I clicked on this thread to type that exact thing, holy smokes.
You're referring to Hooli's streaming of UFC fight that goes awry and Gavin Belson totally loses it, lol. Great scene and totally relevant to what's happening with Netflix rn.
Commercialization and infiltration of advertising-dollars-seeking "influencers" ruins social media sites.
I miss the early days of the internet (and especially YouTube) so fucking much. I'm 28 now, and I've been online since 2009. I think 2009-2014 was the GOLDEN AGE of the internet for me, especially on YouTube.
Wikipedia didn't exist. It was possible to run out of websites to visit. People were, in general, super friendly, aside from the trolls on AIM trying to crash other people's clients. (IRC was a separate place though, I mostly spent time on websites.)
Forums had horrible UIs, the latency was awful. Compared to dial up BBSs that came before the user experience was much worse.
Everything was authentic. People just doing stuff, posting about what they loved. Uploading art they made and photos they took. The barrier to entry was high (you needed to own a scanner and be able to figure out how to set it up!), but not so high that determined non-technical users couldn't muddle through and still make great things.
Same. For me, usenet was "social media", long before social media was a thing. I remember in college hanging out in a newsgroup for people looking for a pen pal, and later exchanging letters with someone on the other side of the country whom I never met in person.
Pretty crude by today's standards, but also a lot more genuine and less risky. At that time there were a lot of people on the internet like me, college kids discovering it for the first time.
I've been on the Internet since 1999, and I feel a strong sense of nostalgia for those early years. For me, the period from 1999 to 2010 was the "golden age" of the Internet. It was a time of exploration, creativity, and genuine connection. I imagine that people who joined even earlier might feel a similar nostalgia for their own era on the web.
I also wrote about my experiences and why I consider this time the golden age in a blog post here: <https://susam.net/web-golden.html>.
Yeah, the ubiquity of smartphones and the rise of Facebook and Instagram (post-acquisition) as an open platform for advertisers versus mostly for early adopters/enthusiasts really killed the "fun" of the internet.
Also, I remember how many different frameworks and "rich internet application" technologies existed back then (Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Apple QuickTime, etc.). In many ways, the internet was a much more diverse and a much more 'unpredictable' place back then.
Yeah, I'm of the same vintage. Never really felt eternal september impacted the newsgroups I frequented as they didn't appeal to AOLers, and felt it was exaggerated. But it feels real now with engagement metric following content creators and influencers, and the way platforms enable it now.
I'm a couple of years older, and I generally agree with you. But even up until 2016 it was generally tolerable. There was a point in time when every single social media changed from "you and your friends" to "you and the world". Which opened the hellscape of influencer and branding world. I'm not sure what exactly accelerated it - Facebook/IG going algo-view first, TikTok starting to get traction even when it was just a dancing app, or the entire A/B science. Oh well...
What happened right around 2016 was a combination of the internet being weaponized in the political space and the destruction of of revenue for legacy media because of Facebook and Google and other walled systems which ingested their IP and served it to their users. This effectively made people paranoid of data that didn't immediately fit into their world view because the concept of any shared truth was shattered and at the same time it felt like everything and everyone on the internet was targeted to misinform you.
The 'mainstream media' was never taken seriously by people savvy in the early tech spaces, so the loss of it didn't really hit us as particularly impactful. But that loss made it so that the 'mainstream' no longer had any 'ground truth' they could all fall back on that would be the arbiter of correct and incorrect information, and so truth became whatever felt most right to a person at the time.
This of course has more to do with the people and culture you most identify with, rather than any kind of objective comparison of data, so groups looked more inwards and became ossified in dogma and refused to look at any other perspective in good faith. And here we are.
IMO we need to move past the follower/following model on social media.
Having followers is the best way to get followers, which creates a fame snowball.
The result is that a few uploads get a bunch of attention, and most uploads get very little attention. The typical user feels lonely, isolated, neglected. Jealously means the attention-rich users, the ones with lots of followers, become targets for bullies -- and that leaves them miserable too. No one is happy.
Platforms with a more equal distribution of attention, such as IRC, didn't have these problems.
It's a Geocities archive containing websites hosted on the platform from the 90s/00s. I really like the creativity and authenticity in the archived sites, it's like looking at a mirror into the past.
For me it was 2003 to 2010. I said this multiple times, and it is that I'm working on a essay about qhy Internet was more enjoyable back then.
But sometimes I think the only reason (or the main reason) is that I was a teenager. It isn't about internet, it is about the user and how they saw the worldwide at that time...
"Even while recording these demos, we encountered some amusing moments. In one, Claude accidentally stopped a long-running screen recording, causing all footage to be lost.
Later, Claude took a break from our coding demo and began to peruse photos of Yellowstone National Park."
Maybe they should’ve asked Claude to generate a better name.
Very dangerous to live in your own hyper focused bubble while trying to build a mass market product.
What has been -- in your personal experience as well as in the experience of some of your lawyer colleagues -- some of the 'hardest' cases wrt employment authorization for US-based startups and YC? And why?
Also, how are you anticipating the immigration landscape to change especially if President Donald Trump returns to the White House in January 2025? I'm asking this in the context of the 2017-2021 Trump administration's massive clampdown on Specialty Occupation visas through executive orders. [0]
Those who are in YC and who previously were in YC almost always can get work authorization, whether it's an O-1, E-2, H-1B, or country-specific visa. Relatively speaking, the harder cases are those involving those who don't have at least a bachelor's degree. While lots of experience sometimes can fix this, not always, which means that an O-1 visa is usually the only option. Regarding the impact of a change in administration, I just touched on this in response to another question/comment.
My thoughts precisely. I wish there was a service that could convert book-length webpages into neatly formatted ePUB document. I did find a 'converter', [0] but the service has tons of room for improvement.
The website has a single HTML page version, I downloaded it using SingleFile extension on Firefox and sent it to my Kindle using Caliber after converting it to AZW3. The result is great!
Breaks my heart. Grew up reading AnandTech in the early 2010s for all things hardware -- processor releases, updates to the DDR SDRAM standard, motherboard and NAND flash reviews.
The era of unbiased, objective and deeply technical journalism is dying out. Sad.
You're referring to Hooli's streaming of UFC fight that goes awry and Gavin Belson totally loses it, lol. Great scene and totally relevant to what's happening with Netflix rn.
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