9 ms·

Useful? I would argue that it's actually a lot less useful today.

by inetknght 9y ago

jgtrosh 9y ago
Please do ! I'll gladly remove this comment if you give an outline to your argument.
- inetknght 9y ago
  Okay, I'll clarify. Is it more useful? Yeah, depending on what you want to do. But it's also a hell of a lot more dangerous. It's especially more dangerous if you're not careful. + Google Search is about as good now as it was back in 2007. I like that its interface has (largely) changed. + Google Maps with smooth scroll is nice, and its integration to 3d street view is nice too. + 1990s MapQuest without AJAX was nice though, in its own way. Even with Google's smooth scrolling, the only real thing Google Maps has going for it is IMO a cleaner display. + Wikipedia's generally better today than 10 years ago, yes. + Airline websites are a nightmare to use. Try getting an optimal route that doesn't use a single airline; and try getting that optimal route without ended up getting spammed or surcharged. + Youtube having virtually every song is nice for some people. It's not so nice for me. The songs on there are usually pretty boring or low quality audio or video or both. I pay for a music service (di.fm) for a reason. + Reddit/HN are pretty neat. Okay, that's about where we agree (along with your comment on Facebook). Let's look at some of the downsides. - Personally, I find Reddit's method of linking to articles vs loading comments to be counter intuitive and confusing. - Ebay is still about as trustworthy as you can spit. - Amazon.com is among the crappiest web interfaces I've seen, and that's ignoring the company's history of abusing compensation and livelihoods of their employees and contractors. It's slow, extremely noisy (which contributes it to being slow), difficult to navigate, and I definitely never intend to buy from the marketplace specifically because I might as well have bought stuff from ebay. - Just about every website has tracking up the wazoo. That contributes to a slower web experience both in bandwidth cost as well as hardware performance. Not everyone has a wonderfully new computer to handle all that. And if you're in America, chances are pretty good that your bandwidth is sub-par as well. - Email. Why do we still have to deal with phishing and tracking? This is something that has been around pretty much since HTML was introduced to email. - Instant Messaging. Slack and Discord are the newcomers but they're also somehow the best. They're popular because they get it "right"; it's super easy to text, talk, video, share files, share screens, etc. But they also get it wrong. That Electron UI has got to be the one of the biggest memory behemoths I've ever seen. Both are yet more walled gardens. - The newer versions of Skype are absolutely dysfunctional compared to the older versions, MSN was better, AIM is (was) better, even IRC does file transfer better more reliably (although optional and clunkier). - Mobile Apps. JFC banks going to mobile apps when the marketplaces are full of fake apps. This is absolutely not user friendly. Build on top of that the fact that phone numbers are super easy to fake or steal and you've got a clusterf!@# personal security nightmare just waiting to happen. - Phones, operating systems, applications which track absolutely everything you do. It eats up my bandwidth, my system resources, and provides no visible benefit to me whatsoever. What happens when someone figures out how to track what I say to whom and when, and use that to "guide" me to buy things? I could go on and on about more stuff but I don't care to at the moment.
  - inetknght 9y ago
    I'm just going to leave this here... https://tttthreads.com/thread/927593460642615296 https://tttthreads.com/thread/927593460642615296
- shliachtx 9y ago
  This is kind of meta, but I think we'd be better served if you wouldn't remove the comment even if proven wrong. It serves everyone better to see both sides of the argument. It would be more appropriate to reply conceding that your initial argument was incorrect, or to add a note on the bottom of your original comment indicating the same.
  - jgtrosh 9y ago
    Sorry, "this comment" referred to itself, I did not post the parent comment. The conversation should not be hidden, just this barely useful meta comment.
- inetknght 9y ago
  Hey, I'm putting some thought into a more thorough reply. I have a reply partially written at home but am now at the office lol. I see the comment thread has garnered a lot of replies in the intervening time though, so I'll just post a quick tl;dr: okay yes the web is more "useful" to most people, and maybe only slightly more useful to me, but that usefulness is significantly offset by some majorly-serious concerns about privacy, performance, and reliability. I'll have a better reply later :)
jasode 9y ago
I grew up with 1980s dial-up modems (slow 300 baud!) to dial directly into BBS systems and USENET. I then continued dialup access into the early internet (GNN not AOL) in 1995. I now have Verizon fiber optic. To me, the modern web today is better in virtually every way compared to 1990s web surfing. + Google search engine is better than Alta Vista and Excite. + Google Maps with smooth scroll, 3D streetview, and satellite view is better than the clunky 1990s MapQuest without AJAX. Google Maps also uses colors to highlight traffic congestion. + Wikipedia is better than the non-existent online encylopedias of 1990s + airline websites now bring up a graphical map of the airplane and let you click on the actual seat you want. When I booked etickets from airline websites in 1998, it was just rudimentary ticket purchase. + youtube obviously has videos but it also has virtually every song. If some music forum mentions an obscure song, I think to myself that someone else may have already uploaded it to youtube. Sure enough, 99% of the time, it's there. It's even better than Spotify in that respect. + discussion websites like reddit/HN are better than Usenet. The better replies are voted and sorted at the top. I learned a lot of C Language from USENET "comp.lang.c" in the 1980s and I'm jealous that today's programmers have StackOverflow which is better. Again, the superior answers are voted to the top. + Amazon.com also made the UI better. In 1990s, they didn't have "Look Inside" feature to see sample pages of books. I use that all the time. One thing they did make worse is you now have to manually click "see all 50 reviews" to read all reviews; I assume they did that to prevent web scrapers. In any case, Amazon is good enough that I stopped wasting gas driving to Barnes & Noble. I'm having a hard time thinking of a 1990s web experience that's superior to now. I can only assume that a big part of why some think that today's web is worse has to do with Facebook and its walled garden. To those people, the web feels "less open". Well, I don't have a Facebook account and none of my longtime friends do either. Therefore, it doesn't feel like the web is any less open to me. The web is more useful now in 2017 than 2007. And back in 2007, it was more useful than 1997.
- snerbles 9y ago
  Respectfully disagree on more votes == better. Visible score systems often lead to groupthink, and commenters aiming for the lowest common denominator in the form of karma whoring. While HN has some measures to reduce hivemind voting, it's quite rampant on the default subreddits.
icantdrive55 9y ago
I don't know the exact date, but the internet did have a few very Golden years. Yes, some of us were in denial over our downloading, but it was fun. Now--it's just different. Not worse, but different. I don't like the conformity of websites, nor the big players that dominate/destroy any/all competition.
vacri 9y ago
I take it that you weren't using the web in the era of webrings?
JohnBooty 9y ago
I think the Internet's gotten worse in general (and, specifically, less useful) over the last decade except for one thing: YouTube is insanely useful for learning how to do basic household stuff, minor car repairs, that kind of thing. Insane. Mundane? Yeah, but life is like at least 50% handling mundane shit like that. Maybe 90%. Maybe 95%? Want to know how to repair some brick stairs in front of your house? Sharpen a lawnmower blade? Mulch a garden? Seal a driveway? Change the cabin air filter on a 2008 Mazda 3? Make pancakes using campsite cooking tools? Multiple videos for each. Perhaps even dozens.
- crispytx 9y ago
  Exactly, we're in the golden age of vlogging.
- indubitable 9y ago
  YouTube is also incredible for educational stuff. There's very pop science, pop science, hard science, and then things like hundreds of lectures from Leonard Susskind on everything from classical mechanics to the latest happenings in string theory/m-theory. Phenomenal stuff, but it seems like the things that most places (universities in particular) are still holding out on are things like problem sets. Hard to know how little you know until you have materials challenging your depth of understanding. Watching a lecture without doing associated problems is like trying to learn to play basketball without touching a basketball.
- blt 9y ago
  Yes. I think Youtube inherited the culture of the old web. Lots of amazing channels about obscure interests. Household repairs but also welding, machining, woodworking, electronics repair, obscure retro tech, distilling, etc. I guess it forces the presenter's personality into the spotlight a bit more than pure text and images. Probably attracts a slightly different kind of person. But I think the same spirit is there.

Useful? I would argue that it's actually a lot less useful today.

jgtrosh 9y ago

Please do ! I'll gladly remove this comment if you give an outline to your argument.

inetknght 9y ago
Okay, I'll clarify. Is it more useful? Yeah, depending on what you want to do. But it's also a hell of a lot more dangerous. It's especially more dangerous if you're not careful. + Google Search is about as good now as it was back in 2007. I like that its interface has (largely) changed. + Google Maps with smooth scroll is nice, and its integration to 3d street view is nice too. + 1990s MapQuest without AJAX was nice though, in its own way. Even with Google's smooth scrolling, the only real thing Google Maps has going for it is IMO a cleaner display. + Wikipedia's generally better today than 10 years ago, yes. + Airline websites are a nightmare to use. Try getting an optimal route that doesn't use a single airline; and try getting that optimal route without ended up getting spammed or surcharged. + Youtube having virtually every song is nice for some people. It's not so nice for me. The songs on there are usually pretty boring or low quality audio or video or both. I pay for a music service (di.fm) for a reason. + Reddit/HN are pretty neat. Okay, that's about where we agree (along with your comment on Facebook). Let's look at some of the downsides. - Personally, I find Reddit's method of linking to articles vs loading comments to be counter intuitive and confusing. - Ebay is still about as trustworthy as you can spit. - Amazon.com is among the crappiest web interfaces I've seen, and that's ignoring the company's history of abusing compensation and livelihoods of their employees and contractors. It's slow, extremely noisy (which contributes it to being slow), difficult to navigate, and I definitely never intend to buy from the marketplace specifically because I might as well have bought stuff from ebay. - Just about every website has tracking up the wazoo. That contributes to a slower web experience both in bandwidth cost as well as hardware performance. Not everyone has a wonderfully new computer to handle all that. And if you're in America, chances are pretty good that your bandwidth is sub-par as well. - Email. Why do we still have to deal with phishing and tracking? This is something that has been around pretty much since HTML was introduced to email. - Instant Messaging. Slack and Discord are the newcomers but they're also somehow the best. They're popular because they get it "right"; it's super easy to text, talk, video, share files, share screens, etc. But they also get it wrong. That Electron UI has got to be the one of the biggest memory behemoths I've ever seen. Both are yet more walled gardens. - The newer versions of Skype are absolutely dysfunctional compared to the older versions, MSN was better, AIM is (was) better, even IRC does file transfer better more reliably (although optional and clunkier). - Mobile Apps. JFC banks going to mobile apps when the marketplaces are full of fake apps. This is absolutely not user friendly. Build on top of that the fact that phone numbers are super easy to fake or steal and you've got a clusterf!@# personal security nightmare just waiting to happen. - Phones, operating systems, applications which track absolutely everything you do. It eats up my bandwidth, my system resources, and provides no visible benefit to me whatsoever. What happens when someone figures out how to track what I say to whom and when, and use that to "guide" me to buy things? I could go on and on about more stuff but I don't care to at the moment.
- inetknght 9y ago
  I'm just going to leave this here... https://tttthreads.com/thread/927593460642615296 https://tttthreads.com/thread/927593460642615296
shliachtx 9y ago
This is kind of meta, but I think we'd be better served if you wouldn't remove the comment even if proven wrong. It serves everyone better to see both sides of the argument. It would be more appropriate to reply conceding that your initial argument was incorrect, or to add a note on the bottom of your original comment indicating the same.
- jgtrosh 9y ago
  Sorry, "this comment" referred to itself, I did not post the parent comment. The conversation should not be hidden, just this barely useful meta comment.
inetknght 9y ago
Hey, I'm putting some thought into a more thorough reply. I have a reply partially written at home but am now at the office lol. I see the comment thread has garnered a lot of replies in the intervening time though, so I'll just post a quick tl;dr: okay yes the web is more "useful" to most people, and maybe only slightly more useful to me, but that usefulness is significantly offset by some majorly-serious concerns about privacy, performance, and reliability. I'll have a better reply later :)

jasode 9y ago

I grew up with 1980s dial-up modems (slow 300 baud!) to dial directly into BBS systems and USENET. I then continued dialup access into the early internet (GNN not AOL) in 1995. I now have Verizon fiber optic. To me, the modern web today is better in virtually every way compared to 1990s web surfing. + Google search engine is better than Alta Vista and Excite. + Google Maps with smooth scroll, 3D streetview, and satellite view is better than the clunky 1990s MapQuest without AJAX. Google Maps also uses colors to highlight traffic congestion. + Wikipedia is better than the non-existent online encylopedias of 1990s + airline websites now bring up a graphical map of the airplane and let you click on the actual seat you want. When I booked etickets from airline websites in 1998, it was just rudimentary ticket purchase. + youtube obviously has videos but it also has virtually every song. If some music forum mentions an obscure song, I think to myself that someone else may have already uploaded it to youtube. Sure enough, 99% of the time, it's there. It's even better than Spotify in that respect. + discussion websites like reddit/HN are better than Usenet. The better replies are voted and sorted at the top. I learned a lot of C Language from USENET "comp.lang.c" in the 1980s and I'm jealous that today's programmers have StackOverflow which is better. Again, the superior answers are voted to the top. + Amazon.com also made the UI better. In 1990s, they didn't have "Look Inside" feature to see sample pages of books. I use that all the time. One thing they did make worse is you now have to manually click "see all 50 reviews" to read all reviews; I assume they did that to prevent web scrapers. In any case, Amazon is good enough that I stopped wasting gas driving to Barnes & Noble. I'm having a hard time thinking of a 1990s web experience that's superior to now. I can only assume that a big part of why some think that today's web is worse has to do with Facebook and its walled garden. To those people, the web feels "less open". Well, I don't have a Facebook account and none of my longtime friends do either. Therefore, it doesn't feel like the web is any less open to me. The web is more useful now in 2017 than 2007. And back in 2007, it was more useful than 1997.

snerbles 9y ago
Respectfully disagree on more votes == better. Visible score systems often lead to groupthink, and commenters aiming for the lowest common denominator in the form of karma whoring. While HN has some measures to reduce hivemind voting, it's quite rampant on the default subreddits.

icantdrive55 9y ago

I don't know the exact date, but the internet did have a few very Golden years. Yes, some of us were in denial over our downloading, but it was fun. Now--it's just different. Not worse, but different. I don't like the conformity of websites, nor the big players that dominate/destroy any/all competition.

vacri 9y ago

I take it that you weren't using the web in the era of webrings?

JohnBooty 9y ago

I think the Internet's gotten worse in general (and, specifically, less useful) over the last decade except for one thing: YouTube is insanely useful for learning how to do basic household stuff, minor car repairs, that kind of thing. Insane. Mundane? Yeah, but life is like at least 50% handling mundane shit like that. Maybe 90%. Maybe 95%? Want to know how to repair some brick stairs in front of your house? Sharpen a lawnmower blade? Mulch a garden? Seal a driveway? Change the cabin air filter on a 2008 Mazda 3? Make pancakes using campsite cooking tools? Multiple videos for each. Perhaps even dozens.

crispytx 9y ago
Exactly, we're in the golden age of vlogging.
indubitable 9y ago
YouTube is also incredible for educational stuff. There's very pop science, pop science, hard science, and then things like hundreds of lectures from Leonard Susskind on everything from classical mechanics to the latest happenings in string theory/m-theory. Phenomenal stuff, but it seems like the things that most places (universities in particular) are still holding out on are things like problem sets. Hard to know how little you know until you have materials challenging your depth of understanding. Watching a lecture without doing associated problems is like trying to learn to play basketball without touching a basketball.
blt 9y ago
Yes. I think Youtube inherited the culture of the old web. Lots of amazing channels about obscure interests. Household repairs but also welding, machining, woodworking, electronics repair, obscure retro tech, distilling, etc. I guess it forces the presenter's personality into the spotlight a bit more than pure text and images. Probably attracts a slightly different kind of person. But I think the same spirit is there.