16 ms·

Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

398 points by alanfranz 9y ago

sergiotapia 9y ago
Medium is quickly becoming the central place for programming articles, and it's ridiculous they don't offer an API. Check it out: https://github.com/Medium/medium-api-docs/issues/91 https://github.com/Medium/medium-api-docs/issues/91 More of these website are just becoming data silos and not sharing their data. Unfortunately I don't know of a better place to write programming content. https://sergiotapia.me https://sergiotapia.me If you're a developer and you care about this, like I do, where would you recommend we write articles sans-self hosting?
- swiley 9y ago
  You could just push your stuff to github.io...
  - rmc 9y ago
    Or on your own website. Get your own domain! Host some static files!
- gkya 9y ago
  > Medium is quickly becoming the central place for programming articles How? There are many programmers on medium, maybe. But it's a website I categorically avoid (too big and clunky, and hardly ever any quality content found there), and yet I can follow many programming blogs.
makecheck 9y ago
Frankly I think what is missing is an understanding of statistics. Even having “1000 friends”, which sounds amazing, is statistically insignificant when we are talking about populations of millions or billions. Think about the last “really long thread” you read on Reddit or something, and think about when you tuned out: was it a few dozen comments, maybe a few hundred? Still statistically insignificant, or at the very least severely biased. People are regularly exposed to, and worse respond to, statistically biased samples. This is a really, really bad thing. What we need is a way to almost forcibly blend samples from many different populations so that the number of comments you can “stand” is a more representative sample. That way, when you get up in arms about “what people think”, it might actually represent what “people” think instead of “my friends” or whatever other biased sample is out there.
- incompatible 9y ago
  I'd like to see better moderation systems. Moderation done by people who are actually good at it rather than just upvoting or downvoting comments depending on whether they agree with them or not (moderating the moderators). Ways to mark comments as duplicates so they are all grouped into one bundle. A way to avoid the "first posts" effect, where the earlier posts are likely to be the highest rated regardless of their merits. Aggregators like Hacker News are already part of a solution; putting interesting articles in one place so that we don't have to subscribe to 10^8 personal blogs and fringe tech sites.
  - ben_jones 9y ago
    Begs the question: what are the best moderation systems in software? Are there any?
    - jalfresi 9y ago
      I always thought slashdot had a pretty good moderation system. Would in most cases separate the wheat from the chaff leading to excellent comment threads
      - givemefive 9y ago
        Yeah meta-moderation, limited mod points and a secret algorithm for earning mod points based on reputation works pretty well. Oh.. and a maximum score for comments.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- Mathnerd314 9y ago
  The Twitter status sample (https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/reference/get/statuses/sample https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/reference/get/statuses/sam...) is a reasonably unbiased sample (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.5204.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.5204.pdf). You'd have to learn 6 or 7 languages to really follow it, but there are some ways to filter it to English-only. Also useful is https://www.reddit.com/r/all/top/?sort=top&t=day https://www.reddit.com/r/all/top/?sort=top&t=day, a bit US/tech-biased but definitely a few million.
znpy 9y ago
If anyone is wondering, Usenet is still alive.
- interfixus 9y ago
  Well, at least it's sort of not dead.
  - zafiro17 9y ago
    I just reposted this article to comp.misc, where we've been keeping up a parallel discussion for years. Usenet doesn't have the sheer numbers it used to, but anyone still there is there because we love it. Usenet's flaws remain unmended, but its strengths remain unfettered. :)
    - z1mm32m4n 9y ago
      Out of curiosity (as someone who never had the chance to see Usenet at its prime), what are Usenets strengths and weaknesses?
      - Jaruzel 9y ago
        Strengths: Totally de-centralised - your post on your local NNTP server, and it gets replicated across the NNTP mesh to all the other servers. Built in threading... Actually HN is very similar to how a fairly busy newsgroup would look back in the day. Weaknesses: Posts used to take hours (sometimes days) to replicate across the whole mesh. Not so much nowadays tho. Text only; no native support for rich media or Unicode (although some might see that as a Strength)
    - Jaruzel 9y ago
      I lurk on comp.misc via Google groups RSS feed: https://groups.google.com/forum/feed/comp.misc/topics/rss.xml?num=100 https://groups.google.com/forum/feed/comp.misc/topics/rss.xm... I'm on the hunt for a good dedicated Windows NNTP reader, failing that I might have a go at writing my own (that supports text posts only - none of that dodgy binaries rubbish!).
kraftman 9y ago
I'm going to write a chat app built on IRC that gradually uses more and more RAM, and adds new features while breaking old ones. Just as it has everything MSN used to have ill have it shut down, rename itself and its website and start all over again.
- ben_jones 9y ago
  Ping me. I'm really excited about this.
  - shakna 9y ago
    Pong
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- bigiain 9y ago
  So Slack then?
- jon_richards 9y ago
  Don't forget to make it struggle to scroll text at some point in the cycle.
- fapjacks 9y ago
  Make sure you get people excited about a standard and then shit all over it to keep competitor clients from accessing your network.
- lightedman 9y ago
  So, Discord?
clishem 9y ago
> Once was IRC Seriously?
- flashman 9y ago
  OP's Italian, go easy.
- gardnr 9y ago
  How old are you?
- alanfranzoni 9y ago
  Uuh, despite the enormous attention, the article was written in just about an hour, and I'm not a native English speaker; that error slipped through the cracks. Thanks for pointing it out.
  - clishem 9y ago
    I was very tired when I wrote that, my apologies. What I meant was that IRC is still alive and kicking.
edgartaor 9y ago
What do you think about Reddit? Topics are enforced and have an API.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- RUTHLESS_RUFUS 9y ago
  Same problem as Twitter/Facebook: little to no barrier to entry, endless bots and politically motivated low-value posters.
- btym 9y ago
  The same thing happens to every subreddit. It's good, people like it, it grows very large, the quality of submissions goes down (or the same content gets reposted constantly). People are incentivized by their visible "karma" score to post mass amounts of low-effort content.
  - zeta0134 9y ago
    I feel like Hacker News is one of the only online communities I've participated in where the score is handled appropriately. It's a good personal measure of how well my posts and comments were received by the community, but it's not bragging rights. No one else can see my vote tallies here, so I have no real incentive to increase it. I've seen this affect sites like Stack Overflow as well. At the bottom of any popular question are usually very low-effort answers from posters who really shouldn't have answered at all. I wonder if it's an example of their otherwise well-executed reputation system creating noise that might have been avoided.
    - jalfresi 9y ago
      Out of curiosity, does any one know of any research or articles into reputation systems in general?
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
chongli 9y ago
With all due respect, what changed since the 56k days (which I remember fondly as well) is that people showed up. Before that, the only users on the internet were early adopters. It's unreasonable to expect 'those people' to go away.
- plaguuuuuu 9y ago
  The Internet is decentralized. It doesn't matter that all the 13 year olds are congregating on Club Penguin or whatever; we can set up our own communities. That's why HN is great (and other small communities). It's intrinsically hostile to the wider internet simply by virtue of the subject and the format of its content.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - chongli 9y ago
    The issue is when the unwanted folks follow the cool kids around. This happens a lot on Reddit. People will make a subreddit with the type of community they want. Others will join. Eventually people will complain that the quality has deteriorated. Then the cool kids will start a new one and migrate there. Rinse. Repeat... ad infinitum. Edit: I don't know if there's a general name for this phenomenon, but I believe it is related to network decay. [0] [0] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - gavinpc 9y ago
      The name I've heard for this is "Eternal September": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
      - chongli 9y ago
netsharc 9y ago
Great point about Twitter and FB not having the "I've seen this" flag (although they probably have this info for their "engagement metrics"), it keeps people addicted and returning. I remember being glued to Twitter during the Mumbai terror attack, but the way it was designed, it was an endless stream of the same info, repeated. And spam, since bots add trending hashtags to their junk messages. I guess it's like cable news' rolling coverage, but instead of the same info repeated every hour, we can now read the same thing every second...
- vosper 9y ago
  With Facebook I scroll down until I see something I've seen before, then I stop. Doesn't seem very hard, and I imagine its what most people do. If I want to revisit older things then I keep scrolling, but that's almost never the case.
  - M2Ys4U 9y ago
    I used to do this with Twitter, but that's impossible these days.
    - SyneRyder 9y ago
      Still possible with Twitter if you use a 3rd party app, like Tweetbot on Mac / iOS and Fenix on Android. I don't think it's possible on the website or official app (and if I was forced to use Twitter as currently designed, I think I'd give up on it).
    - pjc50 9y ago
      Still works for me - you occasionally have to decline "things you may have missed", but they come as a lump and the chronological order is preserved.
  - Terribledactyl 9y ago
    I was under the impression that each scroll through Facebook could show different content in arbitrary orderings.
stuartd 9y ago
Yeah, I'm old as well. Things change. Not for the better maybe, but you can't turn back the clock.. the only way forward is to make something new and better.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  I'm still using RSS without issue. Funny thing is, i didn't really use it back in the day, I've just gravitated toward the best UX available over the years.
  - gkya 9y ago
    This. Many stuff is still there for who want to use them. I use feeds, email and nntp everyday. Also paper books, fountain pens. And also WhatsApp. I don't get the need that the stuff I use to be justified by its popularity or its newness.
beefsack 9y ago
The problem is that it appears most people actually want noise, and it's becoming especially apparent as a lot of these content channels become more mainstream. Anyone who's been on Reddit for the majority of the site's existence will probably have noticed monumental shifts in popular content, which I feel is essentially a movement away from serious diverse discussion towards entertainment and self validation. I don't think I'd be going out on a limb to say a large amount of HN readers are interested in serious discourse, and I wouldn't be surprised to find there are many like me who feel completely alienated by modern Reddit. Previously it was enough to just ignore the default subs, but the momentum has become so strong that it has become pervasive even in niche subs. I've been thinking about it a lot recently, probably mostly stemming from nostalgia of what Reddit used to be, but I feel something that is quite important is identifying that different people are interested in different content, an that nobody is really entitled to stop others enjoying the category of content they want to consume. I don't care about entertainment on Reddit, and I particularly don't care about image macros, in-jokes and one liners. I absolutely love the high effort informational posts and discussions though, and some of them are truly insightful. I yearn for a mechanism to reliably filter out most of the entertainment things and promote the high effort content. I'd love for it to stay some form of voting mechanism though as it seems really effective when the community votes using congruent inclinations. The Slashdot voting system worked using a classification system (interesting, funny, etc.) but that is hardly good supporting evidence for content classification as it didn't work particularly well, perhaps because it was so limited (votes themselves were limited in quantity.) My current line of thinking is using emoji reactions might be an interesting option like you see on GitHub comments. If I want to avoid the entertainment posts I could filter out posts which predominantly have the laughing emoji. There is evidence that emoji reactions themselves are compelling enough to be used, and possibly more compelling than the style of categorisation that Slashdot used. I feel that it's fundamentally important that a system like this needs to integrate into existing communities somehow, as there's no point having it if there's no content to apply it to. This is probably the hardest part but possibly also a very compelling part, having a content indexing / classification system might also be a way to centralise a lot of this content. This post got a little long winded and ranty so apologies for that, but I've been wanting to get these thoughts in writing for a little while. If anyone has any ideas around this general topic I'd love to hear. I've gotten to the point where I'd like to invest energy into attempting to solve it.
ianai 9y ago
And apparently there are now state-sponsored sources of noise. Wasn't there an RFC finalized recently for a site-independent comment system?
- chrisvalleybay 9y ago
  Do you remember anything about the name of this? I am very interested in contributing!
  - aybarshazar 9y ago
    I think that is called Web Annotation: https://www.w3.org/annotation/ https://www.w3.org/annotation/
niftich 9y ago
It's not that these points aren't valid; they are, and I know some people who've been rightfully hammering the exact same points for, well, decades, at this point. But we arrived here neither out of pure accident or grand overarching malice, but simply out of the necessity of the now-commercial web and its lack of good business models, and perverse incentives. Back when most of the traffic on the Internet was academic, institutional, government, or hobbyist, the incentives were to get the content out there and interoperate with others, because the dissemination of the information was seen as having intrinsic value, and the expenses were covered by out-of-band means (i.e. not monetized through the content or the consumers). On today's particular flavor of a commercial web, especially when your next funding round depends on showing user numbers, easy out-migration is a liability, easy in-migration is a feature, so even the use of APIs frequently helps the product and the company more so than it helps the user. When commercial entities started appearing on the Internet, particularly on the World Wide Web, some sites were pure billboards containing only an about page and contact information, e-commerce sites funded the operation through selling actual wares, but news/media/entertainment sites brought with them their previously trailblazed business model of giving away content and trying to recoup some of the cost with advertising. Later, VC-funded content silos took a page from early hobbyist web forums (that were mediocre reimagining of BBSes) and created login-walled playgrounds that funnel the content inward, making it easier to track, analyze, and monetize. It's no surprise that today's four largest display ad servers are Google, Facebook, Verizon/Yahoo/AOL, and Twitter. Other business models only work for specialized players who can command some brand awareness and attract a discriminating customer willing to pay for quality (e.g. big-name or niche newspapers, streaming media sites, data brokers); and, as the HN meme goes, micropayments get much more interest from those who want to collect them than those who want to pay for them, so the everyman's market is full of me-too sites vying for limited attention, or captive content silos that re-create everything on the inside. The battle is largely lost, unless realistic progress is made in the web monetization space. Luckily, there are no technical barriers to people banding together and making interoperable services like the way things used to be -- and keeping up the protocols that make that a reality. It's just that they will have to contend with the realities of playing in that space and competing with similar offerings that don't. Havens on the old web, or the old Internet for that matter still exist, just like amateur radio still exists along with public access television. It's just not where the mainstream attention-hours go.
miguelrochefort 9y ago
Don't worry. I'm in the process of solving this. The solution was in front of us all this time. It's the semantic web. What was missing is an accessible client, and it will be available soon. Imagine one giant unified semantic decentralized database of everything. Add smart contracts, quantified self, intent inferring, and binary input (à la Tinder or Akinator). Organize this on a timeline, so that your OS becomes a task management system. That's it. Unfortunately, my strategy is to target kids that haven't yet be corrupted by current communication paradigms. I think 5 to 12 year old is the sweet spot. Older people will be able to use it, but I don't know if they'll be able to grasp the full potential. Only time will tell.
- inimino 9y ago
  The Semantic Web is going to solve all these problems very soon. There are just a few details to be worked out. This will be as true ten years from now as it was ten years ago.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  gmail me please, we are pursuing similar lines of inquiry.
- Mathnerd314 9y ago
  > one giant unified database of everything That's Google (almost; not everything is online). No need for the semantic web at all, or to wait for your vaporware 'solution'.
  - WalterGR 9y ago
    That's Google (almost; not everything is online). As a (presumably) end user, do you think that the interface provided by Google is database-like?
    - Mathnerd314 9y ago
      query; results. So yeah. It's easy enough to scrape. All this stuff about structured data is trying to find something that isn't there to begin with. If you want structure from unstructured data then use machine learning, don't try to sell everyone a "semantic data format" they have no incentive to use.
cookiecaper 9y ago
Walled gardens and a "protectionist web" are the natural outcome of the legal structure we've chosen to put up around the internet. It's not a technical limitation, and technical solutions can not really affect it. Just this week there was a "Show HN" that combined data from Twitter et al in interesting ways. It was offline less than 24 hours later as all the comments indicated that it was a clear violation of the policies of various content providers. Why should we care about those policies? Well, because under the CFAA, we've made it a federal crime to send packets to a server in a way that displeases the server's owner. There is no technical limitation stopping people from collecting and curating data from many sources and combining/filtering them according to their own interest. The internet is already open in principle (cue Schneier: "trying to make digital bits not copiable is like trying to make water not wet"). The issue is that we've given the Facebooks and Googles of the world the right to hold our data and our personal networks hostage. Start a decentralized, standardized protocol like email or IRC and companies will cooperate insofar as they must to ride the wave, and then they will work aggressively to corner things off into their own little world. Understand, all software companies want one thing: lock-in. They want to make it so that there is as much pressure as possible to remain on their platform. It's the age-old story of someone who can't move to Mac, even though they greatly envy it, because their greeting card program from 1997 won't work on it. Instead of importable programs, it's importable personal networks -- but now, with everything server-side, it's usually illegal to try to bridge that gap on the user's behalf (insofar as doing so involves contacting the server of a competitor). The situation with potential copyright and patent violations was precarious enough when it was all occurring on the user's local machine (WINE is in a big legal grey area, for example; my instinct is WINE would lose if MS ever decided to seriously try to squash them), but once you cross the line into some company's IP space, all bets are off. The CFAA allows them to define "authorized access" to their servers on their own terms, including "people trying to access our server to provide data portability". This has already been litigated with specific regard to Facebook in Facebook v. Power Ventures. As long as we give companies the legal tools to exert effective ownership over user-generated data, we are destined to see well-designed, decentralized protocols that maximize availability, resiliency, and portability get whittled away by the overriding corporate interest in establishing some element that can be used to keep users locked in. The Halloween memos may have caused a stir in the late 90s, and they're all but forgotten now, but their sentiment is more alive than ever.
cronjobber 9y ago
> But we need a common API ... so that people can use their favourite tools Yup, that's exactly what made the internet great in the good old days. But how do you monetize users who get to use their favoirite tools instead of yours?
- brad0 9y ago
  We need a win-win system. People adopted schema.org so their search ranking improved. Adding markup for machine consumption doesn't make sense otherwise. We need to build systems that benefit both parties.
- jalfresi 9y ago
  Sell better tools?
- alanfranzoni 9y ago
  This is an EXTREMELY good point. We'll need to dig out a way.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  This is what happened to twitter in a nutshell.
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  Perhaps some form of decentralized hosting to offload the costly aspect of hosting an online community to its members? The percentage of people with access to ample broadband connections at home is increasing constantly, and bittorrent proved that distributing large amounts of data amongst peers can be done without centralized hosting. It would be pretty neat if everyone could simply buy or configure some low-power hardware (like a router in both size, cost, and energy consumption) and have that become their internet 'home'. When participating in a community that supports the protocol used, that device simply allocates an amount of bandwidth and does its share of distributing content to the swarm. All a community would need is a central place to host the data needed to get started. Anyone could set up a new community with a minimum of means. If technique used is standardized (and open) and gained popularity, service providers could even create hosting packages that do the hosting of your internet 'home' for you for a small monthly fee, so you don't have to bother with setting up your own device (although you could, and should always be able to). This kind of concept probably exists of course. The challenge lies in getting it both technologically feasible for mass-scale adoption, and simple enough for anyone to participate. Still, doesn't this make sense for a future were we won't be as depended on a handful of commercial silos?
anigbrowl 9y ago
I'm not saying we should get back to IRC or to NNTP. I am. Not in the sense of go back to using them for everyting (they're still there if you want to), but int eh sense of building some new protocols on those existing foundations. NNTP was really good given its technical limitations. TBH I think part of the secret of Facebook's success is that it hews to the same ethos of standardization and simplicity, as opposed to myspace which quickly feel victim to its own customizability and ended up being as chaotic and hard to navigate as the web itself.
cyphunk 9y ago
Did we get to this point of fragmentation due to smart phones and their walled garden philosophy? People stopped making applications for the sake of interoperability. ... if RealAudio™ was founded today it'd be king. Or is facebook to blame? John Gilmore famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- he was wrong, censorship just has to wait for the right monopoly to appear. And with the success of monopoly interoperability becomes its casualty
- losteric 9y ago
  Amazon and Facebook, to me, are symptoms of a deeper problem: Technology is still hard. We're building complex large-scale products because the non-technical consumers can't use the simple small-scale products. We're here because it's convenient, not because it's good. I always felt that Google should have created simple tools for web publishing and creating personal walled-gardens - make the web personal for 7 billion non-technical humans, and the brands they consume. Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo. G+ copied Facebook when they should have studied why people were using Facebook instead of the open web. Don't make the problem worse, fixed those problems; take the role of guardian of the internet. Create or support standard APIs, release relevant IP/research, and bankroll SV startups that build the tools to publish or consume through the open web. Google is still an ad/search company that relies on the open web. They need to protect it and drive further innovation. What happens after the coming adpocalypse - micropayments? Subscription bundles? Who knows? Or, perhaps we'll be chained to ads forever because we'll be locked into walled-garden apps... what a hell that would be. Are there any companies working in this space? Closest I've seen is Squarespace, and even then... not really...
  - callumlocke 9y ago
    > Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo. I guess Wordpress is an example. It's got a hosted plan, which requires little more computer literacy than Facebook, and you can also leave at any time and self-host the software, which keeps the hosted offering honest. But it's just not as contagious as something like Facebook. That's the problem, Facebook isn't just more 'convenient' than self-hosted tools, it also has your friends tagging you in photos.
catern 9y ago
I still use NNTP every day. I've never used Usenet, but it's very useful (through Gmane and Gnus) as a way to follow mailing lists. Also, the internal forums at $DAYJOB support connecting through NNTP, which is extremely convenient. Likewise I use IRC every day, through Bitlbee, to interact with people on Facebook Messenger and other platforms. I can do all of this from my client of choice (I choose Emacs) without a problem. Admittedly this doesn't solve the problem of topicality, but I think things are better than they seem.
grogenaut 9y ago
As someone who remembers being uber frustrated at having to use trillian to talk to all of my friend, I disagree, there was major fragmentation back then as well. Also for which BBS you were on, which friends were on AOL or other nerfed internet.
- elviejo 9y ago
  It was possible to use and create trillian. Now I need to have slack, Hangouts and WhatsApp web open independently
  - mehs 9y ago
    It kinda is possible. You can use Franz: http://meetfranz.com http://meetfranz.com
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - chrisvalleybay 9y ago
      Would trust this service, if I could read the source. I don't know what the plan with MeetFranz is, but since it isn't open source, something tells me that there at some point will be monetization involved. Monetization isn't bad, but it also will at some point cause misalignment between it and the users.
narrator 9y ago
I am excited at the proliferation of Mastodon servers. Every cohesive tribe that can afford a $15/month VPS should set one up and ditch Facebook.
- newscracker 9y ago
  Maybe that'd help ditch Twitter, but not Facebook. There needs to be a better (de-centralized) solution for writing that's longer that also provides the ability to add photos, videos, etc. The substitute for Facebook should be like Facebook in almost every way in terms of features to get better adoption, with improvements in several areas where Facebook is weaker.
yosito 9y ago
My own theory about why our ability to focus on what we want to on the internet is Attention Capitalism. Our attention is the latest resource to be exploited by capitalism, and each company is attempting to control what we focus on for their profit. I've noticed this trend; very little software let's me control what information I see anymore. It's almost all controlled by some algorithm making me see what they claim I want to see.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > It's almost all controlled by some algorithm making me see what they claim I want to see. The algorithm is known as "doing what users want". Very popular with companies and even open source projects nowadays. It works like this: you do some "analytics" of your product, or look what sells for others, assume it reflects what users want (and the things that are missing are obviously not wanted by users), and do those. This algorithm ignores the fact that a lot of the time, users don't get any way to express preferences. Users buy/use what's available and what's popular. Through this algorithm, producers make choices for the consumers, and then use statistics to justify them.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Or, worse: the discerning users or customers blot out the company (or its website) and go elsewhere. A/B testing can't test for the users who aren't present.
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    Don't forget the other part that's critical for the big players: lock-in. The first thing gets them to join willingly. The second coerces them to stay. A one-two punch for a acquiring and keeping market share with high margins.
willhackett 9y ago
I'm very much for this. I have five messaging apps, two email clients, three file storage apps and a news reader all on my iPhone - just to stay in touch. It's hard to stay organised when businesses use different technologies across different platforms and there's no single place just for "Messages". I don't care how the message is sent, I just want to make sure it gets to the right person.
balladeer 9y ago
Whenever I come across a new Twitter handle I think of following I first run it through http://www.tweetstats.com http://www.tweetstats.com. I check one simple data there: Number of tweets per day (tpd); and also maybe tweets per month (tpm) If the handle is churning out more than ~10 tweets per day I tend to stay away. Because if even a couple of hanldes I follow crosses 30 tpd or so my feed will pretty much become pointless unless I am glued to my feed all the time and I would miss a lot of good content. Another big problem is repeated content as the article suggests - I follow a quite some literary Twitter handles and longform handles. Everyday I come across just too many tweets that link to the same article. What is worse sometimes the same handles tweet about the same articles repeatedly (to get more views I reckon) with different texts. I usually end up unfollowing many of those handles and that means I actually going to miss a lot of content that I would have otherwise liked but in a moderate dose, at a slower pace. I request my friends/family members to remove me form there WhatsApp broadcast lists and after sometime I simply tell them if they don't stop with that daily "Good Morning/Evening" forwards and all that crap I am simple gonna block them. I wish WhatsApp let me remove myself from all the broadcast lists I am added to or let me choose that I don't want to receive broadcast messagegs at all (if they can't/won't make it granular). I've completed given up on Facebook. Sometimes it shows me posts that I've marked hide like five times. It never keeps my friends photos, self written text posts on top but all those video and silly article shares, those annoying and mostly unfunny memes. In fact they have a limit I guess (haven't really used them in a while) and the personal posts get drowned in the mass market noise. Maybe the problem is we talk of Internet being decentralised but we are all try to find that decentralized Internet at any one place or vert few places - be it Twitter, or Facebook, Google. We are adopting the social networks, content sources wrong... maybe.
peterwwillis 9y ago
Elon Musk said that as time passes, technology continuously degrades, not improves, if people don't make a hard effort to keep improving it. The Egyptians knew how to build giant pyramids, and forgot how. The Romans built fantastic aqueducts, and forgot how. We built vehicles that landed on the moon in the 60s, and the next vehicle we built could only go into earth orbit, and then we no longer even had a vehicle that could do that. Today, for some reason, everyone thinks that writing software for a platform on a platform on a platform with no interconnecting standards or protocols is a great idea. Instead of trying to improve people's lives, we're just making things needlessly complex, buggy, and bloaty. You need 8 gigs of ram minimum just to browse the web, and god forbid you want to do something like back up your data. I was just in a meeting where nobody could get Google's video conferencing to work. Instead of building internet technology, we build web technology. The web is harder to write software for. It's an ephemeral, inconsistent, difficult thing. But if we try really hard, we can turn the tide on the unnecessarily complex box we've forced ourselves into. The proposed fixes are good ideas, but they're bandaids on axe wounds. There are much deeper problems going on that won't be fixed by a feature add or a pivot. We need a re-evaluation of all internet-based technology, how we develop it, how we incorporate it into our lives, and what we want as a society from it.
- txmx2000 9y ago
  Musk never knew how to make a good electric car people want to buy so I guess he has nothing to worry about.
- ukyrgf 9y ago
  Every time I use the word 'web developer' to describe myself, I feel a little pang wishing I was actually designing the internet.
- themacguffinman 9y ago
  I'm skeptical the Egyptians simply "forgot" how to build giant pyramids (especially as pyramid construction seems to be well-documented today). It seems more likely that the age of pharoahs ended and giant pyramid construction was no longer an important skill. Technology hadn't "degraded", it had adapted. Just like we didn't forget how to build lunar vehicles, we just decided that it wasn't worth it in its current state. It's still very possible to do another moon landing, it will just cost a ton of money that corporations won't risk and governments won't spend without a clear political goal like the old space race. Space technology isn't degrading, it's becoming more cost-oriented. A SpaceX rocket only reached orbit but it was relatively very cheap. Cost efficiency helps space technology reach more people and create greater impact, ultimately making the technology more valuable to society. It's the same with the web. You say that the web is bloated "instead of trying to improve people's lives" but the reason the web platform is so heavy is because the platform is rapidly adding features and APIs and tools that make it easier for developers of all skill levels to make complicated applications. Letting more developers make stuff in less time improves people's lives. Maintaining backward compatibility at the cost of bloat also improves people's lives. Society has been constantly evaluating the web and it has consistently reached the same conclusions: RAM is cheaper than developers, a slower platform with a bigger audience is worth dealing with over multiple native platforms, and weird legacy stuff is fine if it means we can run 15 year old websites.
cylinder 9y ago
Indeed. I miss the days of IRC and such. The internet started feeling really noisy after the iPhone was popularized.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  This. It's because of smartphones. People don't write things on smartphones, it's tedious.
  - cylinder 9y ago
    It also brought a lot of people online who previously were not. Desktops were stashed in some room, one per household, and laptops were still seen as somewhat nerdy or work related.
nippples 9y ago
Now we have great discussion forums and link aggregators where a small group of moderators rule over a very large number of places and will frequently go on power trips, dominate discussion (or coddle a power user) and, not rarely enough, engage in doxxing. One thing that keeps me returning to YC is that I'm not even reminded of the existence of moderators over here.
Mathnerd314 9y ago
If you want to focus on something, just google it - depending on what it is you'll get Wikipedia, some blog posts, and maybe a book or two on the subject. What Facebook / Twitter / Blogger / etc. are good for is providing context - why should I be interested in something. Generally it's as simple as "I like Mr. X and he's interested in Y". They're also reasonable at finding new topics to explore, although if you dive deep enough it turns out that everything is interconnected and you'll find it anyway. It's really hard to define "topic" or "noise" in a way that isn't based on search keywords or (facets of) people.
rakoo 9y ago
This is partly what weboob (http://weboob.org http://weboob.org) wants to solve, or at least work around. Its goal is to pull the web out of browsers (hence the name): - each website is handled by a module that does all the scraping, or uses the api if needed - each module provides one or more capabilities, such as "list an account transactions" (typically for your bank or your mobile provider) or "receive and send messages" (such as HN or reddit or tinder) - applications plug into those capabilities and give the user functionalities, regardless of the website. You can list the schedule for your bus just as well as the schedule for carpoolings. One of the applications is actually a daemon with the capability to send and receive messages (with threading and all) and sends messages to the email adress of your choice; you can also configure it as an smtp mta, which means you can use any mail client and interact with all your discussion websites without ever opening the browser. Obviously this is not a perfect solution for OP's problems, but it seems to me it's going in the right direction. Oh and it doesn't stop at websites; I use it for sending RSS feeds to my email in the background.
- irq 9y ago
  This looks really cool, but I found it distracting to see the word "boob" in all the app names.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I'd be inclined to ignore it, but then I saw this on the carousel: "QHandJoob - You are unemployed? Use this application to search job offers!" This naming convention is a sure-fire way to lose a big chunk of potential users.
- xerophyte12932 9y ago
  Am I the only one who read the name and thought this was a porn site? I think the service would reach a greater audience with a simpler name. (Btw I still don't get how the creator wants me to read the name and what it means)
  - CM30 9y ago
d--b 9y ago
As much as I really liked using IRC back in the day, I still think I spent way too much time on it. I mean you got to know the people there, and after a couple of years most discussions were like office conversations. Plus the takeovers, the trolls, the noobs, the never ending screwing around with the bots, etc. I've never done much newsgroups because I didn't like public speaking without anonymity. ICQ and others were like today's WhatsApp and hangout. I didn't use a single interface for them at the time, and still don't today, I don't see a big difference. Today, I'm off Facebook, I barely follow twitter at all. I'm fine with reading hacker news, and other tech news aggregators. I think you can lament on the disappearance of RSS, but to me, that's just about the main issue. I guess the big difference between then and now is that we used to control better what we opted in. Now we're more force fed.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Good points, especially the last point. I approach "internet" differently these days. I have twitter for high freq thin data, reddit for a bit more dense information~. For deeper information I could read serious journals, books. But I rarely need that, or am not capable of digesting it. The force fed thing is inherent to the change of importance and structure of the web.. Remember when Google was an entry point to the mess and not the conductor ?
  - d--b 9y ago
    Exactly, there used to be a reason why we called these things "browsers"
- lyra_comms 9y ago
  Have a go with Lyra (hellolyra.com), it's designed to be an efficient use of your time rather than a sink for time, trolling and harrassment.
  - uhhhhhhh 9y ago
    https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png Looks like a quip/discourse clone from a 10 second look. Not sure why another product offering relatively the same service solves anything.
tovkal 9y ago
"Nowadays we have people instead of topics. I have nothing against people, but maybe, if I follow a great software architect, I'd like to hear what he's got to say about software, not about other shits." That's so true. I want to follow some people on Twitter because sometimes they tweet very useful things, but the amount of "noise"/tweets I don't care about is too high. Tons of people put very good info on Twitter because is quick and easy compared to writing a blog post.
Mooty 9y ago
Maybe what people want is a centralised web, not a "good practice" web ? This is not what I want but as a matter of fact, that may be what majority wants. I wonder how devs/techies people think they know the truth for other people. What changed a lot of things are modern apps and their new features : push notifications, infinite scrolls (attention killer) or adding a f... emoji (I miss smileys personnaly). The rest is just filling empty boxes about what people want/need : a chat for friend, a chat for work, a single feed and not 10's of website to search to have a single information. All I think is missing is local web, all is considered as world and then maybe local, people don't talk to each other in the bars, they prefer now to use Tinder and Facebook to insult themselves.
- hobofan 9y ago
  The people want a working web. They don't care if it's centralized or decentralized, and most probably never even lost a thought about it. "Techies" think that they know better because they are the first to be impacted and have noticed the shortcomings of a centralized web.
lyra_comms 9y ago
We are working to restore the openness of online discussion with Lyra: www.hellolyra.com. We aim to provide helpful services for conversation, not to get users addicted. We have made the choice to focus around people and conversations rather than topics (because Lyra is designed to be harrassment-proof, and topics lead easily to harrassment - you don't see this so much in the tech world but in the mainstream it's a huge problem). We are currently thinking about the best way to do notification aggregation (Facebook does this very badly - several comments on the same conversation will give you several different notifications) and marking-as-read. We have several interesting options in test at the moment.
- d--b 9y ago
  Just some thoughts: putting the full message in the discussion tree means that people will tend to write shorter / comment-like messages, and not in-depth argumentations. On the other end, having only a tree of authors is a bit to slim, cause you have to read the content of each message to know what's going on. I think people who reply to a thread should give it a "reply title". You know it's the same thread, but you can have an idea of the content with the reply title.
  - lyra_comms 9y ago
    Thanks for your thoughts! Are you suggesting that every reply should have a title?
OliverJones 9y ago
The internet era our author mentions was not dominated by companies whose investors measure success by "engagement" -- that is, by wasting our time. FB and Twitter measure success by engagement. That means they don't have the incentive to organize our information and save us time. (Gotta go... Hacker News is about to tell me to get back to work!)
cryptos 9y ago
I think this is related to monetization, since the web gets "louder" to attract advertising consumers. Most companies are actually advertising companies and the users are just part of the product (sold to advertisers). Maybe we need more paid services - and the will to pay. I'm thinking about creating a hierarchical forum like the usenet, but I'm sceptical whether this would earn enough money to work in the long run.
dredmorbius 9y ago
"There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilivy, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." Anonymous publisher, as quoted by Hamilton Holt, Commercialism and Journalism, 1909. https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/20/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...
sullyj3 9y ago
> Can't mark things as read > ... > it could resurface at any time Except that you can't come close to consuming content faster than it's produced on things like Facebook. That's what the news feed is for, taking the massive stream of stuff that your friends and pages are generating, and prioritizing it. I don't think it generally shows you things you've already seen before.
Semiapies 9y ago
For all that RSS is "dead", it sure still seems to be everywhere. A few big-name sites like Twitter shut their feeds down, sure. Out in the rest of the web, I can't think of the last time I looked at a site or a blog that didn't have a pretty usable feed.
deleted 9y ago
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SZJX 9y ago
The internet is definitely getting noisier but I don't get his "solutions", especially about "blogging". What does it ever mean "I think most of us won't discuss about so many totally unrelated different fields. It's a change of mentality - we shouldn't write something just because we can."? He makes it sound as if there are tons of irrelevant blogs out there spewing nonsense and polluting people's experiences, while in fact the people who blog are still the absolute minority. I particularly agree with the idea of "blog small things", since no matter how "small" your experience might seem to be, there could well be somebody else facing a similar situation who can be helped by your article. Also I don't understand his "blog with focus" thing. Many of us are not writing blogs as commercial projects. We are just blogging whatever we find might be helpful to others and in this sense there's absolutely no point in overthinking it. Just blog whatever you want. I get that he might be unsatisfied with the rambling comments in many websites and forums. But come on, what does that have the least bit to do with blogging and "write just because we can"?
type0 9y ago
> Incidentally, this is not a call for the open internet; I could not care less if there's a leading provider for content, as long as such content is accessible in a standard way. There is such a provider and it's called Facebook, that is if you don't care about the open internet is exactly what you get.

398 points by alanfranz 9y ago

Medium is quickly becoming the central place for programming articles, and it's ridiculous they don't offer an API. Check it out: https://github.com/Medium/medium-api-docs/issues/91 https://github.com/Medium/medium-api-docs/issues/91 More of these website are just becoming data silos and not sharing their data. Unfortunately I don't know of a better place to write programming content. https://sergiotapia.me https://sergiotapia.me If you're a developer and you care about this, like I do, where would you recommend we write articles sans-self hosting?

swiley 9y ago
You could just push your stuff to github.io...
- rmc 9y ago
  Or on your own website. Get your own domain! Host some static files!
gkya 9y ago
> Medium is quickly becoming the central place for programming articles How? There are many programmers on medium, maybe. But it's a website I categorically avoid (too big and clunky, and hardly ever any quality content found there), and yet I can follow many programming blogs.

makecheck 9y ago

Frankly I think what is missing is an understanding of statistics. Even having “1000 friends”, which sounds amazing, is statistically insignificant when we are talking about populations of millions or billions. Think about the last “really long thread” you read on Reddit or something, and think about when you tuned out: was it a few dozen comments, maybe a few hundred? Still statistically insignificant, or at the very least severely biased. People are regularly exposed to, and worse respond to, statistically biased samples. This is a really, really bad thing. What we need is a way to almost forcibly blend samples from many different populations so that the number of comments you can “stand” is a more representative sample. That way, when you get up in arms about “what people think”, it might actually represent what “people” think instead of “my friends” or whatever other biased sample is out there.

incompatible 9y ago
I'd like to see better moderation systems. Moderation done by people who are actually good at it rather than just upvoting or downvoting comments depending on whether they agree with them or not (moderating the moderators). Ways to mark comments as duplicates so they are all grouped into one bundle. A way to avoid the "first posts" effect, where the earlier posts are likely to be the highest rated regardless of their merits. Aggregators like Hacker News are already part of a solution; putting interesting articles in one place so that we don't have to subscribe to 10^8 personal blogs and fringe tech sites.
- ben_jones 9y ago
  Begs the question: what are the best moderation systems in software? Are there any?
  - jalfresi 9y ago
    I always thought slashdot had a pretty good moderation system. Would in most cases separate the wheat from the chaff leading to excellent comment threads
    - givemefive 9y ago
      Yeah meta-moderation, limited mod points and a secret algorithm for earning mod points based on reputation works pretty well. Oh.. and a maximum score for comments.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
Mathnerd314 9y ago
The Twitter status sample (https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/reference/get/statuses/sample https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/reference/get/statuses/sam...) is a reasonably unbiased sample (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.5204.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.5204.pdf). You'd have to learn 6 or 7 languages to really follow it, but there are some ways to filter it to English-only. Also useful is https://www.reddit.com/r/all/top/?sort=top&t=day https://www.reddit.com/r/all/top/?sort=top&t=day, a bit US/tech-biased but definitely a few million.

znpy 9y ago

If anyone is wondering, Usenet is still alive.

interfixus 9y ago
Well, at least it's sort of not dead.
- zafiro17 9y ago
  I just reposted this article to comp.misc, where we've been keeping up a parallel discussion for years. Usenet doesn't have the sheer numbers it used to, but anyone still there is there because we love it. Usenet's flaws remain unmended, but its strengths remain unfettered. :)
  - z1mm32m4n 9y ago
    Out of curiosity (as someone who never had the chance to see Usenet at its prime), what are Usenets strengths and weaknesses?
    - Jaruzel 9y ago
      Strengths: Totally de-centralised - your post on your local NNTP server, and it gets replicated across the NNTP mesh to all the other servers. Built in threading... Actually HN is very similar to how a fairly busy newsgroup would look back in the day. Weaknesses: Posts used to take hours (sometimes days) to replicate across the whole mesh. Not so much nowadays tho. Text only; no native support for rich media or Unicode (although some might see that as a Strength)
  - Jaruzel 9y ago
    I lurk on comp.misc via Google groups RSS feed: https://groups.google.com/forum/feed/comp.misc/topics/rss.xml?num=100 https://groups.google.com/forum/feed/comp.misc/topics/rss.xm... I'm on the hunt for a good dedicated Windows NNTP reader, failing that I might have a go at writing my own (that supports text posts only - none of that dodgy binaries rubbish!).

kraftman 9y ago

I'm going to write a chat app built on IRC that gradually uses more and more RAM, and adds new features while breaking old ones. Just as it has everything MSN used to have ill have it shut down, rename itself and its website and start all over again.

ben_jones 9y ago
Ping me. I'm really excited about this.
- shakna 9y ago
  Pong
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
bigiain 9y ago
So Slack then?
jon_richards 9y ago
Don't forget to make it struggle to scroll text at some point in the cycle.
fapjacks 9y ago
Make sure you get people excited about a standard and then shit all over it to keep competitor clients from accessing your network.
lightedman 9y ago
So, Discord?

clishem 9y ago

> Once was IRC Seriously?

flashman 9y ago
OP's Italian, go easy.
gardnr 9y ago
How old are you?
alanfranzoni 9y ago
Uuh, despite the enormous attention, the article was written in just about an hour, and I'm not a native English speaker; that error slipped through the cracks. Thanks for pointing it out.
- clishem 9y ago
  I was very tired when I wrote that, my apologies. What I meant was that IRC is still alive and kicking.

edgartaor 9y ago

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

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
RUTHLESS_RUFUS 9y ago
Same problem as Twitter/Facebook: little to no barrier to entry, endless bots and politically motivated low-value posters.
btym 9y ago
The same thing happens to every subreddit. It's good, people like it, it grows very large, the quality of submissions goes down (or the same content gets reposted constantly). People are incentivized by their visible "karma" score to post mass amounts of low-effort content.
- zeta0134 9y ago
  I feel like Hacker News is one of the only online communities I've participated in where the score is handled appropriately. It's a good personal measure of how well my posts and comments were received by the community, but it's not bragging rights. No one else can see my vote tallies here, so I have no real incentive to increase it. I've seen this affect sites like Stack Overflow as well. At the bottom of any popular question are usually very low-effort answers from posters who really shouldn't have answered at all. I wonder if it's an example of their otherwise well-executed reputation system creating noise that might have been avoided.
  - jalfresi 9y ago
    Out of curiosity, does any one know of any research or articles into reputation systems in general?
    - dredmorbius 9y ago

chongli 9y ago

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

plaguuuuuu 9y ago
The Internet is decentralized. It doesn't matter that all the 13 year olds are congregating on Club Penguin or whatever; we can set up our own communities. That's why HN is great (and other small communities). It's intrinsically hostile to the wider internet simply by virtue of the subject and the format of its content.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- chongli 9y ago
  The issue is when the unwanted folks follow the cool kids around. This happens a lot on Reddit. People will make a subreddit with the type of community they want. Others will join. Eventually people will complain that the quality has deteriorated. Then the cool kids will start a new one and migrate there. Rinse. Repeat... ad infinitum. Edit: I don't know if there's a general name for this phenomenon, but I believe it is related to network decay. [0] [0] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - gavinpc 9y ago
    The name I've heard for this is "Eternal September": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
    - chongli 9y ago

netsharc 9y ago

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

vosper 9y ago
With Facebook I scroll down until I see something I've seen before, then I stop. Doesn't seem very hard, and I imagine its what most people do. If I want to revisit older things then I keep scrolling, but that's almost never the case.
- M2Ys4U 9y ago
  I used to do this with Twitter, but that's impossible these days.
  - SyneRyder 9y ago
    Still possible with Twitter if you use a 3rd party app, like Tweetbot on Mac / iOS and Fenix on Android. I don't think it's possible on the website or official app (and if I was forced to use Twitter as currently designed, I think I'd give up on it).
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Still works for me - you occasionally have to decline "things you may have missed", but they come as a lump and the chronological order is preserved.
- Terribledactyl 9y ago
  I was under the impression that each scroll through Facebook could show different content in arbitrary orderings.

stuartd 9y ago

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

jasonkostempski 9y ago
I'm still using RSS without issue. Funny thing is, i didn't really use it back in the day, I've just gravitated toward the best UX available over the years.
- gkya 9y ago
  This. Many stuff is still there for who want to use them. I use feeds, email and nntp everyday. Also paper books, fountain pens. And also WhatsApp. I don't get the need that the stuff I use to be justified by its popularity or its newness.

beefsack 9y ago

The problem is that it appears most people actually want noise, and it's becoming especially apparent as a lot of these content channels become more mainstream. Anyone who's been on Reddit for the majority of the site's existence will probably have noticed monumental shifts in popular content, which I feel is essentially a movement away from serious diverse discussion towards entertainment and self validation. I don't think I'd be going out on a limb to say a large amount of HN readers are interested in serious discourse, and I wouldn't be surprised to find there are many like me who feel completely alienated by modern Reddit. Previously it was enough to just ignore the default subs, but the momentum has become so strong that it has become pervasive even in niche subs. I've been thinking about it a lot recently, probably mostly stemming from nostalgia of what Reddit used to be, but I feel something that is quite important is identifying that different people are interested in different content, an that nobody is really entitled to stop others enjoying the category of content they want to consume. I don't care about entertainment on Reddit, and I particularly don't care about image macros, in-jokes and one liners. I absolutely love the high effort informational posts and discussions though, and some of them are truly insightful. I yearn for a mechanism to reliably filter out most of the entertainment things and promote the high effort content. I'd love for it to stay some form of voting mechanism though as it seems really effective when the community votes using congruent inclinations. The Slashdot voting system worked using a classification system (interesting, funny, etc.) but that is hardly good supporting evidence for content classification as it didn't work particularly well, perhaps because it was so limited (votes themselves were limited in quantity.) My current line of thinking is using emoji reactions might be an interesting option like you see on GitHub comments. If I want to avoid the entertainment posts I could filter out posts which predominantly have the laughing emoji. There is evidence that emoji reactions themselves are compelling enough to be used, and possibly more compelling than the style of categorisation that Slashdot used. I feel that it's fundamentally important that a system like this needs to integrate into existing communities somehow, as there's no point having it if there's no content to apply it to. This is probably the hardest part but possibly also a very compelling part, having a content indexing / classification system might also be a way to centralise a lot of this content. This post got a little long winded and ranty so apologies for that, but I've been wanting to get these thoughts in writing for a little while. If anyone has any ideas around this general topic I'd love to hear. I've gotten to the point where I'd like to invest energy into attempting to solve it.

ianai 9y ago

And apparently there are now state-sponsored sources of noise. Wasn't there an RFC finalized recently for a site-independent comment system?

chrisvalleybay 9y ago
Do you remember anything about the name of this? I am very interested in contributing!
- aybarshazar 9y ago
  I think that is called Web Annotation: https://www.w3.org/annotation/ https://www.w3.org/annotation/

niftich 9y ago

It's not that these points aren't valid; they are, and I know some people who've been rightfully hammering the exact same points for, well, decades, at this point. But we arrived here neither out of pure accident or grand overarching malice, but simply out of the necessity of the now-commercial web and its lack of good business models, and perverse incentives. Back when most of the traffic on the Internet was academic, institutional, government, or hobbyist, the incentives were to get the content out there and interoperate with others, because the dissemination of the information was seen as having intrinsic value, and the expenses were covered by out-of-band means (i.e. not monetized through the content or the consumers). On today's particular flavor of a commercial web, especially when your next funding round depends on showing user numbers, easy out-migration is a liability, easy in-migration is a feature, so even the use of APIs frequently helps the product and the company more so than it helps the user. When commercial entities started appearing on the Internet, particularly on the World Wide Web, some sites were pure billboards containing only an about page and contact information, e-commerce sites funded the operation through selling actual wares, but news/media/entertainment sites brought with them their previously trailblazed business model of giving away content and trying to recoup some of the cost with advertising. Later, VC-funded content silos took a page from early hobbyist web forums (that were mediocre reimagining of BBSes) and created login-walled playgrounds that funnel the content inward, making it easier to track, analyze, and monetize. It's no surprise that today's four largest display ad servers are Google, Facebook, Verizon/Yahoo/AOL, and Twitter. Other business models only work for specialized players who can command some brand awareness and attract a discriminating customer willing to pay for quality (e.g. big-name or niche newspapers, streaming media sites, data brokers); and, as the HN meme goes, micropayments get much more interest from those who want to collect them than those who want to pay for them, so the everyman's market is full of me-too sites vying for limited attention, or captive content silos that re-create everything on the inside. The battle is largely lost, unless realistic progress is made in the web monetization space. Luckily, there are no technical barriers to people banding together and making interoperable services like the way things used to be -- and keeping up the protocols that make that a reality. It's just that they will have to contend with the realities of playing in that space and competing with similar offerings that don't. Havens on the old web, or the old Internet for that matter still exist, just like amateur radio still exists along with public access television. It's just not where the mainstream attention-hours go.

miguelrochefort 9y ago

Don't worry. I'm in the process of solving this. The solution was in front of us all this time. It's the semantic web. What was missing is an accessible client, and it will be available soon. Imagine one giant unified semantic decentralized database of everything. Add smart contracts, quantified self, intent inferring, and binary input (à la Tinder or Akinator). Organize this on a timeline, so that your OS becomes a task management system. That's it. Unfortunately, my strategy is to target kids that haven't yet be corrupted by current communication paradigms. I think 5 to 12 year old is the sweet spot. Older people will be able to use it, but I don't know if they'll be able to grasp the full potential. Only time will tell.

inimino 9y ago
The Semantic Web is going to solve all these problems very soon. There are just a few details to be worked out. This will be as true ten years from now as it was ten years ago.
anigbrowl 9y ago
gmail me please, we are pursuing similar lines of inquiry.
Mathnerd314 9y ago
> one giant unified database of everything That's Google (almost; not everything is online). No need for the semantic web at all, or to wait for your vaporware 'solution'.
- WalterGR 9y ago
  That's Google (almost; not everything is online). As a (presumably) end user, do you think that the interface provided by Google is database-like?
  - Mathnerd314 9y ago
    query; results. So yeah. It's easy enough to scrape. All this stuff about structured data is trying to find something that isn't there to begin with. If you want structure from unstructured data then use machine learning, don't try to sell everyone a "semantic data format" they have no incentive to use.

cookiecaper 9y ago

Walled gardens and a "protectionist web" are the natural outcome of the legal structure we've chosen to put up around the internet. It's not a technical limitation, and technical solutions can not really affect it. Just this week there was a "Show HN" that combined data from Twitter et al in interesting ways. It was offline less than 24 hours later as all the comments indicated that it was a clear violation of the policies of various content providers. Why should we care about those policies? Well, because under the CFAA, we've made it a federal crime to send packets to a server in a way that displeases the server's owner. There is no technical limitation stopping people from collecting and curating data from many sources and combining/filtering them according to their own interest. The internet is already open in principle (cue Schneier: "trying to make digital bits not copiable is like trying to make water not wet"). The issue is that we've given the Facebooks and Googles of the world the right to hold our data and our personal networks hostage. Start a decentralized, standardized protocol like email or IRC and companies will cooperate insofar as they must to ride the wave, and then they will work aggressively to corner things off into their own little world. Understand, all software companies want one thing: lock-in. They want to make it so that there is as much pressure as possible to remain on their platform. It's the age-old story of someone who can't move to Mac, even though they greatly envy it, because their greeting card program from 1997 won't work on it. Instead of importable programs, it's importable personal networks -- but now, with everything server-side, it's usually illegal to try to bridge that gap on the user's behalf (insofar as doing so involves contacting the server of a competitor). The situation with potential copyright and patent violations was precarious enough when it was all occurring on the user's local machine (WINE is in a big legal grey area, for example; my instinct is WINE would lose if MS ever decided to seriously try to squash them), but once you cross the line into some company's IP space, all bets are off. The CFAA allows them to define "authorized access" to their servers on their own terms, including "people trying to access our server to provide data portability". This has already been litigated with specific regard to Facebook in Facebook v. Power Ventures. As long as we give companies the legal tools to exert effective ownership over user-generated data, we are destined to see well-designed, decentralized protocols that maximize availability, resiliency, and portability get whittled away by the overriding corporate interest in establishing some element that can be used to keep users locked in. The Halloween memos may have caused a stir in the late 90s, and they're all but forgotten now, but their sentiment is more alive than ever.

cronjobber 9y ago

> But we need a common API ... so that people can use their favourite tools Yup, that's exactly what made the internet great in the good old days. But how do you monetize users who get to use their favoirite tools instead of yours?

brad0 9y ago
We need a win-win system. People adopted schema.org so their search ranking improved. Adding markup for machine consumption doesn't make sense otherwise. We need to build systems that benefit both parties.
jalfresi 9y ago
Sell better tools?
alanfranzoni 9y ago
This is an EXTREMELY good point. We'll need to dig out a way.
jacquesm 9y ago
This is what happened to twitter in a nutshell.
Freak_NL 9y ago
Perhaps some form of decentralized hosting to offload the costly aspect of hosting an online community to its members? The percentage of people with access to ample broadband connections at home is increasing constantly, and bittorrent proved that distributing large amounts of data amongst peers can be done without centralized hosting. It would be pretty neat if everyone could simply buy or configure some low-power hardware (like a router in both size, cost, and energy consumption) and have that become their internet 'home'. When participating in a community that supports the protocol used, that device simply allocates an amount of bandwidth and does its share of distributing content to the swarm. All a community would need is a central place to host the data needed to get started. Anyone could set up a new community with a minimum of means. If technique used is standardized (and open) and gained popularity, service providers could even create hosting packages that do the hosting of your internet 'home' for you for a small monthly fee, so you don't have to bother with setting up your own device (although you could, and should always be able to). This kind of concept probably exists of course. The challenge lies in getting it both technologically feasible for mass-scale adoption, and simple enough for anyone to participate. Still, doesn't this make sense for a future were we won't be as depended on a handful of commercial silos?

anigbrowl 9y ago

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

cyphunk 9y ago

Did we get to this point of fragmentation due to smart phones and their walled garden philosophy? People stopped making applications for the sake of interoperability. ... if RealAudio™ was founded today it'd be king. Or is facebook to blame? John Gilmore famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- he was wrong, censorship just has to wait for the right monopoly to appear. And with the success of monopoly interoperability becomes its casualty

losteric 9y ago
Amazon and Facebook, to me, are symptoms of a deeper problem: Technology is still hard. We're building complex large-scale products because the non-technical consumers can't use the simple small-scale products. We're here because it's convenient, not because it's good. I always felt that Google should have created simple tools for web publishing and creating personal walled-gardens - make the web personal for 7 billion non-technical humans, and the brands they consume. Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo. G+ copied Facebook when they should have studied why people were using Facebook instead of the open web. Don't make the problem worse, fixed those problems; take the role of guardian of the internet. Create or support standard APIs, release relevant IP/research, and bankroll SV startups that build the tools to publish or consume through the open web. Google is still an ad/search company that relies on the open web. They need to protect it and drive further innovation. What happens after the coming adpocalypse - micropayments? Subscription bundles? Who knows? Or, perhaps we'll be chained to ads forever because we'll be locked into walled-garden apps... what a hell that would be. Are there any companies working in this space? Closest I've seen is Squarespace, and even then... not really...
- callumlocke 9y ago
  > Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo. I guess Wordpress is an example. It's got a hosted plan, which requires little more computer literacy than Facebook, and you can also leave at any time and self-host the software, which keeps the hosted offering honest. But it's just not as contagious as something like Facebook. That's the problem, Facebook isn't just more 'convenient' than self-hosted tools, it also has your friends tagging you in photos.

catern 9y ago

I still use NNTP every day. I've never used Usenet, but it's very useful (through Gmane and Gnus) as a way to follow mailing lists. Also, the internal forums at $DAYJOB support connecting through NNTP, which is extremely convenient. Likewise I use IRC every day, through Bitlbee, to interact with people on Facebook Messenger and other platforms. I can do all of this from my client of choice (I choose Emacs) without a problem. Admittedly this doesn't solve the problem of topicality, but I think things are better than they seem.

grogenaut 9y ago

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

elviejo 9y ago
It was possible to use and create trillian. Now I need to have slack, Hangouts and WhatsApp web open independently
- mehs 9y ago
  It kinda is possible. You can use Franz: http://meetfranz.com http://meetfranz.com
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - chrisvalleybay 9y ago
    Would trust this service, if I could read the source. I don't know what the plan with MeetFranz is, but since it isn't open source, something tells me that there at some point will be monetization involved. Monetization isn't bad, but it also will at some point cause misalignment between it and the users.

narrator 9y ago

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

newscracker 9y ago
Maybe that'd help ditch Twitter, but not Facebook. There needs to be a better (de-centralized) solution for writing that's longer that also provides the ability to add photos, videos, etc. The substitute for Facebook should be like Facebook in almost every way in terms of features to get better adoption, with improvements in several areas where Facebook is weaker.

yosito 9y ago

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

TeMPOraL 9y ago
> It's almost all controlled by some algorithm making me see what they claim I want to see. The algorithm is known as "doing what users want". Very popular with companies and even open source projects nowadays. It works like this: you do some "analytics" of your product, or look what sells for others, assume it reflects what users want (and the things that are missing are obviously not wanted by users), and do those. This algorithm ignores the fact that a lot of the time, users don't get any way to express preferences. Users buy/use what's available and what's popular. Through this algorithm, producers make choices for the consumers, and then use statistics to justify them.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Or, worse: the discerning users or customers blot out the company (or its website) and go elsewhere. A/B testing can't test for the users who aren't present.
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  Don't forget the other part that's critical for the big players: lock-in. The first thing gets them to join willingly. The second coerces them to stay. A one-two punch for a acquiring and keeping market share with high margins.

willhackett 9y ago

I'm very much for this. I have five messaging apps, two email clients, three file storage apps and a news reader all on my iPhone - just to stay in touch. It's hard to stay organised when businesses use different technologies across different platforms and there's no single place just for "Messages". I don't care how the message is sent, I just want to make sure it gets to the right person.

balladeer 9y ago

Whenever I come across a new Twitter handle I think of following I first run it through http://www.tweetstats.com http://www.tweetstats.com. I check one simple data there: Number of tweets per day (tpd); and also maybe tweets per month (tpm) If the handle is churning out more than ~10 tweets per day I tend to stay away. Because if even a couple of hanldes I follow crosses 30 tpd or so my feed will pretty much become pointless unless I am glued to my feed all the time and I would miss a lot of good content. Another big problem is repeated content as the article suggests - I follow a quite some literary Twitter handles and longform handles. Everyday I come across just too many tweets that link to the same article. What is worse sometimes the same handles tweet about the same articles repeatedly (to get more views I reckon) with different texts. I usually end up unfollowing many of those handles and that means I actually going to miss a lot of content that I would have otherwise liked but in a moderate dose, at a slower pace. I request my friends/family members to remove me form there WhatsApp broadcast lists and after sometime I simply tell them if they don't stop with that daily "Good Morning/Evening" forwards and all that crap I am simple gonna block them. I wish WhatsApp let me remove myself from all the broadcast lists I am added to or let me choose that I don't want to receive broadcast messagegs at all (if they can't/won't make it granular). I've completed given up on Facebook. Sometimes it shows me posts that I've marked hide like five times. It never keeps my friends photos, self written text posts on top but all those video and silly article shares, those annoying and mostly unfunny memes. In fact they have a limit I guess (haven't really used them in a while) and the personal posts get drowned in the mass market noise. Maybe the problem is we talk of Internet being decentralised but we are all try to find that decentralized Internet at any one place or vert few places - be it Twitter, or Facebook, Google. We are adopting the social networks, content sources wrong... maybe.

peterwwillis 9y ago

Elon Musk said that as time passes, technology continuously degrades, not improves, if people don't make a hard effort to keep improving it. The Egyptians knew how to build giant pyramids, and forgot how. The Romans built fantastic aqueducts, and forgot how. We built vehicles that landed on the moon in the 60s, and the next vehicle we built could only go into earth orbit, and then we no longer even had a vehicle that could do that. Today, for some reason, everyone thinks that writing software for a platform on a platform on a platform with no interconnecting standards or protocols is a great idea. Instead of trying to improve people's lives, we're just making things needlessly complex, buggy, and bloaty. You need 8 gigs of ram minimum just to browse the web, and god forbid you want to do something like back up your data. I was just in a meeting where nobody could get Google's video conferencing to work. Instead of building internet technology, we build web technology. The web is harder to write software for. It's an ephemeral, inconsistent, difficult thing. But if we try really hard, we can turn the tide on the unnecessarily complex box we've forced ourselves into. The proposed fixes are good ideas, but they're bandaids on axe wounds. There are much deeper problems going on that won't be fixed by a feature add or a pivot. We need a re-evaluation of all internet-based technology, how we develop it, how we incorporate it into our lives, and what we want as a society from it.

txmx2000 9y ago
Musk never knew how to make a good electric car people want to buy so I guess he has nothing to worry about.
ukyrgf 9y ago
Every time I use the word 'web developer' to describe myself, I feel a little pang wishing I was actually designing the internet.
themacguffinman 9y ago
I'm skeptical the Egyptians simply "forgot" how to build giant pyramids (especially as pyramid construction seems to be well-documented today). It seems more likely that the age of pharoahs ended and giant pyramid construction was no longer an important skill. Technology hadn't "degraded", it had adapted. Just like we didn't forget how to build lunar vehicles, we just decided that it wasn't worth it in its current state. It's still very possible to do another moon landing, it will just cost a ton of money that corporations won't risk and governments won't spend without a clear political goal like the old space race. Space technology isn't degrading, it's becoming more cost-oriented. A SpaceX rocket only reached orbit but it was relatively very cheap. Cost efficiency helps space technology reach more people and create greater impact, ultimately making the technology more valuable to society. It's the same with the web. You say that the web is bloated "instead of trying to improve people's lives" but the reason the web platform is so heavy is because the platform is rapidly adding features and APIs and tools that make it easier for developers of all skill levels to make complicated applications. Letting more developers make stuff in less time improves people's lives. Maintaining backward compatibility at the cost of bloat also improves people's lives. Society has been constantly evaluating the web and it has consistently reached the same conclusions: RAM is cheaper than developers, a slower platform with a bigger audience is worth dealing with over multiple native platforms, and weird legacy stuff is fine if it means we can run 15 year old websites.

cylinder 9y ago

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

pmlnr 9y ago
This. It's because of smartphones. People don't write things on smartphones, it's tedious.
- cylinder 9y ago
  It also brought a lot of people online who previously were not. Desktops were stashed in some room, one per household, and laptops were still seen as somewhat nerdy or work related.

nippples 9y ago

Now we have great discussion forums and link aggregators where a small group of moderators rule over a very large number of places and will frequently go on power trips, dominate discussion (or coddle a power user) and, not rarely enough, engage in doxxing. One thing that keeps me returning to YC is that I'm not even reminded of the existence of moderators over here.

Mathnerd314 9y ago

If you want to focus on something, just google it - depending on what it is you'll get Wikipedia, some blog posts, and maybe a book or two on the subject. What Facebook / Twitter / Blogger / etc. are good for is providing context - why should I be interested in something. Generally it's as simple as "I like Mr. X and he's interested in Y". They're also reasonable at finding new topics to explore, although if you dive deep enough it turns out that everything is interconnected and you'll find it anyway. It's really hard to define "topic" or "noise" in a way that isn't based on search keywords or (facets of) people.

rakoo 9y ago

This is partly what weboob (http://weboob.org http://weboob.org) wants to solve, or at least work around. Its goal is to pull the web out of browsers (hence the name): - each website is handled by a module that does all the scraping, or uses the api if needed - each module provides one or more capabilities, such as "list an account transactions" (typically for your bank or your mobile provider) or "receive and send messages" (such as HN or reddit or tinder) - applications plug into those capabilities and give the user functionalities, regardless of the website. You can list the schedule for your bus just as well as the schedule for carpoolings. One of the applications is actually a daemon with the capability to send and receive messages (with threading and all) and sends messages to the email adress of your choice; you can also configure it as an smtp mta, which means you can use any mail client and interact with all your discussion websites without ever opening the browser. Obviously this is not a perfect solution for OP's problems, but it seems to me it's going in the right direction. Oh and it doesn't stop at websites; I use it for sending RSS feeds to my email in the background.

irq 9y ago
This looks really cool, but I found it distracting to see the word "boob" in all the app names.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I'd be inclined to ignore it, but then I saw this on the carousel: "QHandJoob - You are unemployed? Use this application to search job offers!" This naming convention is a sure-fire way to lose a big chunk of potential users.
xerophyte12932 9y ago
Am I the only one who read the name and thought this was a porn site? I think the service would reach a greater audience with a simpler name. (Btw I still don't get how the creator wants me to read the name and what it means)
- CM30 9y ago

d--b 9y ago

As much as I really liked using IRC back in the day, I still think I spent way too much time on it. I mean you got to know the people there, and after a couple of years most discussions were like office conversations. Plus the takeovers, the trolls, the noobs, the never ending screwing around with the bots, etc. I've never done much newsgroups because I didn't like public speaking without anonymity. ICQ and others were like today's WhatsApp and hangout. I didn't use a single interface for them at the time, and still don't today, I don't see a big difference. Today, I'm off Facebook, I barely follow twitter at all. I'm fine with reading hacker news, and other tech news aggregators. I think you can lament on the disappearance of RSS, but to me, that's just about the main issue. I guess the big difference between then and now is that we used to control better what we opted in. Now we're more force fed.

agumonkey 9y ago
Good points, especially the last point. I approach "internet" differently these days. I have twitter for high freq thin data, reddit for a bit more dense information~. For deeper information I could read serious journals, books. But I rarely need that, or am not capable of digesting it. The force fed thing is inherent to the change of importance and structure of the web.. Remember when Google was an entry point to the mess and not the conductor ?
- d--b 9y ago
  Exactly, there used to be a reason why we called these things "browsers"
lyra_comms 9y ago
Have a go with Lyra (hellolyra.com), it's designed to be an efficient use of your time rather than a sink for time, trolling and harrassment.
- uhhhhhhh 9y ago
  https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png Looks like a quip/discourse clone from a 10 second look. Not sure why another product offering relatively the same service solves anything.

tovkal 9y ago

"Nowadays we have people instead of topics. I have nothing against people, but maybe, if I follow a great software architect, I'd like to hear what he's got to say about software, not about other shits." That's so true. I want to follow some people on Twitter because sometimes they tweet very useful things, but the amount of "noise"/tweets I don't care about is too high. Tons of people put very good info on Twitter because is quick and easy compared to writing a blog post.

Mooty 9y ago

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

hobofan 9y ago
The people want a working web. They don't care if it's centralized or decentralized, and most probably never even lost a thought about it. "Techies" think that they know better because they are the first to be impacted and have noticed the shortcomings of a centralized web.

lyra_comms 9y ago

We are working to restore the openness of online discussion with Lyra: www.hellolyra.com. We aim to provide helpful services for conversation, not to get users addicted. We have made the choice to focus around people and conversations rather than topics (because Lyra is designed to be harrassment-proof, and topics lead easily to harrassment - you don't see this so much in the tech world but in the mainstream it's a huge problem). We are currently thinking about the best way to do notification aggregation (Facebook does this very badly - several comments on the same conversation will give you several different notifications) and marking-as-read. We have several interesting options in test at the moment.

d--b 9y ago
Just some thoughts: putting the full message in the discussion tree means that people will tend to write shorter / comment-like messages, and not in-depth argumentations. On the other end, having only a tree of authors is a bit to slim, cause you have to read the content of each message to know what's going on. I think people who reply to a thread should give it a "reply title". You know it's the same thread, but you can have an idea of the content with the reply title.
- lyra_comms 9y ago
  Thanks for your thoughts! Are you suggesting that every reply should have a title?

OliverJones 9y ago

The internet era our author mentions was not dominated by companies whose investors measure success by "engagement" -- that is, by wasting our time. FB and Twitter measure success by engagement. That means they don't have the incentive to organize our information and save us time. (Gotta go... Hacker News is about to tell me to get back to work!)

cryptos 9y ago

I think this is related to monetization, since the web gets "louder" to attract advertising consumers. Most companies are actually advertising companies and the users are just part of the product (sold to advertisers). Maybe we need more paid services - and the will to pay. I'm thinking about creating a hierarchical forum like the usenet, but I'm sceptical whether this would earn enough money to work in the long run.

dredmorbius 9y ago

"There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilivy, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." Anonymous publisher, as quoted by Hamilton Holt, Commercialism and Journalism, 1909. https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/20/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...

sullyj3 9y ago

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

Semiapies 9y ago

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

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

SZJX 9y ago

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

type0 9y ago

> Incidentally, this is not a call for the open internet; I could not care less if there's a leading provider for content, as long as such content is accessible in a standard way. There is such a provider and it's called Facebook, that is if you don't care about the open internet is exactly what you get.