"...the top 100 Digg users are responsible for more than half of the content that reaches the Digg front page. Furthermore, there could be as few as 20 'superusers' who are responsible for submitting 25 per cent of Digg's front-page stories. If you do the maths, you'll realise that anyone could set up a company with that many employees and have a far more interesting and diverse front page... "
> A bunch of the early internet brands are being rebranded/relaunched
More like recycled to lend credence to dubious grifts and tangential services. Digg is all-in on AI; Napster is another paid music streaming service; Limewire is another file locker and an AI cryptocurrency¹; GeoCities I’m not aware of a revival.
> which is collectively is being branded as the nostalgic internet.
Nothing about that is nostalgic or remotely related to the old internet. The names are the same and some founders may have returned, but the values and technologies are entirely different.
¹ Whatever that even means in practice. Double-dip on a pile-on of grifts, can never have too many hyped technologies!
Besides GeoCities - the rest are being relaunched by SV VCs and PE groups.
Napster was acquired and relaunched in crypto a few years ago and just resold for $100M+ to a metaverse company immediately following a new raise at a $1B+ valuation.
So yeah it’s acquiring historic IP by VC/PE to resell to friends that are using someone else’s funds. Considering the .com boom and era of publicly traded big tech giving golden parachutes to friends (buying their companies and shutting them down) - it’s very nostalgic.
Napster is so old that I remember its DMCA-compliant reboot from 20 years ago. My college gave students free access to it, all the music was a DRM'd WMA file. Most people who used it also downloaded a DRM-removal program to be able to put it on shared drives and MP3 players.
"Alexis on board" has about as much value as saying "Richard Branson is an investor". The difference in their goals now vs when they were young and hungry is in orders of magnitude. They are old, out of touch and spread too thin to do anything noteworthy in rebooting an old brand. They're lending their name for credibility, in exchange for equity and board seats.
I only knew it through the lens of it being a (good natured) punching bag of somethingawful.com. Today it's still up and being updated regularly, while somethingawful hasn't had a new article in half a decade+.
Something Awful is also missing from this history. Maybe too niche? Though for geeks and gamers it was well known, and (checks Wikipedia) it was launched on 1999...
It was certainly a notable part of the internet culture of the era.
I think it might not be well-known how much of current internet culture cascaded out from the hive that was the SA forums. 4chan was started by an SA goon, as was bellingcat, for example.
Fark feels like the echo of a dream these days. It's like the Friendster of news aggregators; it came on the scene first, set the tone for everything that followed, then faded from memory.
The ability to describe a language with useful and concise rules make a language easier to understand and learn. I think this serves as a perfectly reasonable metric for how "crazy" or consistent a natural language is. What other definition of consistency would matter to anyone?
And a few nits, because I'm personally sick of others coming up with their own contrived definitions of intelligence. All of which, unsurprisingly of course, also claim to be hyper intelligent. I wouldn't expect to have to explain any of the following to a polymath.
- The ability to consume information (or the accumulated volume of information), even with perfect recall, is by no means a direct measure of intelligence -- large performant databases of useful information are by no means intelligent. And it's clear that you at least partially believe this, given your comments on the ability for others to "catch up". As if intelligence is something that can be measured linearaly to begin with (though, of course we try to approximate it). Does the path to catching up have to be linear wrt. time, or even continuous? No. The simplest counter-example being, maybe you've been reading garbage.
- 3rd gear gives higher velocity than 1st gear, and the RPMs can be redlined in either case. Or maybe the measure is the potential of acceleration from stop, I don't know, but either way, this doesn't make sense. As a polymath I suppose your knowledge of transmissions must be a bit lacking.
- I don't think people generally have a problem believing that people "like you" (polymaths) exist. It's more likely that people have a problem with you specifically claiming to be a polymath.
- You must have repeatedly attempted to convey this belief of yourself. In this post, for one, but, moreso to the point of being _sick_ of people not believing people "like you" exist.
Produce useful work, and nobody cares about whether you played by the rules of society.
If you cannot effectively convey information to others, then, I'm not sure you are a polymath. This skill is the same skill that you should already be using to consume and comprehend information to begin with, so it should be second nature to you.
And, go ahead and go through life thinking "I am a polymath, but, I feel no need to prove it either directly or indirectly through the work that I do." If that's the path that you take, then, enjoy being completely indiscernible from everyone else, and thus effectively lying to yourself to feel special. Because you can not even trust your own perception of yourself except through the work that you do -- this is the litmus test that avoids large swaths of cognitive bias if you can pass it.
You need to produce work that others can evaluate to earn you the title of "polymath" -- otherwise you are not.
It's too easy to self-proclaim titles, and to others, naturally, entertaining statements like these are a waste of time.
All that anyone can gain from your comment are the claims that you consume a lot of information, and that you can recall said information. And that you're good at math despite others not knowing it. But, that says nothing about the ability to use said information usefully. Maybe another person consumes 10% of the total information that you do, but, they select this information more carefully, and can produce insights more effectively than you. This is at least in part the difference between fluid and crystalized intelligence.
Maybe a person that consumes 10% of the information that you do is in fact a polymath, but you are not.
Not that I really care to prove that you specifically are or are not a polymath, because, the designation is meaningless, anyway. This designation never meant anything to those that society has retroactively identified as polymaths, either.
