could maybe moderate it (though probably not as well as dang and co, they are rather more even handed than me) but getting people to come and use it without attaching it to a VC fund not so much.
If I wanted to make a profit though then things are different.
Good community projects can self fund, lichess is a good example, hundreds of thousands of users, millions of games a day and zero advertisings, scheezy tactics.
Completely funded on donations, even pays the lead developer a liveable salary (though certainly not what he'd earn on the open market working for said scheezy social networks sadly).
I actually wasn't trying to make a point that HN itself is specifically hard to copy, but the more generic idea that having a business model that's not based on monetization is hard, for some of the reasons you noted. I guess a corollary is that HN is therefore hard to copy, but it's not for any real technological issue, as you note.
I also agree it's not impossible, as you point our with lichess, it's just that with the current level of consumer awareness of privacy, I think most people (still) don't realize what they are paying for some competitors that appear free, but are really just monetized through selling personal information, and for some services network effects trump almost all others. A free chess matching service, where being linked with random people of appropriate skill level is a selling point is a lot different than a social network that's built around connecting with friends and family.
AS to being funded on donations, while I think it's wonderful that a project can be funded on donations, I wouldn't want any project I care about to be in this situation unless the donations exceed all operating/staffing costs by a very comfortable margin. There's just not enough leeway for unforeseen problems in a situation like that. Server failure? Severe illness in key personnel? Massive influx of new users that haven't matured in the user lifecycle to consider donating yet? That's such a stressful situation that I can't imagine wanting to live it for more than a few years. Unfortunately, if you can't get enough donations to get past that point (or keep increasing scope until you are at that point no matter the incoming funds), I'm not sure a solution besides monetization in some manner, and the problems and perverse incentives that come along with it. :/
> I was on the internet in the mid-90's (I was 15 in 95 which I think is the year I got on the net, I'd been on BBS's for about 5-6 years before that) and it did used to be much more weird as a percentage of sites than now (though the number of sites was tiny).
I agree with your basic observation but I have a slightly different response:
Most people aren't all that fun or weird, at least not in a way which translates to text or graphical arts or music or anything else you can transmit over the Internet. Most people are the majority, and you'll never find the majority you're currently steeped in to be especially fun or weird. (Example: A great way to make a living as a comedian is to rephrase normality to make people see it as fun and weird. Observational comedy takes a keen eye for the obvious.)
In 1995 been on the net at all made you an outlier which is why I said by percentage though perhaps that wasn't clearly put.
None of my friends had a computer at home and didn't understand anything about them beyond those things we use in school for an hour once a week I was literally the only kid in my year who programmed them as a hobby.
We were not rich or anything but my father (for his faults) was fascinated with them and so I had access years before they became a thing.
They just were not embedded into the fabric of a working class northern town in England the way that they are now.
It's strange been under 40 and remembering three distinct phases in my life, pre-computers in homes, 1 computer in a home (maybe) and now everyone is wandering around with the kind of hardware 15 year old me would have dreamed of in their pocket.
I've been on the leading edge of computer adoption since a child and I still get future shock when I walk through a bus station and literally everyone is starting at a little glass rectangle streaming video wirelessly.
The other thing that still makes me smile is that my mum has three computers in her house, all of them running a linux kernel (Kindle Fire, Chromebook and a desktop running Mint) meaning as a percentage of devices owned she out 'Linuxs' me (I have an Xbox and dual boot for gaming), in 1998 when I was faffing about with RH and getting in trouble for breaking the family PC I wouldn't have seen that coming either.
You're entirely correct that most people just aren't all that fun or weird.
Over the last 20 years the internet has become an increasingly commercial and democratised place. In the earlier years the level of technical aptitude necessary to be a content producer online would have filtered out the contributions of all but the more tech-savvy amongst us, who I'd wager tend to be among the more 'fun or weird' people out there.
For commercial reasons alone, it's advantageous to all parties involved from those on the infrastructure side, all the way to media companies and manufacturers of consumer goods to make the internet a more accessible place. This has contributed to the internet becoming ever more homogenised, commercial and bland to match the taste of the vast consumer public. 2019 internet is built for the same status quo that the television stations and tabloids of old were made for.
Also refer to the 'Eternal September' phenomena on Usenet, that's pretty much what's happened here at a large scale.
During that same period, we were building up the concept of UX and one of the things drilled into people's heads was that 9 times out of 10 (at least), what you are doing is not so unique that you deserve to use a new UI metaphor to present it.
When in doubt, use the same mechanisms to accomplish things that everybody else uses.
That sort of peer pressure is intended to reduce the variability between web sites. I think for better or worse we are seeing the dividends of that effort.
More on-topic, you're totally right. I keep a copy of "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines" on my desk and show it to designers sometimes when they want to suggest interaction patterns that are unnecessarily novel. Very handy! haha :)
Wow, have you looked up the price of that book now? I don't know what it originally sold at, but today it's $248 and up. You can get the PDF for free, but if you want a hardcopy to keep on your desk, it's not cheap.
Huh for sure? I could see it on Amazon around $20-40. But yeah I got pretty lucky, cost me $5 or $10 or something along with some other Mac programming books from that era. Aww yeah :)
Interesting wording, that reddit "cleaned up the community", and that this caused a decline in the quality of content. I had this worry at the time, and was, under doubt, opposing this decision. Could you say a few words about what specifically changed after this?
I don't personally agree, as far as I know, with any of the communities that were banned, apart from the communities for buying and selling stuff, which no one should really have a problem with. And some of the communities that were banned, I vehemently disagree with, and would probably strongly oppose if they formed a political platform. The "involuntary porn" subreddits were probably breaking the law and in some cases causing great emotional distress. This latter case I think clearly crosses the line, but there were plenty that were in a gray area at worst.
There's something to having free speech readily available for criticism and scrutiny that feels very valuable. These people are around whether you want them to or not, and there's value in being able to scrutinize their views. Also, I feel there's a chilling effect when you've seen examples that saying certain things leads to explulsion.
What was illegal should already have been banned but the removal of non illegal but objectionable (to many) content stuck at the heart of what Reddit was, of course it's their platform and they can do as they please but I often enjoyed debating with people holding diametrically opposite views.
I mean I entirely get why they would do it from a business point of view but it was a stark sea change from what they'd done up to that point.
Throw in all the other odds and ends and Reddit just feels different.
The constant nagging to install their app, the hilariously bad redesign and handling of the redesign etc it just adds up.
Cool. Nice to have this discussion with you. It felt like there was remarkable consensus on reddit while these changes took place, with remarkably few people who took a more principled (in a free speech sense) stance. So I’m glad it’s not just me. I’ve been questioning whether I am in the wrong for not wanting to censor unpopular or heinous opinions.
I wonder if there is a way to combine the weird fun that was geocities/tripod/etc with the connections of a social network and modern ease of updating. Like how you use twitter, but for following webpages about butterflies or a shrine to the 6502 processor.
It's the underlying protocol that connects the various federated services in the "Fediverse", (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse) like Mastodon, PeerTube, NextCloud, etc. At root it's just a standardized way for nodes in a network to send messages to each other, though, so you could use it to get those "connections of a social network" you're looking for. And then Mastodon users, say, could get updates/notifications from your site/service/whatever right in their feed.
My first website was about about TNG and why DS9 sucked balls.
Ironic since I now consider DS9 the better series (but TNG still has the truly stand out episodes, I think young me was just oblivious to a lot of the subtler stuff but I digress), it was shockingly bad (and I'd been programming since the 80's, HTML was just weird).
I spent about five years hating the crap out of it and never even considered web development as a career, if you'd have asked me back then I'd have said you'd claw the compiler out of my cold dead hands.
20 odd-years later and I do enterprise web dev (and C#/WPF and Java)
I forked tt-rss back in 2005 for my personal use after I tried to submit a few patches that didn't "align well" w/ the developer. I wouldn't go so far as to say "massive asshole", but he did seem to be a challenge to deal with. I decided it wasn't worth the effort to try to contribute back my changes.
I was able to enjoy TNG from the get go. It's one of the few shows where the stories have any depth. Although I did start watching it when I was in my twenties, so that could have been a factor in being able to pick up on the subtler themes
Websites have had comments sections since well before social networks took off. Even in the Geocities days, you had "Sign my Guestbook/View my Guestbook". Some truly old-school websites, like Mark Prindle Reviews, included email responses from people who read his work.
Trying to shoehorn social media profile integration into this system will eventually end up influencing the content, and once more it'll be a race to the bottom, with everyone posting stuff only for other people's validation. It shouldn't work that way for the 'weird web'.
I think a bigger reason than any of those is that the web became a corporate advertising tool, run by bean counters and marketing people who don't like "weird" content because it may scare some people away. Just like TV, web content now targets the lowest common denominator and anything confrontational or "weird" gets put on niche sites or self hosting out of the limelight.
I think there are still a ton of "fun and weird" sites out there, they're just not on highly promoted, corporate backed platforms. And they're now a much smaller percentage of the entire web.
Actually, they're not that much scared that weird content will scare people off, they just don't like weird content exactly because it's weird and therefore unpredictable and hard to put into Excel planning charts.
The end result is still things like “wow, my tumblr account sure is a lot quiet now that all the people I was following because I liked their weird cartoon porn are gone”.
No, FOSTA hit sex workers. Tumblr just decided that lewd stuff would make it hard for Verizon to sell ads, so they banned lewd stuff and anything their shitty algorithm thought was lewd-adjacent. Now they're down something like a quarter of their former userbase, depending on whose estimates you believe; it might be higher. So that'll really help them sell those ads!
This is an amusing comment. You're trying to attribute social problems to underlying technological "problems". This is something an engineer would try to do, but I think the social problems of the internet have nothing to do with what framework a website was written in or whether or not software is proprietary.
I think this has made a huge difference, not so much if it is open source our not but how much things have become locked down. Before if you made a cool program you could hand it out to your friends on a usb stick and run it. These days you have to pay $100 to apple and go through a long approval process before you get listed on the app store. Its the same with all the platforms people use now. They have become more and more locked down pushing the regular user in to simply consuming content and only the corporations with large dev teams are able to make anything.
Now you need to buy a domain name, understand dns, understand web hosting and rent out a server because many home ISPs and routers don't support hosting servers.
Sure you can still do things but we are constantly raising the bar for creating and making consuming easier.
Not only that, but even if you could create something in the traditional way (without having to go through all those extra hoops you described), how many of the younger generation know how to run an executable locally (either downloaded, compiled from source, or received on a USB stick) when they've been raised on computer systems where everything takes place in the browser?
I came here to say the same thing. This reads like a list of technical issues that bother HN users the most. As such it's understandably a very popular comment with the HN crowd, but it has almost nothing to do with why we rarely encounter fun/weird things on the internet.
I don’t think it’s how we build websites per se, I think it has to do with how just a few websites have made themselves so phenomenally useful that they’ve eliminated the need for what I’ll call the “discoverabilty infrastructure” we used to have.
The first is Google. Google was such a phenomenally good search engine that you rarely needed to “surf” the web to accomplish a task. You could search “order a hand powered woodworking drill” and likely be taken to a page that let you do just that. Much of the discoverability of “fun, weird” stuff came from the “surfing” aspect of the web, Google vastly reduced that.
The second is Wikipedia (and the Wikia networks). Much of the wonderful weirdness of the early web was passionate amateurs compiling information, wrapped in their own design aesthetic (or lack thirst of.). Wikipedia as amazing and wonderful as it is, gets rid of the need to find these sites to answer a question about the world (again, reducing surfing behavior, at least outside of Wikipedia.)
The last is Facebook. So much of geo cities and the early web was the “personal website”- a Sort of combination of Facebook profile, blog, and experiment in web art. These sometimes grew into impressive little gems of content, but mostly they were terrible quips and “under construction” banners. Then came the Friendster->MySpace-> Facebook and LinkedIn transition, and the need for these personal sites dropped away. They still exist, but the interaction patterns for using fbook and LinkedIn are so much easier.
I feel like YouTube still has the early web experience to it. Much of the content remains the domain of passionate amateurs and the “up next” algorithm regularly takes me in serendipitous locations (and sometimes down some darker paths).
The fun and weird communities now seem like “islands in the net” if you will, they are there and probably larger than ever, but much harder to get to (or at least stumble upon), due to tooling that allows use to accomplish tasks without detours.
Much of the discoverability of “fun, weird” stuff came from the “surfing” aspect of the web, Google vastly reduced that.
One must not forget that Google is actively optimising search results away from the "weird stuff" and blocking users that try to dig deeper into the results to find it, insulting them with the accusation that they're a bot (a bit ironic, considering that if you behave "like the billion other mindless drones" you don't get singled out...) and presenting them with endless CAPTCHAs.
On the other hand, Bing still feels a bit like the "old school" search engines, and I've had better success finding the rare and niche "weird stuff" with it; apparently you can even find stuff horribly beyond legality, which is not surprising given how "dumb" it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18876361
I'd say the "fun and weird" Internet is definitely still alive; but the efforts of search engines to "clean up" their results have basically resulted in censorship and hiding of the less popular parts.
I think the de-anonymization of online users is another shift that (among many other things) caused the Internet to be less fun and weird.
You can see a very different tone in YouTube video comments, for example, before they switched to using real names.
Now, people are afraid to risk damaging their own personal reputation by posting "weird" things (I don't mean extremely weird either -- people are extremely self-conscious in general of saying things that MIGHT be considered weird in front of others, so they don't be themselves as much as they did when they were anonymous). And often, "fun" is synonymous with "weird".
It's not ALL bad -- people also say FAR less offensive things to each other when their real names are attached (but it still happens), but if you're looking for reasons for the shift, user de-anonymization is definitely one of them.
I'm in a private forum and its funny to see how strangers with anime profile pics are able to discuss topics that would be flamed to death in seconds on most of the internet.
Show me a declarative, idempotent API that will render MAME games and run old OSes inside a browser window.
Even show me a declarative, idempotent API that can generate an arbitrarily long scroll of user-generated content.
If your answer is that users shouldn't expect to be able to do these things, then you have aliased the word "web" to mean something that 99% of web users will not recognize.
You bring up a good point, and I've had similar conversations with my friend who is an avid Unity developer, which has a mostly imperative programming (IP) runtime with a declarative GUI.
Since functional programming (FP) and declarative programming (DP) have many similarities, the same issue of hardness (for lack of a better term) exists in languages like Elixer/Clojure/Julia/Haskell/Scala/F# etc etc.
This all comes down to one of the most poorly understood concepts in FP, the monad:
Honestly, I'm still not sure I understand internally how monads work, or if there are related terms for how I think of them. But monads (and related devices) are a way to deal with imperative logic and side effects when pure FP can't.
Imagine you're writing Tetris in a spreadsheet. It's easy to visualize how you might enter a piece's (x,y) coordinate in 2 cells and then pipe that through a series of cells containing logic that examines the blocks and outputs the next (x,y) coordinate for the following main loop.
But the actual main loop (that grabs input events) is very hard to visualize as a spreadsheet. This "glue" with the imperative stuff is where the monad comes in. Another way to think of it is, how to represent exceptions in a spreadsheet or a pure functional implementation of a promise chain (you can't without monads).
To write Tetris in HTML/CSS with no Javascript, we'd probably have to write a ton of CSS rules to show/hide/move DOM elements based on the state. That's an intractable problem for humans, so we'd probably compile the CSS from another language, which defeats the whole purpose. Maybe someone has tried it, I can't tell:
But if we had something like a CSS monad, then we could write rules that are based on dynamic state from other rules. Writing this all out now, something like this might be useful, if anyone knows of such a thing.
Anyway, from what I understand, languages like Clojurescript get around this by suspending execution via a monad and then entering again with new input. Here is an almost purely functional Tetris clone written in Clojurescript:
I know that code looks a little strange. But conceptually it's orders of magnitude simpler than that equivalent imperative code. Note that this is different from easy:
TL;DR; you bring up a really good point. FP and DP probably shouldn't be considered proven techniques until they can be used in the same problem domains as IP.
>This all comes down to one of the most poorly understood concepts in FP, the monad:
Of the languages you mentioned just Haskell, and Scala to some extent, has any deep concept of monads (and even in haskell they’re not part of the language, just a common idiom and ”easily” implemented)
Also, I’m using FP for the exact problems I used to use IP for, not sure what needs ti be proven..?
What I was trying to get at is that (IMHO) somehow the FP and DP paradigm has a huge blind spot when it comes to tackling the problems that IP solves handily. These are the problems that mostly involve integrating with the outside world - things like mutating state, exceptional situations, side effects etc.
Sure FP can largely avoid them via strong type handling and categories etc, but I've rarely seen good explanations of how to REALLY do something that programmers like to do, like write video games and social media feeds (things which the parent poster alluded to).
It's easy to visualize FP as a spreadsheet where the inputs generate a certain output. It's even straightforward to visualize how FP and IP are equivalent:
But I'm not convinced that pure functional programming can handle the simplest thing like new input without suspending execution or via a device like a monad. I also wonder if using those things makes functional programming impure. Which would make pure functional programming a fantasy..
This is maybe just a misunderstanding on my part since I haven't actually written much FP since learning Scheme back in the 90s. I'm all ears if you or anyone else knows of any articles exploring these issues.
Scheme was my first functional language actually. The general computational model is very similar to haskell untill you get to homoiconicity/metaprogramming.
Purity (and lazyness) is primarily there to help you reason about your code with referential transparency (purity ensures no side effects, and lazyness makes dealing with (certain parts of) bottom (think undefined) easier).
Of course any program needs to communicate with the outside world, and monads are a very general way of dealing with this. It’s worth noting that the first releases of haskell did not handle IO with monads.
At the same time, haskell contains functions to subvert lazyness (the function seq, which forces strict evaluation), and purity (the Debug.trace function which prints values in the middle of evaluating a pure function).
There’s also some fairly well-founded arguments that the State-monad violates the monad laws, which causes problems for referential transparency.
And you can still write a divergent function, in which case all your referential transparency goes out the window (kinda)..
Does this make haskell less pure? Probably, but since these are generally considered escape hatches or debug functions, the main paradigm of the language allows you (imho) to reason about your code in a way that’s (again imho) more amenable to separating your problem logically into discrete parts.
At the same time these escape hatches allow us to use haskell in the situations you describe. And you can often wrap them in a monad, in a way that allows you to reason about that boundary of the more purely logical parts of your code.
(There is obviously a tradeoff to using a type system like haskell’s. I’m a big fan of elm, precisely because it makes typed functional progamming easier to explain, and doesn’t distract people with all the fancy type theory stuff you can find in haskell (which I also love of course, and don’t get me started on agda))
I agree with his analysis except that in his "MAGIC TRICK" example, I would have used something that is UNDEFINED in the interim but can be computed to a real value at the end (just like how we use i as a placeholder device in math). His example:
f(x) = x^2 + x + 1
g(x) = 2x
h(x) = sqrt(x)
m(x, f) = UNDEFINED, if x is UNDEFINED f(x), if it isn’t
See, using i or a monad as a placeholder allows us to compute a real answer.
In FP, all computable parts of the stack could be collapsed (optimized). Then if anything is left uncomputed, the runtime could block on any involved monad. Then when the monad is set to a real value from the input stream, it could be collapsed completely and return the final answer.
I haven't succeeded in learning Haskell yet, but when I tried, I got stuck on its mutability implementation, which seems to use monads:
Honestly today, I would prefer to use pure FP. I think that allowing mutability anywhere in the language is a huge cost, because we can no longer visualize the whole thing as a spreadsheet.
I'd really like to know if another FP language solved the mutating state problem by doing something more like ClojureScript (CS), where it stops execution until the monad gets set from the runtime. Unfortunately, it looks like CS has mutable variables via reset!:
>Monopolies and duopolies now receive the lion's share of funding for research
This for me is especially soul-crushing. Some of the biggest minds of our time are working, devoting their talents and their ful attention, to the noble goal of... making us click more ads.
These people could be trying to research diseases, to come up with solutions for the big problems that affect us -- in short, working to to improve our lives. Instead, we reward those that make our lives even more miserable/erode democracy/help concentrate power even more. In our economic system, those are the ones that get rewarded.
I'd agree with #1 and #4, combined— "regular" people are very much siloed into apps that narrow the kind of media that get to them. Sure, the videos and photos are better than before, but that's just two types of content.
In my mind, weird/interesting internet died with the phrase "link in bio."
To add context, is a type of captatio benevolentia (“obtaining benevolence/captivating”) and as such is typically placed at the start of a discussion.
Someone uses cleuasms (I’m gonna create a word by inferring a translation) many times in a discussion. Pay attention: this unsolicited and reiterated form of humbleness can be too much. If you shouldn’t have right for a statement, apply suspension instead ;)
Weird, I was actually writing a response wondering whether there was a term for this phenomenon and then got distracted by work. I made a post about a week ago that I thought would be fairly unpopular and it ended up being my most upvoted post yet. It's like a super specific form of self doubt.
MySpace was a centralized for-profit site that owned your data, no different than any other, they just happened to allow more advanced design editing than similar sites today (which we look back on nostalgically, but I promise you they were ugly and crappy and fb an amazing breath of fresh air at the time). They do not, however, represent any sort of utopian free internet.
The problem is our wants have become too complex. A blog site that used to be simple self-hosted markup, now requires commenting, moderation, voting, recommendations, authentication, backup, performance, media, analytics, seo, and more. How much coding skill can we expect from people? And even if they had it, should everyone use their time re-implementing or deploying and maintaining tens of individual platforms to participate on the web? There doesn't seem to be a feasible way but to centralize. And now you need to monetize and people have shown they are not willing to pay money, leaving the only other possibility we know: monetizing the data - which, of course, only encourages even more centralization and data capture.
None of this is new, but these are the fundamental natural forces that need to be addressed.
This is 100% correct. The only thing I can add is that the profit seeking and consolidation is now hurting the remaining enclaves of weird fun on the Internet. For instance, many of niche subcultures that once thrived on Geocities still thrive on Tumblr, but the leadership of Tumblr is not happy about this fact.
When Marissa Mayer was in control of Yahoo (which included Tumblr) she used to brag about how she was using a "data driven" approach to maximize the revenue from Yahoo. This seems to have been abysmal for the actual users. Engagement on Tumblr stagnated, then declined. The great business guru Peter Drucker has pointed out that entrepreneurs often ruin their own products because they are uncomfortable with the type of success they end up with. Marissa Mayer would be an example of this. She had one of the great gems of the Internet, but she was uncomfortable with how weird it was. And it is difficult for leadership to really lead when the leadership is uncomfortable with the product they have.
I tried to capture how destructive her rhetoric about "data driven decision making" can be when I wrote the essay "When companies make a fetish of being data driven they reward a passive aggressive style":
"I’m especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on “data”. I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say that every company I’ve worked at that supposedly valued “data” in meetings actually valued something darker. The use of “data” in meetings tends to be a passive aggressive negotiating tactic for a group of people who for cultural or emotional reasons don’t think it is reasonable to express strong disagreement or actual anger. Instead of expressing strong emotion, people are taught to quote data — they then cherry pick whatever statistics back up their beliefs."
As far as I know, there has never been a company that said “We want the worst informed people to make the decisions” so in a sense all companies have always valued data. But they didn’t make a fetish out of it. They simply expected people to be well informed, and to make intelligent arguments, based on what they know. That would have been true at General Motors in 1950. That much has probably been true at most companies for centuries. When management says that the company is going to be “data driven” they are implicitly asking for a particular type of interaction to happen in meetings, an elaborate dance where people hide their emotions and quote statistics.
Trust your instincts. Over the years, we often condense many years of learning to a few simple rules. If you asked me from what peer-reviewed study I learned to value minimalist design, I would not be able to answer you — it comes from dozens of books, hundreds of articles, thousands of conversations, and countless observations, and if the accumulated wisdom of my years of experience is of no value to you, then why did you hire me?
Obviously I am not advocating that meetings should be abusive. No one should be allowed to talk over another person, as that would be disrespectful, but when one has a chance to speak, often the most effective kind of communication is one where people show how strongly they feel about an issue. If you are an experienced professional, then presumably you’ve been hired because the company wants to know the lessons you’ve learned over the years. If your instincts tell you that a given policy will be a disaster, don’t let anyone silence you with their demands for “data.” Speak the truth that you know."
This is completely on point ^. I remember those times, and I also long for a weirder, more creative and more frontier-like internet! The combination of a strong reaction to Flash, which had begun to dominate the web around 2001, and the well-intended, but simultaneous push for web standards created an insurmountable course over-correction. Then the iPhone's non-support for Flash in 2007 was the final nail in the coffin. The web was never the same. We got standards (yay), but we made it unfashionable to be really CREATIVE with code. It was no longer cool to do something totally different and unique with code. There was no longer any point in putting information on the web if it wasn't cross-browser, cross-device, and future-proof. While standards have been a boon to our profession, they completely zapped the old internet. I am hopeful the pendulum will swing the other way.
To take a simple example, HTML was originally a pure markup language, so if you wanted to make text bold you <b>would do it like this</b>; simple, declaritive
But then it was decided that there was no semantic purpose to the <b> tag, <span style="font-weight:bold">so it became this</span>.
Now, with the ubiquity of js, it's more like
<span id="bold-text">this</span> (along with something like
getElementById("bold-text").setAttribute("style", "font-weight:bold") in the background).
It should be pointed out that things come full-circle: frameworks like Bootstrap define the <strong> tag which, via similar JS to above, all-but-duplicate the functionality of the original <b> tag. I think the OP's point though is that you have to add a JS framework to do this.
What? <strong> is a tag defined in the HTML standard (with a bold default-styling in browsers). There is absolutely no need for frameworks to do anything to it, especially not with JS.
<span style=...> vs <b> vs <strong> have different semantic meaning, and all have valid uses in modern HTML.
I think this is a bit confused? <span style="font-weight:bold">bold text</span> would be appropriate for a span of text that is to be set in bold for no semantically-relevant reason, otherwise you would use something like <strong class="important">this (please read carefully!)</strong>, and then use CSS to style the "important" class as bold. The <b> tag has actually been revived, but it is reserved for a span of text that is to be clearly set apart from its surroundings for some semantic reason unrelated to emphasis, importance or anything that's covered by other HTML tags or features.
state machine/brittle long running process/fear of manual retry->idempotent request/response
Always, always, always work towards the rightmost side if you want the least side effects and highest reliability (critical for a distributed system built on unreliable parts!)
I'd like to say that declarative idempotency was an immediately obvious thing to the architects of the www, but what really happened is more like Darwinian evolution where each solution's fitness was measured by reliability. Declarative idempotency was also cheaper because requests/responses could be cached and scaled.
If we flip it around for a moment, imagine a web without these things. Every site would have a complex tangle of brittle code to do even the most trivial operations, and it wouldn't be able to pass data on to other sites (it would be an app). Without idempotency, users would have to be really careful to only click the send button once when they were transferring money (thankfully this hasn't happened much).
The one thing that I wish the web had though was a layer to make unreliable communication reliable. It would look something like a promise or future with no exceptional logic. That way we could think in terms of wiring up the inputs and outputs of many websites and then "load" it to execute the logic. Kind of like Ansible, where internally the logic is imperative but on the surface is declarative.
I'd also like to see declarative idempotence replace imperative code (especially object-oriented programming) at the developer level.
Incorrect. I was there the moment this flipped. It was actually with a bang, not a whimper.
The iPhone came out. Before the iPhone DSL was a thing, making big-ish pages was a thing.
Suddenly your pages had to be downloaded on a 2g connection. Eventually 3g, and 3g today is seen as insanity, but back then was the best we can get and still only few could get that.
We started to minify the hell out of our code. Every byte was critical. CDNs were used to speed every bit of our site up. Google came out with their research that you have ~150ms to serve content before it stops feeling instantaneous.
Boom.
Eventually tools came out to make all this so easy, why wouldn't you do it.
And thus here we are today.
I was using the internet when AltaVista was a thing. Searching was SLOW! If you wanted to find something online, grab a cup of tea, because its gonna be a while.
And ad companies like Google who have become so big that they can basically crush their competition. If you said 10 years ago that the most popular web browser right now is made by an ad company, people would have thought you're nuts but here we are. They basically control the very code that fetch and render those ads right at the end-user level.
Allowing arbitrary HTML allows hackers to use your site to impersonate login pages, using your trusted SSL certificate to make the page appear authorized in the browser header.
Allowing arbitrary content allowed hackers to exploit browsers to run arbitrary code and go wild from there with user permissions.
Allowing arbitrary HTML mixes poorly with having more than one user doing it on a page.
Allowing arbitrary content to be uploaded and served out means that if you're lucky, you'll go bankrupt serving people pirated movies, and if you're not lucky, you'll go bankrupt and to prison for serving child porn.
This is just a sample of the problems.
You have to sandbox this stuff, and the crazier the line you try to draw with the sandbox around what is safe to do, the harder it is to secure.
That's only half the answer. The real answer is that no one wants to spend the time to offer those features securely.
It's perfectly cromulent to allow users to upload CSS and html and even javascript. You just have to put a lot of effort into making it safe.
Look what we did on reddit -- we allowed users to make almost any CSS they want, and look at the beautiful creations that have come from that (like all the sports reddits). It was a lot of work figuring out how to make it safe, but we did it.
And now they're putting in a ton of effort to make it work on mobile too. Because reddit still values user creativity.
It's totally possible to allow all that creativity, it just takes time and consideration to make it safe.
> Look what we did on reddit -- we allowed users to make almost any CSS they want, and look at the beautiful creations that have come from that (like all the sports reddits).
The main reason I have a reddit account is so I can turn off custom CSS for subreddits because otherwise it's almost as garish as MySpace. When they finally eliminate the "old" reddit, I'm gone (unless they hire a competent UX person before then).
> That's only half the answer. The real answer is that no one wants to spend the time to offer those features securely.
>It's perfectly cromulent to allow users to upload CSS and html and even javascript. You just have to put a lot of effort into making it safe.
I work in an online payment company. Custom CSS is one of the features we hate the most implementing. It is very difficult to get it right and the cost of maintenance is quite high.
I actually agree with you, but on topic, I can't help but think the original author does not consider reddit "fun and weird", or the objection being made would make little sense.
Sadly yes, but they are trying really hard to make the new experience as close to custom CSS as possible while still maintaining the ability to be creative. Unfortunately it's not really a security problem as much as it is a design problem making things mobile and app friendly.
Most of these things I think are pretty easy to mitigate.
>Allowing arbitrary HTML allows hackers to use your site to impersonate login pages, using your trusted SSL certificate to make the page appear authorized in the browser header.
Make each user have their own custom virtual host (yourname.example.com).
>Allowing arbitrary content allowed hackers to exploit browsers to run arbitrary code and go wild from there with user permissions.
Arbitrary does not mean you can't sanitize it. You can specifically restrict javascript for example.
>Allowing arbitrary HTML mixes poorly with having more than one user doing it on a page.
You don't necessarily need more than one person doing it on a page. Each person can have their own page.
>Allowing arbitrary content to be uploaded and served out means that if you're lucky, you'll go bankrupt serving people pirated movies, and if you're not lucky, you'll go bankrupt and to prison for serving child porn.
You could say the same thing about Facebook. We have the safe harbor act and we have the ability to monitor these systems for misuse.
I don't know enough about MDX and JDX that Codeblog seem to allow. Where, in your opinion, does Codeblog land on the spectrum: More on the secure but boring side or on the fun and weird but dangerous side?
I never claimed the problems were hard to solve. (It's probably harder than you think, but there's off-the-shelf solutions for them now, as long as you've got a developer smart enough to reach for them, or one skilled and experienced enough to know how to build them in a pinch.)
But by the time you've solved them all, you're pretty much back to where Reddit, HN, Facebook, etc. are. I assume the author does not consider those "fun and weird".
I mean, I remember when Slashdot was having trouble with user abuse of <pre> tags. A simple <pre> tag of all things! When you scale up, you have to close all the little holes, and what's left is not "fun and weird".
You can have fun and weird. It's out there, if you look, and worst case, you can always deploy your own site and do anything you want. But you can't have fun and weird at scale.
Then you strip out interactivity. Which is a pretty huge component of making the internet interesting and weird.
For its many sins, Flash was actually a pretty great sandbox for people to play with that way (as long as it didn't have one of its many security issues at the time)
There was a period when you could use Flash to invoke a javascript: protocol link and it would be executed in the containing page! They fixed it eventually but it was a great way to escape the Flash sandbox.
The other problem that bedeviled sites that allowed arbitrary HTML back in the day was crude phishing attempts: convert your user profile into a fake login page with CSS and HTML. Blocking this entirely is probably impossible. I suppose some machine learning could be used to detect pages styled as phishing attempts.
There were also all sorts of ways to sneak JavaScript back in. I remember embedding a javascript: protocol link inside a Flash applet would do it (flash eventually blocked that though).
Pretty sure if there's no JS you could just block iframes and maybe form tags and then people would have no way to submit anything. They could click a malicious link, sure, but they can do that on today's social networks.
Then you can replace the website "chrome"- the headers, the links back to the rest of the site- with doppelgangers that take you to a phishing page that makes it look like you've been logged out. All of those you'd expect to be internal links, so when they show you a "please log in again" screen you will have no reason for suspicion. You can't do that on Facebook today.
Alternatively, you don't need a form tag. Just show a login set of text inputs and an image that looks like a submit button. That button links you to a phishing site that says "oops! try again" and then you put your password in a second time and this time it's a real form. So you'd have to get rid of text inputs entirely.
If I understand you correctly those "you are leaving example.com" interstitial pages with a redirect are a solution to this problem. Although they are not so pleasant.
Is it technically possible to completely strip out javascript but still retain full html + css compatibility? I had the impression that somebody always finds a way to outsmart any filter using UTF arcanes or some other method.
Hmm. I can't say for absolute sure, but if the root document is HTML and there are no <script> tags (or <iframe>s, I guess), I don't see how you'd get JavaScript to execute. I think those are strictly the only entry-points JS can have, and it's not like HTML or CSS could mutate the document to create one after the fact.
EDIT: I brainfarted and totally forgot about inline event handlers. Go easy on the downvotes please.
Man, this really resonates with me. I learned how to program because I wanted a website for my Halo 2 team back in late HS early college. I started with a MySpace and learned some basic HTML and CSS (a minute after I learned that making a website was not just dragging things around in MS office and saving the file as "www.my-cool-website.com"). It was ugly and it was hard. Then a friend told me he had some hosting we could use and I learned to hack together some PHP in notepad.exe with just enough MySQL to add and remove things. I used for loops and that was it. No functions or classes. One big file, similar things were copied and pasted all over. No version control, just a handful of different copies of the PHP file on my computer, and deploying was uploading via FTP. I got a bootleg version of photoshop and learned how to make fancy web 2.0 graphics, and I installed PHPBB and integrated it into our site. The forum was actually pretty successful for a hot minute (a hundred or so active users) and I learned a little bit about community management.
I do disagree that "coding is now a privilege" or at least that it's more a privilege because of the demise of MySpace. It's easier than ever to learn how to program; it just takes time and motivation. The only thing that's harder is figuring out which technologies you actually need to learn to realize your vision (because there are so many more ways of doing things than there were in 2006); however, people are also generally nicer now than in 2006 (when I would ask people for help, they often would expect me to have read certain textbooks or know C before they would send me the link on standing up a LAMP stack). The toxic bits of StackOverflow culture were just normal--if you didn't already know the answer, you didn't deserve to know it.
Anyway, that's my 5 minute stream of recollection.
Yeah, I think the issue is there's not a lot of low-hanging fruit anymore. No one hacks together some PHP scripts to create a community website anymore, they just make a Facebook group, or use Discord or whatever.
Agreed. I think it's a deficiency of imagination. If I had the time I'd reinvent wheels all day. I'd especially love to figure out how to make some of the cool open source cloud native projects feasible for use by some college kid who wants to run a distributed ecosystem on a cluster of old laptops and raspberry pis without 10 years of devops or sysadmin experience.
This is why the internet isn't fun. Because assholes write useless press releases for yet another product that's not new or interesting and disguise it as someone putting their thoughts out there.
I'd suggest that if you don't think the Internet is "fun" or "weird" you're just not looking hard enough.
I've been a regular net user since 1995 and there's every bit (in fact more) weird unusual content than there's ever been.
You want creativity, look at today's meme culture. Sure there's a lot of "hit or miss" content out there, but there's no shortage of weird.
Deviantart, tumblr, LNI on imgur, a huge section of subreddits and that's just the easily accessible stuff. If you like video content, tiktok and similar have no shortage of fairly odd stuff.
You can head off into far weirder territory than that with a little effort (*chans, or ToR based content)
Is it MySpace, I guess not, but there's nothing stopping anyone putting up flashy HTML content easily, Netlify or GH pages aren't that difficult to get started with.
Exactly, the web became less weird because it got bigger. Back then, the entire web consisted of early adopters, so obviously they were trying out whatever they could.
One “simply” needs to look for communities where this happens now. But of course, these days it's a pure game of chance and/or years-long riding on the edge to find oneself in such a community. Just like in any other saturated creative field.
So many commentators in this thread seemingly only read the title of the article, and are (somewhat rightly) decrying the increased commercialization of the Internet as one cause, without realizing that they're commenting on an article that's just a thinly veiled advertisement for a blogging product.
Also, there's no way the people here would support the monstrosity that was the average self-designed myspace page. People here complain constantly about small usability issues like scroll hijacking or overall bloat from minor animations; just imagine sites wantonly abusing things like flashing headers or an entire page full of glitter.
The author has a good thought but the wrong solution (most likely there is no solution and the public internet of the late 90s early 2000s is gone forever)
But the author (vendor?) seems to miss what was actually fun and weird about the "old days." When you screwed around with MySpace like that, you got that pleasurable frisson borne of thinking that you were doing something you weren't supposed to do -- or that you were doing something the developers of MySpace hadn't foreseen.
Creating a tightly circumscribed environment in which "glitter" is one of your built-in affordances is hardly the same thing. It's the difference between discovering rocket jumping in Doom and having rocket jumping become an intentional mechanic in Quake. The latter might still be fun, but it's no longer weird (and certainly not fun because it is weird).
The Internet is not fun and weird anymore because it was used to be a hobby. Nowadays content creators do it for the money. When you create content for your hobby you're more relaxed. You can say stupid things, make mistakes, interact with your visitors, try and build a community because relationships is all there is. The moment advertising comes into play everything has to look professional. You start asking for emails to send newsletters and you shove advertisements into the visitor's face in order to get a click. Your site becomes impersonal after a while.
I agree, along with a corresponding point, production values. Now, everyone who makes a video has to have theme music, an intro, and use specific cues. Podcasts all tend to sound the same too. Do these aspects really add anything or are they just gatekeepers about who can conform? I've seen plenty of slick videos on Youtube that have little content, while less produced videos may have way more useful content but they don't take off because they don't have support.
Maybe the slick presentations put people in a headspace, but that on its own is the start of the slippery slope of not being original because then everything has to be streamlined to those expectations, and productions aren't recognized unless they have these features.
It will probably take another leap before the internet moves past this, where presentations aren't videos with one view and one soundtrack focused on particular personality types, where text and charts aren't pictures but rather mixable data used to render arbitrary views. I guess ironically if Flash had taken over the Web in the early days we might be closer to that vision now since it was more the focus to create an interactive work rather than using a desktop application to generate a video, or the generally harder slog to create interactives in Web technologies.
It could be that few read it. But the product itself doesn't exist yet.
I think the more interesting discussion isn't about the product itself anyway. More interesting discussions would be about why have such a product and why such a product doesn't exist in high amounts like it used to.
Actually, a lot of comments show that people realised very quickly that they were being astroturfed, and only discuss the article up to the point where the product was slyly introduced.
I don't see this opinion very often, so I might just be insane, but I firmly believe that the fun was removed from the internet with the invention of NAT.
Without the ability to receive connections on your home computer, the list of "fun" things you can build is hugely reduced.
Many if not most home router/firewalls have some provision to allow you to resolve thru NAT to a server at home.
Please note that this -may- violate TOS with your ISP; most officially don't allow servers, but some turn a blind eye to it as long as you aren't hosting something nefarious or popular (and if you are hosting something popular, it's better to just bite the bullet and get actual server hosting somewhere, given how cheap and easy it is today).
A phrase that I read, and sums up my feelings went like "In the early 2000's, in the internet you went to places, but now you just go to the mall".
Many parts of the internet are weird and fun, but you gotta look for them. You need to decide to get past the over-designed mall, which is meant to capture your time to sell ads, and support your run of the mill mom-and-pop shops.
It’s commercialized, that’s it. You still have the same weird stuff, probably even with some growth but it doesn’t get visibility relative to all the commercialism.
Having been on BBSes and the internet since the mid 80s I’m as sad and nostalgic about it as anyone but you can’t turn back the clock. Instead we need to fight today’s battle—big tech company hegemony.
The internet is the great equalizer (1996). People used to believe that. Today, it sounds sarcastic.
We — the programmers, designers, product people — collectively decided that users don't deserve the right to code in everyday products. Users are too stupid. They'd break stuff. Coding is too complicated for ordinary people. Besides, we can just do the coding...so why does it matter?
As a programmer, let me say that when I've switched over to the role of user: As for our bedside manner, we programmers xxxxcould stand to improve a bit! (Not all. But on average.) Remember to treat users as people you're supposed to serve, not as an underclass that needs to be kept in line.
It stopped being a hobby, or art, and started being a platform for making money.
With the money came the scammers and other malicious actors, and so now, everything that used to be fun is also a security vulnerability. Everything even remotely interesting has to be sandboxed and sanitized, to contain the damage when someone inevitably figures out how to weaponize a toy and upload the resulting bomb to your site.
And the moneymaking parts also had to be simplified, so that users without a lot of technical knowledge could still figure out how to enter their payment information. All clicks; no command lines.
I suspect fun and weird is still out there, but their signal is drowned by the noise. You have to already know where it is to get to it. An army of fun-finders could constantly troll through the dark waters of the out-of-mainstream net, looking for new and interesting, and then recommend whatever they may find to their social networks. Otherwise, the best site you will never see might be on page 200 for the nearest search term you will ever enter that matches it--ranked well behind all the disturbing rule 34 interpretations of it.
The niche-dwellers just can't find each other easily any more. The crowd standing between them is too vast and noisy. And if you don't have a strong community already, your tentative steps into forming one can easily be annihilated by spammers advertising boner pills and 419 scams, sometimes in a language you can't understand, or someone renting a DDoS botnet just to kill your server, or any of a dozen other ways to pave over your paradise.
I am looking forward to a fully decentralized internet. I know that carries a bit of “hype” right now but I’ve been playing with it lately and I think it’s exacty what a lot of people are thirsting for. The original feeling of geocities, bbs, forums. Actual sense of community and discovery without worry.
It’s definitely too early / the projects I’ve played with have a lot of progress to go on.
Things that need to be improved for a real Dapp to exist:
1. Storage layer with encryption / p2p / access control. Allows “back-end” logic to be distributed amongst peers.
2. UX tooling that makes it extremely easy to sign in with identities and manage encryption.
3. Developer tooling to easily package app code and deploy to users.
4. Absolutely no 3rd party dependencies outside of the app itself. It must be self sustaining.
5. Open source for a true Dapp. If value is being provided at a cost of a company/dev team then monetize it by selling access to a client or data within the app. This can be done easier with wallet integrations and crypto.
1. Based on personal experience, I don't really buy the many comments here that say the web is boring bc most people are boring vs some fun geeky outlier elite. I remember IT class 20 years ago and everybody - including the most mainstream jocks if one were to stereotype - had great fun making colorful html, watching sheep walk around the windows desktop, chatting on icq, etc. Even orkut several years later was zany.
2. It is ironic that in the age of google, many responses here are lists of cool urls - almost like mini directories. reminds me of the physical Guide To The Internet (or some similar name) book we had (and which was great).
3. It is a little ironic that the OP is a rant about an uncool internet that proceeds to plug a product, which is typical of the uncool internet. I dont mean to criticize, though, bc refering to a problem and proposing a solution is legitimate. But u have to smile.
4. FWIW strongly share the feeling that the web is less fun.
5. No data, but I have a gut feel that as powerful as the big cos may be, it is not an inevitable process - just a matter of going out there and building alternatives (not that they'd necessarily be as profitable or big as the googles and facebooks) - [in my country] we've switched from icq to msn to orkut to fb to ig+whatsapp. Who is to say there won't be another 5 switches over the next 20 years?
The internet always has been (and is) whatever we make it to be.
I do really mean that - in fact, it's more accessible than ever.
For example, personally for me, it means that I can go online and access vast resources of knowledge to make myself better at my job, my business etc. It provides me with hours of entertainment - both free and paid. It also has enabled be to in touch with friends and family across the world.
For my mom, it means she gets to see videos and tv shows she had given up on decades ago (Indian tv drama - 1 ep / day, it adds up quite quickly). It also means, I can send her stuff that I know she'll find funny. She can keep in touch with her family, friends etc.
For my dad, it means he can see places online that he's never been to. He loves maps and the internet has enabled him to see detailed maps he'd never even dream of.
For others, it could a dark place of business - a place to sell drugs, or organs or others. For some it's a glimmer of hope that their stories / struggles could be put out there for the world to see and empathize.
The internet is what you make of it. For those looking for what the author mentioned - those still exist - you have to know where to look. But for the "normies" - Those that are not concerned about programming, internet etc. - it's something totally different and they've moulded what internet is for them.
This pure feeling of "let me show you what I did", with no business involved, not trying to get a job, just happy with this thing he made. Reminds me of _why as well, which I miss for some reason.
One could argue that this is simply nostalgia of a time when I would do things just for fun... I might agree.
For once I'm glad most comments here seem to ignore the article content and instead are responding to the (much more interesting) headline, because the article is really pretty terrible, and very much misses the point of what made/makes the internet "fun".
For anyone who hadn't read: it's a marketing piece for a React-based blogging platform that posits that the reason the "old" internet was fun was because websites didn't sanitize inputs, and that we can somehow bring that back by using a platform with a limited set of sanitized "fun" components...
Most of the "big websites" are now serving mainstream customers. As a result, they're not fun or weird. When the internet was younger, it was mostly early adopters creating their own culture, so it was weirder.
The great thing about the internet is that there's a bunch of stuff on it that is not in the main stream.
It's harder to FIND that stuff now because, as a percentage, it is not as prevalent, but it's definitely out there and it can be located.
If the internet were a city then yes, we'd be struggling to "Keep it weird" but since it's an ever-expanding universe there will always be weird corners and cultures, just like here on earth.
For ex. in Switzerland, almost almost all citys did forbid cheap (plastic) chairs in street restaurants.
We used to have very old cars, when we started to drive a car. Today they start with a new leased car. We could do funny things and if the car broke it was an easy fix (one door has a different color, who cares). Today if you do just a little bit something forbidden,10 people make a picture with a cellphone and send it to a newspaper.
Also just on the street, people dress much nicer than a couple of years ago, allways ready for a selfie ..
Jokes are not allowed about anything, because somebody could get a bad feeling, etc...
I think the old internet is still there. It's just buried under the new internet. There are billions of people who think it's a good idea to communicate with proprietary platforms and use SaaS. But software freedom and communities that encourage users to become producers are also flourishing -- you just have to know where to look.
The kooky internet starts on the second or third page.
Most of the main entry points for the internet have been intercepted and squatted by "big internet". Google is where you go, and the top searches are all squatted throughout the front page and the ranking algorithm biases the bigger companies.
Even the "long tail" went through a period of ad revenue extraction/industrialization. So even those corners are wrapped by crappy aggregators and SEO spammers/interceptors. If there was a dime to be made, someone has tried it.
Actually, I'm wrong about my first statement. After the big companies/adwords spenders comes all the SEO spammers.
Google stopped caring about how SEO spammers drown out small corners of the internet since all their revenue is first page results/adwords.
Your best shot for kooky stuff is finding a kooky site that is pretty good, and doing a manual walkback of the google algorithm: find other pages that link/reference that kooky page and see what non-spam links are on those pages.
Hopefully you'll find some subreddits or discussion boards or other stuff that also centers around that kookiness.
I almost think that the old categories/directory/yellowpages style that is manually maintained used to hold good results for kooky subjects. But those all got closed off.
I'd say the weirdness is still there. There is probably even more weirdness than in the old days, but these days it's dwarfed by the boring stuff.
Remember that weird stuff is only weird when you have something boring to compare it with. Did we even think of the old stuff as weird back then? I don't really remember, but I don't think so.
Today you can go to Mastodon to find funny and weird stuff. I'm having fun on there, and I really like weird stuff.
Man... fundamentally because we aren't all trying to invent things ourselves any more. We inherit so much. And it gets us to production faster, but it also locks us in on how things work.
One toaster... you can adjust all the dials, but as a result you get burnt toast. One toaster... it's locked in, but makes near-perfect toast every time (assuming you like toast that way). Which do you use?
The dialed toaster! I have one and probably had one of the funniest nights with my girlfriend being drunk and doing "burning" test with different bread, etc...I own that toaster for years and yet still burn a few slices once in a while.
A lot of people nowadays just want a streamlined experience or doesnt bother to look/experience.
I was on the internet before http - a time when nntp and gopher ruled the waves. At that time and in the decade that followed, the net was populated with geeks, nerds and people who could be considered on the edges of the distribution of societal/behavioural norms in some way. This population was responsible for the overwhelming majority of "content" - said content being published directly by the "content creators". Hence the weird and wacky world of oddball websites that the early www was comprised of. As the skew of netizens changed to reflect that of wider society, so too did the inclination/ability to self-publish content without some help, creating the demand that gave rise to Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. As for the content, its variety came to reflect that of broader society i.e. overwhelmingly vanilla, inane, mundane. The gems are still out there - just like needles in the proverbial haystack.
The internet these days is alot more accessible than it use to be. Back in the 90's you had to be more tech savy and you needed to be able to code because no one has written the software that could do that thing and there was even less documentation. Now these days, you get a web hosting account. run C-panel and install WordPress in just one click (Wix if you know even less). Heck, you don't even have to code the HTML, just select a template you like. Probably 50% of the static sites are CMS. The point is, as the software and platforms become standardized commodities where you don't have to learn anything to use it, the less innovation you will see from individuals as most people don't want to learn, they want the benefits without paying their dues.
I humbly submit that if you haven’t found fun and weird stuff on today’s Internet, you haven’t tried TikTok, or checking out subreddits outside of your bubble.
While it's true that platforms on the internet become more and more similar to each other, both in terms of functionality, lack of customizability, and design, it's not possible to allow unsanitized input anymore. There are too many ways to exploit input, not only with JS, but also with CSS, and trying to allow custom styles while preventing exploits is an arms race.
That said, social platforms not allowing users to express themselves through canvas and styles could be a matter of consistency and usability, while the myspace pages were a form of expression; they were certainly a pain to use and navigate through.
I've been saying that MySpace was the last time the internet was at all good for... years now. Of course most of it was annoying, but if you don't let people be annoying you're also restricting the range of everyone's speech. 99% of everything is crap, but if you don't allow the crap, the 1% of good stuff will evaporate, too.
Between the sanitized Facebook and the siloing of people into apps, there's fewer obvious social on-ramps to coding on the internet, especially now that so much is mediated by apps.
As annoying as MySpace tended to be, I fully appreciate what the article is getting at.
I miss the days where people who wanted to have an online presence could create a website, and it was actually a comparatively good experience.
Facebook is the defacto standard now, and you have to do things their way. Yes it is by far the easiest way for most people to share their photos and thoughts if they want their friends to see them. Unless they are twitterers or whatever.
But I really wish the internet had continued to progress as....it could have.
Because people want what they create to be seen by other people.
And today that means they have to use Instagram or Twitter. Or maybe Medium. Or something else very highly constrained.
So you see a fucktonne of creativity within the very narrow bounds of those formats: Our level of innovation when it comes to the 280-character format is through the goddamn roof.
Otherwise, the perceived effort required to create something innovating and fun/weird simply isn't worth the result. Unless you're doing it for a client.
Standards - In the early days of any technology, you have an open playing field in innervation, with this you get some quirky and diverse solutions forward. Take the early days of computing, every one was unique and today, standards give you a narrower choice. Sure, you will always have the option to innovate, but the market will be more standard and less openly receptive to such change. But to advance, you need to draw lines in the sand, and standards are just that.
So in the early days of the web, each page was unique and crafted with minimum standards and lots of opportunity to innovate. Today, much of those early layers of innovation have become templated, and the majority of what you get are just that and less quirky. But there will be exceptions, just less of them than the pioneering days, proportionally.
Not saying standards are bad, and indeed without them, we end up stuck at one point in advancement and there is that point when a line in the sand has to be drawn. Hence a focus shift from hardware towards software.
But then, anybody today looking at yesteryears solutions will call them weird, amongst other things. That's progress for you and for that, lots of small lines in the sand moving forwards tend to happen over big leaps. Though they do happen, mostly in new advancements of technology, the early days when the foundation standards are written, which we still have.
Though I'm sure in a decade or two when people have phototic processors with optical memory coils or whatever the future holds for computing. They will look back upon today's computers as...fun and weird.
It's weird to me when people bring up MySpace as a positive example.
MySpace gave people headaches. Pulling all the stops on CSS manipulation without any associated training on design, color, or style gave us precisely what we got: an often-unreadable mess that bordered on the physiologically unpleasant.
I think we have seen few recapitulations of that style of system today (in spite of the fact that the tools to allow it never vanished) because most people don't want it, end of story.
Why? Because people with bad intentions discovered its potential and took advantage. It’s the iconic example of the lament “That’s why we can’t have good things”
It's great, but won't sign up for another blogging platform because it makes it fun and weird. I've been successfully running my own blog for the past 15+ years while I've seen many blogging services come and go. Remind yourself that Medium, Blogger, Twitter will all be gone in some years from now, it's only a matter of time. Anything you self host, even a WordPress blog has higher chances of surviving.
Along with the points others have made about a more representative user base making the internet lamer, there was also a change in behavior by users within the last 10 years which I myself have undergone. Instead of going on web safaris like I used to, I eventually found a trusted shortlist of sites and aggregators which scratched my itch, and I return to those fewer sites rather than going hunting for new information like I used to. My slice of the web has shrunk, which either means the boringness of the web is my own confirmation bias, or a lot of other people are behaving the same and the web is being winnowed into a few portals rather than a constellation of sites. I tend to think I'm not alone in this.
Also just as a vignette, a classmate of mine in high school in the late 90s had a personal web site (which was very well done at the time) with a GIF of an aerial shot of our high school with a targeting crosshairs superimposed on it, and flickering red. Naturally he did not fit in, but that sort of early web freedom would get you a visit by a police officer nowadays. There are many, many more restrictions on content than there used to be.
As a student developer working for my University, I would occasionally add ASCII art to my coworker's (also students) branches in SVN as a lighthearted way to encourage code reviews. If I saw an ASCII art in the main branch, it was a poke in the ribs that they hadn't gotten it reviewed. I agree that we've lost a lot of the character that used to make things more fun.
Historically, it all went downhill with iterations of the W3C specs, particularly the strict HTML/XHTML fad. As browsers began to sloppily implement the rapidly changing specs and sometimes add their own nonstandard elements, it was no longer feasible to make single static webpages look the same for all users.
JavaScript and its potential for nasty security issues also played a major role.
I think things really changed about 2007 or so when AJAX and mobile really took off, and the web went from being document centric to being more of an application platform. That raised the barrier to entry because things did legitimately get better, but you needed specialist knowledge to do anything respectable.
I don’t think specialised markdown languages really changes anything though.
The truth is pretty much no one cares. As long as instagram still works the under 30s are happy, as long as FB still works the 30+ers are happy. As long as WhatsApp still works, most everyone outside of US is happy.
At the same time, I understand the sentiment. But who is going to bother maintaining this functionality which if done wrong exposes you to Bobby'); DROP TABLE STUDENTS
>Nobody ever talks about why this was bad for the world.
Stop just a minute there. Who says that random people copy pasting CSS and HTML they don't understand is even a good thing? Let's be clear, 99% of people don't understand that stuff, it's just copy pasting.
If you want a glitter blog, then launch a blog with that option. But letting people do it themselves just adds risk to themselves they'll never understand.
Edit: to be clear, if you said pasting <script>alert(911)</script> can be used to call the cops from your computer, then 99% of people would assume that's what it did until they tried it. 99% of people are not coders and it might as well be a foreign language they are pasting into a Google Translate to see what it means. If it happened to contain JS, well, too late. See the warnings in the FB JS console for a reminder that people are gullible and will copy paste anything they are told to.
To be fair, lots of random people (myself included) `npm install`'ing things they don't understand but seem to do the trick has generally been a good thing.
Or, at least there's been far fewer incidents of that blind trust spectacularly blowing up than the pitchfork mobs about to come after this comment might lead you to expect. Perhaps you might say that npm users at least understand the risks we take on when we do it, but I still don't think most npm users give it all that much thought...
I think you are remembering. In the blog screenshot of myspace, when it says "Javascript is not allowed", it was acting as "a sign, not a cop" [0]. Most websites were riddled with security flaws, to the point that you'll find there wasn't really any comprehensive listing of major vulnerabilities in websites because people didn't really understand that an XSS was a problem until someone actually used it in an attack. This example from 2005 shows that their security to prevent JS was sorely lacking.
I think the article has a point, but I'm not convinced the fun and weird stuff really went away. Social media probably had a pretty big impact on people losing ownership over their online presence, but often I think it's just harder to find the cool stuff.
A few years ago I attended a 60th birthday, and I was seated next to a retired biologist. He was a wonderful man, full gray unkept beard, and, the only man attending who wasn't wearing a suit. Instead he wore a striped shirt, some green work pants, suspenders and a green hat that he only reluctantly took off as his wife shot him a look. A real character, and a great conversationalist. When he found out that I worked with EDB he enthusiastically told me about his blog about the fauna of Bornholm (one of our islands). I looked it up when I got home, and it was exactly what I had expected. He obviously build it himself, without the use of any form of blogging engine or framework, and it was this really nerdy thing full of stories and pictures of the fauna of Bornholm along with his journals of discovery. Sadly I didn't keep the link, and I haven't been able to find it since.
I have another great gem though, it's the webpage of my psychologist: http://psykoweb.dk (please don't crash it). I think it certainly lives up to what the article is about, but it's actually also full of useful information and science done, found and tested in a long life of psychology. Most of the other places I follow aren't like this. They look more akin to https://www.valdemarsro.dk , but unlike the article, I don't think the uglyness was really the true value, I think it was the content, and you can certainly have that in a nice package.
I personally hope a lot more people start taking ownership, and start building their own little places on the internet and I wish it wasn't so hard to find these days. I don't think they need to look like Geocites, I really don't. But I do miss the bravery in the openness and honesty of the early internet, because that stuff was just more interesting. As I write that, I know I'm a bit of a hypocrite, because I'm completely guilty of being uninteresting myself. My main socialmedia is linkedin, and it's where I put most of my musings, and as such they're marketed to represent exactly the sort of message you'd expect to find on linkedin. They're informative, but they're also selling either myself or my points. Which is fine for linkedin, but it's also a lot less interesting than the authentic interent where things were actually fun, weird and entirely geninue.
That was a fun blog article to read because it had interactive components to it; particularly the 'Confetti me' button which I pressed more times than I should have.
Is you want fun and weird then maybe check out the sites where teenagers get creative: https://9gag.com and Reddit. Although Reddit is more serious compared to 9gag while 9gag users often just "steal" from Reddit.
I've a daughter who is now 23. Growing up she dabbled extensively in the evolving Internet - through the transitions it has made over the last 15 years. Seeing the sites and apps that she has used over those years has, as a techie, been an oustanding experience. I say "Don't trust anyone over 25 to make the Internet fun and weird".
I've not doubt that in 15 years we will look back at the current internet as tame or simplistic - like I look back at the computers I used in the early 80s. We might still be carrying "smartphones" but I doubt it.
Lastly, I am more concerned about us users controlling the internet than I am about it being fun or weird.
My jam used to be to go to alta vista or hotbot and search "weird shit" and see what came up. Boy howdy...but nowadays I can agree with a lot of the comments. It is about monetization (thanks Mitch) and the user base. Also the rise of what I will call super social sites like Reddit, FaceBook, etc. Allowing users to tailor their content into a funneled feed, where before you had to search for it. Literally. Then bookmark it/rss feed, hopes it stays up. Save some websites/data to a zip drive.... ohhh I did, I did. <3 me some iomega zips. Thanks for a walk down internet history lane. Enjoyed it!
Appreciate the point, and that ads ruin everything. But get away from the endless promotion of 'big name' sites and there is still a lot of fun&weird going on on the net.
Just one example: 'Tumbler' isn't mentioned a lot anymore. But fun abides.
It's not hard to get caught up in the big names, all echo'd by all the wannabees. It's a lot like the rest of mainstream culture. Fun's in the subcultures. As true now as all thru the rock era.
EDIT: Wanna try a fun experiment? Limit all profitable enterprises (including advertising) to one or two domains, say .com or .biz . Watch what happens to those over time.
It targeted a community of musicians in a moment when indie music on the web was blowing up. It also allowed those naturally creative people to style their profiles. And then it brought the fans and everyone else.
It would not be a stretch to say that, had myspace not existed, I wouldn't have played in 2 music bands in my teens. And I also started programming there! Even though I didn't know I was programming.
I just wish I knew about archive.org back then to keep my profile somewhere with my cool hair and horrible design xD
I think the question maybe is why users in social media spaces can't .... be more creative?
I used to use Geocities and yeah the internet and HTML were sort of synonymous. As users my friends and I all had pages we'd do things on and show each other.
I suspect the issue is that long term that doesn't bring in users who DO NOT want to do that and thus your user base is limited, and once you make a place that does appeal to the folks who don't want to dip their toes in code.... you just stick everyone there.
...and no, it all wasn't able to be saved - but a massive amount was managed to be preserved (it used to be available as a torrent - assuming it is still being seeded, you might be able to download a copy if you really want it - but it ain't small).
I think the answer is sturgeon's law essentially. Even by the standards of social media freeform customization degrades consistency. Most people aren't good at it or interested in learning it for its own sake.
Essentially with mass adoption it got increasingly lowest common denominator.
Geocities really wasn't "social media", though. The closest thing at the time would have been PHPBB forums or the like, and customization with those tended to be limited.
I think there just isn't much of a desire among most people to be "creative" with their layouts. Most people use social media like an appliance, they care about the networking and communication and are satisfied as long as that works.
It certainly isn't social media as we describe it now.
It is though a good example of "fun and weird" and a little sad it was left out as social media grew. I get why, but still feels like that character missing is a loss of some kind.
I don't doubt it, but as it was a given user's space that was bad as far as navigation or such ... so what? Kinda like the dumpy diner people go to because it is cheap and has that atmosphere they're looking for. Maybe the table wiggles and it's not a great spot, but that's what it is.
If you're talking about security issues, I get that, valid concern. I've got no good answer for it.
I do think there is a loss, that there isn't that personality.
I hope that my explorable explanation on neural nets will be a bit more fun and weird [1]. It is still very much in the early drafting phase but I already have cats! Neural nets shouldn't be scary, they should be fun.
I will do a more formal submission once I'm done.
If anyone has an idea how I can make it more fun and weird, please let me know!
I watched a 45 minute video "Web Development In 2019 - A Practical Guide"
Its him just listing off upto date technologies you need to learn to call your self full stack in 2019 for 45 minute.
It's really ridiculous, how complicated web development is.
The technology is broken. No one wants to admit it. They just keep building on top of a rotten core.
People keep bringing up existing "weird" websites as a sort of proof that life on the web is as fun and weird as ever. What's really missing on the web is a sense of raw discovery and wonder. I can't recall the last time the web really surprised me. We're so connected we stopped changing. I had no idea what today's web might have looked like back in 1997. Tomorrow's web feels a lot easier to predict.
The internet is great. The absolute best. It is or can be the superset of everything else. All of everything is just a post, one upload away from being part of internet.
I'm sure the top 1 or 80% is cheap but that is always the case. Pop stuff is lowest comm denominator. The interest, the unique, the original is in tiny niches. And that is where internet shines. Niches are cheap to publish and have frictionless audience of the world.
Because the majority of people are not fun and weird. Every fringe thing that becomes mainstream inevitably drifts toward the mean in one way or another.
It seems to be a phase. Things are fun and weird when they are new and fresh. Remember early Facebook and Stack Overflow?
After a while, they attract more serious types and evolve to be more... well dressed. When people start to put Stack Overflow and Facebook branding on their resume, they start to take it real seriously.
I completely agree with the author and love the idea, however I'm more of a Vue guy. The system the author is describing already exists for Vue.js, it's called VuePress[0]. I think it's amazing, not only for docs but also for blogs, portfolios, etc.
Shameless plug but for an example you can check out how it's used in one of the tutorials about VuePress I'm writing.
This link will take you to a Vue component used inside a markdown file:
A few years ago, I saw @r0ml touch on this in his linux.conf.au keynote. It had some really interesting ideas around how software could be democratized.
I suffer from a strange sexual fetish and I will not soon forget the feelings I had in the 90s when I realized I wasn’t the only one.
It was a surreal feeling to know that not only was I not alone I wasn’t the weirdest person anymore. Some were much more into it and much weirder than I was.
I think the reason the internet isn't as fun and weird as it used to be is that it's now Important and it's been weaponized by powerful interests in pursuit of political ends. It's just non-stop ideological warfare, which is both stressful and boring.
And these are just fun nerdy tech sites — there is something fun or weird for every walk of life.
It's easy to get nostalgic about the internet of old (and I appreciate the OP is writing to promote their own neat creative coding/blogging playground), but the premise that the Internet is no longer as fun somehow because you can't inject crazy JavaScript into your Facebook pages seems misguided.
Outside of those strictly controlled communities, it has never been easier to join a group of people who like to make and break weird shit online.
The internet isn't fun and weird because you don't actively seek it out. You're content with what you're given and what everyone else uses and put no effort into getting what you want because you can't bring yourself to care enough for it.
It's pretty simple: The Internet is mainstream now. The original users of the Internet were academics, techies, and nerds. Now everyone and their mother, literally, is online.
Do you remember Wired magazine in the 90's? It was wayyyy weirder... How about Mondo 2000?
Want weird internet? My friends made http://newhive.com a while back, and that site is as weird internet as it gets, with glitter, gifs, code, and anything your heart might desire.
1. the widget has a secret toggling hotspot that is only discovered when the user clicks the circle and observes that the action failed to toggle the widget.
2. widget looks like it should behave like a mobile widget (where touching any part of the widget will trigger a toggle) but behaves differently
3. dragging the little circle to the other side of the widget generates a dragging animation, but does not update the toggle. Instead, upon releasing the pointer the little circle will animate back to its original position, defeating the user's expectations.
4. attempting to drag the circle past its own widget boundaries will fail to drag the circle to that distance. However, it will succeed in toggling the widget! So the obvious analogic behavior in #3 fails to trigger the desired widget behavior, where this fantasy-world interaction does (e.g., like sliding a penny with one's finger past the edge of a borderless table to get the penny to stop right at the edge, yet moving the penny right to the edge will cause it to travel back to its original position).
5. the cursor icon changes from the "move" icon to some other icon when attempting to drag outside the widget bounds. But remember that #4 requires a drag to the outside of the bounds to trigger the toggle. This means that the user is likely to see the wrong cursor icon the moment before a successful toggle event occurs. I.e., "cursor change to reflect a concern other than this widget" likely means "this widget is about to do its thing!"
I'd like to suggest the following additional feature to the Dark Mode Toggle:
* when user drags the toggle with the pointer outside the bounds of the widget and then releases, immediately show a dialog that reads: "Ok to Cancel Toggle? [Ok] [Cancel]"
So this is an ad for the author's publishing tool "codeblog"? Worst, when you click on the link in the article, it only has a form to put your email in. I have no idea what this tool does or what it's used for.
There's plenty of weirdness to be found. The *chan websites, for a start- the more obscure, the more idiosyncratic and possibly pure.
Trawling through IRC channels is mysterious experience for me.
What little is left of news servers can also be interesting to troll thru - but there's more noise than anything out there on those today, so it can be frustrating at best.
There are also small pockets of gopherspace if you dare to look for 'em.
For more "mainstream", you can also still find old-school style ANSI BBS systems (I know, redundancy) on certain IP addresses; most are simple hobby projects, or focused on certain niche things (retro computing, for instance).
Why isn't there a new social networking site using the old myspace layout as their template where you can just choose your theme song, your top friends, post weird stuff and have it just be fun?
When this is used to create a worm of some kind that puts obscene pictures in emails to people's mothers...it will then make more sense why people stopped taking code in inputs.
One of my favorite sites of all time is searchlores.org I still visit it sometimes. I'd say it qualifies as fun and probably a little weird as well. RIP Francesco.
it used to be. Then the internet became a product. It became a storefront, and home to the advertising apocalypse that will probably wind up being the catalyst for the downfall of the human species.
there's still funny/weird shit out there, but you have to dig pretty deep, sift through the ads, copypasta, and general crap content to find it... eventually it'll all be banned/deleted for some reason or another.
it had its balls cut off. What made it edgy and fun was removed as it was promoted to normal people who just wanted to read movie listings, or whatever.
Well, I sort of agree with that, and I was with you until you used the term. But I don’t see anything less masculine about the internet now than as it was in 1993. Perhaps “sanitized” would be more applicable?
sure, I agree the term definitely has a masculinity implication. but, I actually think the term is roughly correct given that at the time, the net was 95% male while now it's much closer to 50-50.
Understood. And I MUDded with some women. Am I disappointed that the net is less masculine? Not particularly. I certainly felt more welcome, and more comfortable with the net before when it was a more masculine environment, and in some sense I miss that. But I'm not the deciding user, and as a parent with kids... my feelings are complicated.
I blame the death of Flash. Flash let a whole bunch of people make stuff who can't now. Artists, kids, people just dicking around. You could make something fun in a day and it didn't even need testing. Now you need to code properly and use git and libraries. A vast swathe of fun people have been cut off from making weird shit.
Hmm not sure on this - if I recall correctly, you needed super-expensive Adobe software to make Flash applications (or were they called "animations"?) which I am guessing most people did not have - IIRC the price of the software was several hundred GBP (£200+) in a time when a mid-range desktop PC was like £600-800. I think it also only ran on Windows and Mac OS? Its all half-forgotten memories no though so those figures may be incorrect.
HTML, Javascript and CSS is free and openly available in any browser on open source OSes as well as Windows & OSX these days. You can still make some weird stuff on the web platform if you want to, although I would agree that there are not nice WYSIWYG editors (that I am aware of anyway) that makes this easy.
> It was a beautiful mess. As the internet grew up, consumer products stopped trusting their users, and the internet lost its soul.
I think that's the wrong assumption to make - we figured out the language of the internet, and developed a design methodology that worked, though it continues to evolve.
Corporate takeover, and censorship as the Internet becomes commercialized. Takeover of payment systems that can ban anyone's account for political reasons.
It brought on the neoliberal trolls on 4Chan and Reddit. In some areas anyway.
The Internet is like working a job now, all fun is blocked by management.
idk bro, I think you're hanging out in the wrong parts of the internet. the weirdness and funnest is out there. the internet is global, you sure you looking in all the right places?
Great post. I started reading it thinking it was just a nice nostalgic rant. Then he goes all twist ending and announces he actually did something about it. Bravo.
I thought about this as well. The internet was very fun and very weird from the late nineties to 2012 or so. Then something changed and it became very boring, very stale and very censored.
Then corporations, journalists and politics happened. Now those with the megaphones complain day and night about anything and everything they disagree with and demand everything be censored. Every day there is a new list of words you can't stay, sites you can't visit or content that is going to be filtered.
Somehow, the most annoying and prudish people were given the role of internet hall monitor and we are suffering for it.
I think we are in a funk part where there are now so many people and so much info available it kind of washes everything out with no personal touch. The natural response to this will be to form ever and ever more specific communities.
I had an idea for social site. You can only belong to a single group of traditional common evolutionary size, say 30-50 people. All these groups self organize and people can leave or be voted in/out. The groups form goals and plans to get stuff done, like testing recipes or anything they have fun doing. Groups could communicate if they wanted, and based on the abilities of each group you'd form these abstract chains of interdisciplinary volunteerism. Inter group communication would be more meaningful as each communication could represent the knowledge of the entire group.
Our brains are pretty much designed for a close knit group of that size. Our current way of living is kind of nuts. By keeping the group to a size that the mind can actually grasp and form relationships within I think is the powerful part. A lot of people are living lives now where that might add serious long term value with meaningful relationships, as well as crazy efficiency on hobbies.
Because it is more dangerous. When the internet was treated as just images on a screen that one could turn off, it wasn't taken seriously and people weren't afraid to put up stuff on textfiles. Now some trash people would dox you and it is easy because your entire personal network is ubiquitously connected. So all it takes is persistence from a malicious actor and they will have a lot of influence on your real life.
This still exists you just have to dig quite deeply for it. I created https://ratwires.space (NSFW) specifically to try and bring back some of the things that made the internet weird and wonderful when I was growing up but within a more modern framework rather than simply trying to make another GeoCities clone.
in an era where the internet is controlled by a handful of internet monopoly businesses and where any fun can easily be seen as offense by someone somewhere, then fun has to disappear or relabeled to not hurt businesses sole raison d'etre which is profit. It's not 2007 anymore, sadly.
But yeah, a lot of custom MySpace pages were just terrible. A friend of mine set the background to his to a snowy forest and set the foreground text to white, making it basically unreadable. He tried to defend it by pointing out that if you highlight the text, it becomes readable. I tried to show him that if he really wanted that image as a background, he should spend two seconds in Photoshop to lighten the image so he can put black text over it and keep it readable, but he just went off about how much he prefers white text.
I made pocket change in high school by debugging IE CSS issues for strangers on the internet, which was absolutely fun and occasionally also quite weird :)
Why does it need to be all-or-nothing? There wasn't anything about MySpace that hinged on browser incompatibilities. We can try to bring back the parts of the old Internet that were cool and fun without bringing back all the baggage too.
The web of 2006 was fun, but to be honest, I find the modern web to be even more fun.
I mean, if we want to take off the rose tinted glasses and look at it honestly, disregarding the homogeneity of modern frameworked layouts versus a Geocities page with a fire background and crimson Morpheus text, the quality and variety of content is much better on the modern web than the old, as is the availability of media and depth of interaction that social media, for all its negatives, provides.
I feel like what the modern web may lack in style, it gains (and surpasses the old web) in substance. And I think that's a fair trade.
https://pouet.net is the unofficial home of the demoscene, even though it's much weirder than the demoscene itself.
https://dwitter.net needs no comment
Stack Overflow has answers like: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454
Half of tumblr is totally out there.
I personally wouldn't call 4chan and its relatives fun, but they sure are weird.
There's dedicated, active, shitty phpbb forums for every single weird sexual fetish you can imagine.
And that's just the fun and weird patches of the internet that I happen to know about. There must be 3 orders of magnitude more. I'd wager that if you think the internet isn't fun and weird anymore, then you're just looking in the wrong places. The problem is with you and not the internet.