12 ms·

The Internet I Knew (2014)

200 points by luu 9y ago

montrose 9y ago
This description of the old days is actually a fairly accurate description of HN now.
- zbentley 9y ago
  Kinda, except HN exists and is popular largely due to YC's popularity, which is very closely tied to the new style of ad-financed, VC-linked, revenue oriented social networks. For the record, I don't think that's a good or bad thing. Just a reality of this community.
- klez 9y ago
  On old forums (at least the ones I was part of) the community was usually small, and you knew most users and what they thought. Instead on hn most of the comments I see are from people I don't think I ever read from before. Also, here we don't officially have PMs or an official IRC channel, both of which were major parts of the communities I remember (most of the stuff actually happened on IRC, not on the forums).
  - Goladus 9y ago
    Even the visual design of HN (grey usernames in a smaller font) minimizes identity in favor of the content. Also, for whatever reason, convention seems to favor all-lowercase names.
  - veddox 9y ago
    Absolutely. HN isn't about meeting people, it's about discussing ideas. A very worthwhile objective in its own right, but the two shouldn't be confused.
- archagon 9y ago
  I personally find that threaded discussion substantially worsens the social aspects. When the “best” comments float to the top, any topic turns into soapbox vs. soapbox and actual conversation rapidly breaks down. Social norms are also reinforced and very little change happens in practice. In a linear discussion, topics don’t die when they reach the width of the page. People can go back and forth on an idea for days or weeks. I believe this property is very important for fostering bonds and maintaining a community spirit. Otherwise, everyone just becomes a collection of their pet ideas.
isostatic 9y ago
And 10 years earlier we had irc and usenet. But be under no illusions - I ran a Star Trek site in the late 90s that had adverts on, every month or so I'd get a cheque trough the post. In dollars. My bank were somewhat confused about how to cash foreign currency cheques into a child account.
- Semaphor 9y ago
  I ran a forum with a decent amount of users as a kid some 15 years ago. We had no ads but once a year when the bills came through we'd have a donation drive to cover the hosting fees and sometimes upgrade our (paid) forum software. Was always weird when people sent letters with cash from all over the DACH area to me ;)
  - marklyon 9y ago
    I had a similar experience with my BBS. We did UUCP with some rather remote nodes and I had 11 incoming lines (the maximum BellSouth would install in a residence) so the bills were not trivial. Each month I’d post the prior month’s bill total and small checks and envelopes of cash would show up in my post office box soon after. It never made a wild profit, but there were only a couple of months where we couldn’t cover the bills.
waytogo 9y ago
OT: I don't get social networks. Till today, I don't see any value in real name social networks like Facebook. They should present content I want but they don't, they show upvoted content from my connections which is wrong from a consumer and entertainment perspective. My friends like or share mostly content of people because those people are kind of high-profile in their circles. Not because they post good content. The typical example, we all know, is some boring dude working at a VC that just raised a new fund who hourly posts really crappy content on FB and gets hundreds of likes every single time. Now, guess why. This happens all the time, everyday, every minute, just go to your FB feed right now and check how many of those high-status animals post again and again some random content which is liked and shared by too many likers. So, the status of my connections determine which (lousy) content I have to see? No thanks and this is why I prefer interest-driven platforms such as HN.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  Unfortunately, you missed out on the brief time in history when they did exactly what you were asking for. MySpace had no likes and no algorithm to filter your activity. Neither did Facebook for several years, nor did LiveJournal (and all the other social blogging platforms), or even Instagram at first.
  - waytogo 9y ago
    > they did exactly what you were asking for No, MySpace and Facebook didn't what I was asking for because they didn't have any feed then. With MySpace and Facebook in its early days, I could just stalk profiles and both didn't serve me any content based on my interest. On MySpace I could browse through some music genres but this is not my understanding of an interest-driven site.
    - yoz-y 9y ago
      Twitter has had a feed from the beginning and served you content you wanted, as long as you subscribed to the right people. It still does, as long as you only follow a few people.
nerdponx 9y ago
The difference is who owns and pays for what. Running a centralized application for more than a few people on donations and goodwill is a challenge. This is why I am a huge fan of distributed and federated networks. The idea of you and your buddies being able to split a dream host subscription, but instead of being locked into your own forum hangout, you can interact with a whole global network of fellow self posters and VPS renters. We are in the early days of high-quality federated interaction for non-nerds, but we will get there.
- lyra_comms 9y ago
  An open conversation service needs to be open to all, not just people with tech skills; we need to prevent large numbers of people feeling locked out of discourse, or left behind. Also, many of the distributed/federated services we've looked at have rapidly devolved into niche communities often centred around sexual content. These two reasons lead us to think that a centralised service is more open and approachable.
  - slipstream- 9y ago
    With regards to mastodon, there's at least one hosting service specifically for it already (https://masto.host https://masto.host), and people who don't know that much about the Linux command line/etc have set up their own instances using it.
    - lyra_comms 9y ago
      I know it's hard to see it this way when one is into tech, but many of my non-tech friends (artists, philosophers, retail...) would balk at this. We believe using a communication tool needs to be as easy as entering a URL and logging in - friendly, familiar, no new terminology.
      - __s 9y ago
        Sorry, but that doesn't fly in a technocracy. Oh well, just bow before the Google/Amazon/Facebook/Apple overlords
lyra_comms 9y ago
Our team (mostly cognitive scientists and engineers) is nostalgic about the past of online communication and concerned about its future. Our platform, Lyra, provides support for effective conversations rather than social networking and advertising. You can read our history of online convesation - and more about our approach - here: www.hellolyra.com/introduction
- nofilter 9y ago
  But why does all the free and open stuff look so bad. I mean seriously, Lyra is in dire need for someone with a UX/UI background to join their team.
  - lyra_comms 9y ago
    As a nonprofit, we operate on grants and revenue alone, not investment. We'd love to hear some specific feedback on what you think could be improved about our UI :) We also think we're not doing too badly compared to Reddit and Hacker News!
    - 60654 9y ago
      Not the parent, but I have two specific suggestions about the on boarding process. One, please add a directory (feed?) of public conversations that can be viewed without logging in. I want to see how the platform is used by other people and whether that fits me - but if you ask me to create an account first, I'm going to bounce. Two, here on HN you say the team is mostly cog sci and engg people, which sounds awesome and piques my curiosity about why you made this. But the web site itself doesn't mention that, or anything about the people behind it. Please add an 'about the team' page so that I can understand more about the people who are inviting me to use their platform. Hope this helps!
      - lyra_comms 9y ago
        Thanks, we will add a page about the team. We have been thinking carefully about whether to include a public conversation feed. Public communications are not Lyra's central use case, and as most conversations are private at the moment, such a feed would be quite sparse. As a nonprofit which is not funded by advertising, it is not our main goal to support viewers without an account. There is no charge to sign up.
nimbius 9y ago
call me nostalgic, but i refuse to let go of that internet. There are plenty of alternatives that dont get a multi billion dollar TV ad blitz, and theyre worth checking out https://freenode.net https://freenode.net for a classic IRC experience, free of charge. https://mastodon.social/about https://mastodon.social/about for a distributed open source twitter-like experience https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/ for an alternative to facebook that respects your privacy.
- dijit 9y ago
  I maintain to this day a personal IRC network. Many of us have been “together” for over a decade. In fact I just tried to advocate self-hosted communities at CCC. So I’m also stuck in the past and refuse to let the internet go. But I have two points I’d like to mention. 1) Forums are dead for almost all but the biggest communities that surround a product of some kind. Social forums are simply dead. 2) As an IRC-user mentioned at the CCC. Facebook is the new telephone number. It’s significantly easier to ask for a Facebook friend request than a phone number and that edge will keep Facebook relevant even if we saw a rise in self-hosted or segmented interest driven communities.
  - pault 9y ago
    Spam is the reason Facebook is currently the easiest way to get in touch with someone. Otherwise you could just put your email address in a publicly searchable database. It seems like we need a service that provides the verification and permission based communication model of Facebook but without the public feeds, virtue signaling, and political garbage.
    - Goladus 9y ago
      Spam drove people to Facebook even in the early days. When Facebook first came out, spam filtering was far less effective than it is today. Also, for whatever reason, people trusted Facebook and would post private things there that they wouldn't post on pseudonymous forums.
    - 9y ago
agentultra 9y ago
I recall being a bit confused about the terms, "social web," and "social network" when they were beginning to be bandied about to discuss Flickr and Facebook et al. The Internet was already a social network. You had irc, nntp, http, ftp, etc etc... communication protocols. For communicating with other humans. The only thing Facebook did, in my experience, was make the web anti-social. I distinctly recall when my group of friends had stopped calling around each week to figure out what we were going to do on the weekend. I was calling people to find out what they were up to... and I got that condescending call to action, just get on Facebook. So I did. I tried it for about a year or two. And it didn't make the web any better or more social for me. It would recommend events to attend and I'd go... but people would just be in their cliques not talking to anyone outside of their groups. Even learning about upcoming concerts and events required a Facebook account. People stopped calling and hanging out. It was all very passive: like, like, comment, meme, har, har. So I closed down my Facebook account and haven't used it since 2009 or so. The "social web" has only become more anti-social. Most of these web services made quite a lot of interesting innovations and such but I can't help but wonder what the web would've been like if we'd stayed true to its roots and improved the protocols and infrastructure instead of centralizing everything behind walled gardens.
- lyra_comms 9y ago
  It's absolutely hearbreaking to see the independence, critical thinking and self-determination that Western society has been building up since the Enlightenment, weakening under the forces of big data and targeted advertising. Communication should be open, profit should not be involved in discourse, and advertising should not corrode conversation. Viva la revolucion! www.hellolyra.com/introduction
  - ukulele 9y ago
    > advertising should not corrode conversation. You really followed this with a link to your website?
    - pipio21 9y ago
jancsika 9y ago
> Those "social networks" were small, and never made front-page news (or any news at all), and were more concerned with keeping to themselves than recruiting new members. And I'm supposed to be convinced that those small forums weren't anti-social in their own important ways?
- throwanem 9y ago
  Such as? It wasn't that you never brought new people in. It was that you weren't operating under a perverse incentive to bring in as many new people as you could.
  - jancsika 9y ago
    Such as being subject to the whims of random administrator/moderators and whatever random set of principles they wished to apply to their users. The most striking example I can remember was with Rick and Morty creator/writer Dan Harmon using mod powers to edit a forum user's posts to publicly humiliate the user until he/she left the forum. This was a forum for the monthly short-film festival Channel101-- a forum that is no longer alive, but it appears someone kept some of Dan's insults from that thread[1]. But that pales in comparison to more technically-oriented forums and mailing lists where insidious forms of passive-aggression flourished. These include: * making the new user feel stupid for failing to comprehend the poor documentation or poorly considered forum guidelines * making the new user feel stupid for asking a question and failing to read a relevant footnote from a message posted three years ago with an unrelated message topic * endlessly blathering on about top-posting, asking-about-asking, proper quoting, on-topic vs off-topic, reading-the-stickies, formats for uploading images/attachments, instead of making the software better so that humans don't have to deal with that bs. (The same way git makes it so that humans don't have to bicker about who gets repository permissions) * telling a user they will be ignored, then mentioning in a meta-discussion about the forum who is ignoring whom * other users rationalizing the behavior of trolls because those trolls were veteran members * general lack of mentors to help new users (if the purpose of the forum was to be a sort of community) There are of course exceptions. But I still remember the feeling of just crossing my fingers in the hopes that my query about a technical topic wouldn't trigger Socratic bombs from a forum's resident jerk. Stack Overflow proves there's a way to at least a way to discover and read relevant responses without that pain. I have no idea what the antidote to Facebook/Google is. But pining for single-point-of-failure, buggy backends serving up poor UIs with content that cannot easily bubble up to a wider audience isn't going to help. And forget the anti-social part-- you can't even technically achieve the spirit of such forums today because sock puppets and Sybil have become so sophisticated. Unless we confine ourselves to topics so ineffectual that nobody on the internet would ever decide to hate us. [1] http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Harmon/Quotes http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Harmon/Quotes
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
en-us 9y ago
You don't have to use corporate sites like Facebook and Pinterest. Check out scuttlebutt.nz for a serverless alternative, or Mastodon for one where anybody can host a server. Or just stick to forums and IRC.
- throwanem 9y ago
  No, you don't have to. But if everyone you know does, then you have to make a choice. I've had the same "just get on Facebook" experience as the article's author, and it isn't just about "what are we doing this weekend?" It's about human social behavior changing to fit the model implemented by Facebook, because Facebook tries so hard, and so successfully, to be sticky, that eventually everyone is on Facebook. If you're not, then once that's happened, you're no longer part of "everyone", because Facebook's design very successfully seeks to maximize the degree to which people prefer it as an exclusive medium of social interaction, because that's the same as maximizing its revenue stream. The people who run Facebook, and who build it, have by now gotten very, very good at doing exactly that. And their userbase is such that, whatever adverse effects their model of revenue maximization by social behavior monopolization may have, it is by now having them on about one-third of the entire human species. If we include all the other behemoths which use similar models, the fraction of humanity affected grows markedly - half? More? Yeah, I know, it sounds absurd and dystopian and like something you'd hear from an ideologue of the RMS stripe. Well, I have my differences with RMS, and we've had them out in public before now. And I'd have regarded the things I'm saying as dismissively as anyone might, if I'd heard someone saying them a few years ago. But that would've been a few years ago. Times change. It was around the time I missed the second wedding, followed by the second chance encounter with one of the parties thereto, and the second heartfelt apology, and the second "but you should really get on Facebook", that I started to really think something was up other than that everyone had just quietly and comprehensively dropped me, over the space of a few months, because I was just that unpleasant a person to have around. Sure, that was my default assumption. But it would seem unlikely in that case for the apologies to be so heartfelt, or indeed to occur at all; they needn't have, no more than the entire conversations in which they occurred, if those who made them hadn't chosen to engage when they saw me out and about. They could've quietly walked the other way. Instead they hailed me and started conversations, in order to apologize for having unintentionally snubbed me, and to warn me I'd better get on Facebook if I didn't want more of the same. So I had to think something else was up, something outside my own constant suspicion that I exist in the world purely on sufferance and should not be too surprised when that sufferance ceases - and I started looking around for what it might be. What I found was other people who'd had the same kinds of experiences that led me to start looking in the first place. People like the author of this article, who'd also watched their social circles disintegrate around them, and be reconstituted in a form which did no longer include them, in order to make a lot of money for a dozen or so thousand people mostly in California. Now I've got no problem with people making a lot of money. This is America, after all. And I don't think anyone who works for Facebook is evil, at least not in any higher proportion than the population at large; you get a few bastards in every hundred, sure, but there's no reason to imagine Facebook uniquely concentrates them somehow. But none of that changes the fact that, in the cause of building something that makes those people a lot of money, they have produced a machine for the deliberate mass modification of human social behavior, the like of which history has never yet seen. I don't know. I feel like there's nothing unreasonable in thinking such a situation has implications a bit beyond "well you don't have to use it". Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe I really am the problem here, and Facebook is just a bugaboo. Maybe that's true for everyone else with a story like mine, too. But what if it isn't? Wouldn't that seem a little dystopian to you, there being a website in a position to mediate your friendships? It seems a little dystopian to me.
fimdomeio 9y ago
my faith is that there will be a revival for this internet just like vinyl. I I dream it will be very based on physical location. Kind of a mix of mastodon with localwiki.
- throwanem 9y ago
  Optimizing for faddishness? Vinyl's been over for years.
  - r3bl 9y ago
    And yet, they just keep selling more and more of them, a year after year. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/03/record-sales-vinyl-hits-25-year-high-and-outstrips-streaming https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/03/record-sales-v... https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/01/vinyl-sales-rose-26-in-2016-see-the-25-top-selling-releases/ https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/01/vinyl-sales-rose-26-i... https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanpassman/2017/01/12/vinyl-is-officially-booming-the-new-billion-dollar-music-business/#81905e54054b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanpassman/2017/01/12/vinyl-... https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/10/04/vinyl-records-sales-2017/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/10/04/vinyl-records-sa... https://thevinylfactory.com/news/vinyl-sales-q3-2017/ https://thevinylfactory.com/news/vinyl-sales-q3-2017/
    - throwanem 9y ago
      Didn't say that selling vinyl was over. Every fad gets commercialized some time after it's peaked. In a year or two, no one will remember.
      - r3bl 9y ago
        That "in a year or two" seems to be happening since 2007 for the Vinyl industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_revival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_revival
jesperlang 9y ago
I think a more fair view of the term social media should be as a marketing term? When these tech giants were growing they needed a name to refer to them as a whole, but that name reflected what they wanted those services to be viewed as, not the effects they came to have. We see this everywhere in how labelling of things appeal to some of our inner desires -- in this case the need of social interactions -- and not necessarily accurately describing their effects. I think the main reason these services exist at all is not to create social mediums but to tap into the flows of human communication for profit. And, since their version of communication is, in the true social aspect, an incredibly crippling one compared to the rich, immersive experience of more old ways of interacting -- no wonder we can be left with a deeply dissatisfying feeling when use social media services.
darrmit 9y ago
One of the biggest differences in my mind between the Internet described in the article and the social networks of today (at least for me) is the forums and IRC channels I frequented were filled with people who genuinely enjoyed talking to one another and even cared for one another. I still have friends 15 years later that I’ve never met and so many great memories. I can’t say the same for FB or Twitter. And the “heart of a sysadmin” statement hit so close to home.
- styfle 9y ago
  In 2005, I used to be in a Battlefield 2 online community with game servers, SMF Forums, and ventrilo for VOIP. I used to play pretty regularly, but when not playing we would all talk and learn from each other. There were maybe 30 people at most from age 15 to 50 years old. The way we sustained the servers was everyone pitching in to pay maybe $5 to $15 per month. Moderation and Adminstratuon was volunteer based and people who donated had priority. We eventually became some of the most popular BF2 servers and it made for interesting social interaction when the admins had to come together to make a decision if someone was cheating or just really good. I’m sure communities like that still exist but I haven’t played many online games since then. Those were the days :)
jaysonelliot 9y ago
We had ad-free social networking in 1994, and 1984. Usenet, IRC, BBSes, MUDs… heck, remember The Well? The Internet has always had ways for people to get together and socialize. Ello invented nothing.
- nitrogen 9y ago
  BBSes sometimes had full screen ANSI art interstitial ads, too, though.
keithpeter 9y ago
OP mentions Paul Ford's tilde club [1], [2]. I really must get around to putting up one of these locally soon - if only to learn about running a Web server in the wild. How would one go about that now? [1] https://medihttp://tilde.club/um.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf https://medihttp://tilde.club/um.com/message/tilde-club-i-ha... [2] http://tilde.club/ http://tilde.club/ [infinite waiting list... suspect dead]
- veddox 9y ago
  > How would one go about that now? If you know your way about Linux and the commandline, it's not that hard. There's plenty of good tutorials out there for (almost) anything you would want to do. Renting a small VPS is not particularly expensive either. I did it this year and can only recommend it - I learnt a ton in the process :-)
  - keithpeter 9y ago
    That's a plan, thanks
- veddox 9y ago
  BTW, thanks for mentioning the tilde club! Hadn't heard about that before... A lovely passage from the Medium article: [Talking about the history of Unix] Fast forward 20 years: Your typical “cloud” Unix server, designed in the 1970s to be a very social place, is today a ghost town with one or two factories still clanking in the town square—factories that receive our email, or accept our Instagram photos and store them, and manage our data. But there’s no one walking around and chatting downtown. Thus when people talk about “cloud computing” they are talking about millions of tiny ghost towns. Ironic, because what do people build on these ghost towns but social networks.
codingdave 9y ago
> we had ad-free social networking in 2004. We had ad-free online communities in 1994... you just used telnet instead of a browser. We had BBSes in 1984. She is totally correct that online gathering spaces of various kinds are not new. The labels change, the tech changes, the scale changes... and that is why the ads came in. Because at some point we jumped from individuals making small systems into businesses making money via large systems.
z3t4 9y ago
Facebook killed most of the old social communities. The big ones where very lucrative basically swimming in cash, they where only replaced by a bigger fish. The non profit forums and IRC channels are still alive. What worries me though is that so many people use smartphones instead of work-station computers. With a smartphone you are mostly a consumer/by-stander. While on a work-station you are actively taking part by both producing and consuming. There are a lot of really high quality content produced by professionals for profit. But the best content and Internet culture is still made by "ordinary" people for the love of sharing. I hope the good content is not buried by monetized content. There should be more "Hacker News" and less Google and Facebook ads.
- r3bl 9y ago
  And you've just described how Instagram and Snapchat took off. You don't need a work-station to post the content. All you need is a camera and a couple of seconds of your life and you're contributing something. Sure, that content might be crappy photo of your breakfast or a short video of you puking rainbow, but it's a content that regular people submitted with little or no effort simply because they had a phone with a camera that they spend most of their time on the Internet on, not a laptop or a desktop.
  - z3t4 9y ago
    Uploading photos is not that impressive. You've been able to do that on a PC from the 90's. While it has been interesting to see the 90's repeat itself on the phones, the smartphone's hardware have already surpassed, and there's really no excuse to have such a limited io-interface. The problem is the big players are just fine with their users being just consumers. One step in the right direction is the note (pen/stylus input) devices that give much better precision then using your thumbs, which makes it possible to take advantage of all that screen resolution. What we'll see next is an extra fold-able screen that will give more screen real estate. And general purpose hardware buttons on the sides and back, that apps can use for special functionality. And better voice processing using camera plus mic, so you can talk to the phone.
  - ilammy 9y ago
archagon 9y ago
Hear, hear! My friend group in high school had its own Proboards forum and we spent so much of our free time on there. (And we weren't the only ones, either.) I'd say the split was 60-40 male/female. We talked about everything—political topics, gaming, arts and crafts, literature—and I owe much of my development as a kid to those conversations. It makes me sad that those kinds of half-online, half-offline communities don't seem to be around much anymore. It felt like we owned our own little plot of online land, tended to it, inhabited it. It was nothing like renting some page space on Facebook or standing on a Twitter soapbox. After reading the delightful chapter on Community Memory in "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", I've been thinking of ways to get back to this local, more intimate style of online conversation. It seems that with the centralized nature of the web, an abundance of resources leads to the formation of a limited few communication hubs to which everyone gravitates. How easy would it be to create some sort of mesh network hub or beacon that would only let people in a local area connect to each other and create their own decentralized forums or databases? Thinking back on my high school forum experiences, the success of things like Nextdoor, local community events such as UC Bekeley's Anoncon, and even things like Geocaching, I think this could be an incredible paradigm shift for those who are tired of the overwhelming numbers and impersonality of today's "social" web. It's only the spark of an idea, but few things excite me more than the social possibilities of a publicly-accessible network firmly and intrinsically rooted in a particular physical area!

200 points by luu 9y ago

montrose 9y ago

This description of the old days is actually a fairly accurate description of HN now.

zbentley 9y ago
Kinda, except HN exists and is popular largely due to YC's popularity, which is very closely tied to the new style of ad-financed, VC-linked, revenue oriented social networks. For the record, I don't think that's a good or bad thing. Just a reality of this community.
klez 9y ago
On old forums (at least the ones I was part of) the community was usually small, and you knew most users and what they thought. Instead on hn most of the comments I see are from people I don't think I ever read from before. Also, here we don't officially have PMs or an official IRC channel, both of which were major parts of the communities I remember (most of the stuff actually happened on IRC, not on the forums).
- Goladus 9y ago
  Even the visual design of HN (grey usernames in a smaller font) minimizes identity in favor of the content. Also, for whatever reason, convention seems to favor all-lowercase names.
- veddox 9y ago
  Absolutely. HN isn't about meeting people, it's about discussing ideas. A very worthwhile objective in its own right, but the two shouldn't be confused.
archagon 9y ago
I personally find that threaded discussion substantially worsens the social aspects. When the “best” comments float to the top, any topic turns into soapbox vs. soapbox and actual conversation rapidly breaks down. Social norms are also reinforced and very little change happens in practice. In a linear discussion, topics don’t die when they reach the width of the page. People can go back and forth on an idea for days or weeks. I believe this property is very important for fostering bonds and maintaining a community spirit. Otherwise, everyone just becomes a collection of their pet ideas.

isostatic 9y ago

And 10 years earlier we had irc and usenet. But be under no illusions - I ran a Star Trek site in the late 90s that had adverts on, every month or so I'd get a cheque trough the post. In dollars. My bank were somewhat confused about how to cash foreign currency cheques into a child account.

Semaphor 9y ago
I ran a forum with a decent amount of users as a kid some 15 years ago. We had no ads but once a year when the bills came through we'd have a donation drive to cover the hosting fees and sometimes upgrade our (paid) forum software. Was always weird when people sent letters with cash from all over the DACH area to me ;)
- marklyon 9y ago
  I had a similar experience with my BBS. We did UUCP with some rather remote nodes and I had 11 incoming lines (the maximum BellSouth would install in a residence) so the bills were not trivial. Each month I’d post the prior month’s bill total and small checks and envelopes of cash would show up in my post office box soon after. It never made a wild profit, but there were only a couple of months where we couldn’t cover the bills.

waytogo 9y ago

OT: I don't get social networks. Till today, I don't see any value in real name social networks like Facebook. They should present content I want but they don't, they show upvoted content from my connections which is wrong from a consumer and entertainment perspective. My friends like or share mostly content of people because those people are kind of high-profile in their circles. Not because they post good content. The typical example, we all know, is some boring dude working at a VC that just raised a new fund who hourly posts really crappy content on FB and gets hundreds of likes every single time. Now, guess why. This happens all the time, everyday, every minute, just go to your FB feed right now and check how many of those high-status animals post again and again some random content which is liked and shared by too many likers. So, the status of my connections determine which (lousy) content I have to see? No thanks and this is why I prefer interest-driven platforms such as HN.

nerdponx 9y ago
Unfortunately, you missed out on the brief time in history when they did exactly what you were asking for. MySpace had no likes and no algorithm to filter your activity. Neither did Facebook for several years, nor did LiveJournal (and all the other social blogging platforms), or even Instagram at first.
- waytogo 9y ago
  > they did exactly what you were asking for No, MySpace and Facebook didn't what I was asking for because they didn't have any feed then. With MySpace and Facebook in its early days, I could just stalk profiles and both didn't serve me any content based on my interest. On MySpace I could browse through some music genres but this is not my understanding of an interest-driven site.
  - yoz-y 9y ago
    Twitter has had a feed from the beginning and served you content you wanted, as long as you subscribed to the right people. It still does, as long as you only follow a few people.

nerdponx 9y ago

The difference is who owns and pays for what. Running a centralized application for more than a few people on donations and goodwill is a challenge. This is why I am a huge fan of distributed and federated networks. The idea of you and your buddies being able to split a dream host subscription, but instead of being locked into your own forum hangout, you can interact with a whole global network of fellow self posters and VPS renters. We are in the early days of high-quality federated interaction for non-nerds, but we will get there.

lyra_comms 9y ago
An open conversation service needs to be open to all, not just people with tech skills; we need to prevent large numbers of people feeling locked out of discourse, or left behind. Also, many of the distributed/federated services we've looked at have rapidly devolved into niche communities often centred around sexual content. These two reasons lead us to think that a centralised service is more open and approachable.
- slipstream- 9y ago
  With regards to mastodon, there's at least one hosting service specifically for it already (https://masto.host https://masto.host), and people who don't know that much about the Linux command line/etc have set up their own instances using it.
  - lyra_comms 9y ago
    I know it's hard to see it this way when one is into tech, but many of my non-tech friends (artists, philosophers, retail...) would balk at this. We believe using a communication tool needs to be as easy as entering a URL and logging in - friendly, familiar, no new terminology.
    - __s 9y ago
      Sorry, but that doesn't fly in a technocracy. Oh well, just bow before the Google/Amazon/Facebook/Apple overlords

lyra_comms 9y ago

Our team (mostly cognitive scientists and engineers) is nostalgic about the past of online communication and concerned about its future. Our platform, Lyra, provides support for effective conversations rather than social networking and advertising. You can read our history of online convesation - and more about our approach - here: www.hellolyra.com/introduction

nofilter 9y ago
But why does all the free and open stuff look so bad. I mean seriously, Lyra is in dire need for someone with a UX/UI background to join their team.
- lyra_comms 9y ago
  As a nonprofit, we operate on grants and revenue alone, not investment. We'd love to hear some specific feedback on what you think could be improved about our UI :) We also think we're not doing too badly compared to Reddit and Hacker News!
  - 60654 9y ago
    Not the parent, but I have two specific suggestions about the on boarding process. One, please add a directory (feed?) of public conversations that can be viewed without logging in. I want to see how the platform is used by other people and whether that fits me - but if you ask me to create an account first, I'm going to bounce. Two, here on HN you say the team is mostly cog sci and engg people, which sounds awesome and piques my curiosity about why you made this. But the web site itself doesn't mention that, or anything about the people behind it. Please add an 'about the team' page so that I can understand more about the people who are inviting me to use their platform. Hope this helps!
    - lyra_comms 9y ago
      Thanks, we will add a page about the team. We have been thinking carefully about whether to include a public conversation feed. Public communications are not Lyra's central use case, and as most conversations are private at the moment, such a feed would be quite sparse. As a nonprofit which is not funded by advertising, it is not our main goal to support viewers without an account. There is no charge to sign up.

nimbius 9y ago

call me nostalgic, but i refuse to let go of that internet. There are plenty of alternatives that dont get a multi billion dollar TV ad blitz, and theyre worth checking out https://freenode.net https://freenode.net for a classic IRC experience, free of charge. https://mastodon.social/about https://mastodon.social/about for a distributed open source twitter-like experience https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/ for an alternative to facebook that respects your privacy.

dijit 9y ago
I maintain to this day a personal IRC network. Many of us have been “together” for over a decade. In fact I just tried to advocate self-hosted communities at CCC. So I’m also stuck in the past and refuse to let the internet go. But I have two points I’d like to mention. 1) Forums are dead for almost all but the biggest communities that surround a product of some kind. Social forums are simply dead. 2) As an IRC-user mentioned at the CCC. Facebook is the new telephone number. It’s significantly easier to ask for a Facebook friend request than a phone number and that edge will keep Facebook relevant even if we saw a rise in self-hosted or segmented interest driven communities.
- pault 9y ago
  Spam is the reason Facebook is currently the easiest way to get in touch with someone. Otherwise you could just put your email address in a publicly searchable database. It seems like we need a service that provides the verification and permission based communication model of Facebook but without the public feeds, virtue signaling, and political garbage.
  - Goladus 9y ago
    Spam drove people to Facebook even in the early days. When Facebook first came out, spam filtering was far less effective than it is today. Also, for whatever reason, people trusted Facebook and would post private things there that they wouldn't post on pseudonymous forums.
  - 9y ago

agentultra 9y ago

I recall being a bit confused about the terms, "social web," and "social network" when they were beginning to be bandied about to discuss Flickr and Facebook et al. The Internet was already a social network. You had irc, nntp, http, ftp, etc etc... communication protocols. For communicating with other humans. The only thing Facebook did, in my experience, was make the web anti-social. I distinctly recall when my group of friends had stopped calling around each week to figure out what we were going to do on the weekend. I was calling people to find out what they were up to... and I got that condescending call to action, just get on Facebook. So I did. I tried it for about a year or two. And it didn't make the web any better or more social for me. It would recommend events to attend and I'd go... but people would just be in their cliques not talking to anyone outside of their groups. Even learning about upcoming concerts and events required a Facebook account. People stopped calling and hanging out. It was all very passive: like, like, comment, meme, har, har. So I closed down my Facebook account and haven't used it since 2009 or so. The "social web" has only become more anti-social. Most of these web services made quite a lot of interesting innovations and such but I can't help but wonder what the web would've been like if we'd stayed true to its roots and improved the protocols and infrastructure instead of centralizing everything behind walled gardens.

lyra_comms 9y ago
It's absolutely hearbreaking to see the independence, critical thinking and self-determination that Western society has been building up since the Enlightenment, weakening under the forces of big data and targeted advertising. Communication should be open, profit should not be involved in discourse, and advertising should not corrode conversation. Viva la revolucion! www.hellolyra.com/introduction
- ukulele 9y ago
  > advertising should not corrode conversation. You really followed this with a link to your website?
  - pipio21 9y ago

jancsika 9y ago

> Those "social networks" were small, and never made front-page news (or any news at all), and were more concerned with keeping to themselves than recruiting new members. And I'm supposed to be convinced that those small forums weren't anti-social in their own important ways?

throwanem 9y ago
Such as? It wasn't that you never brought new people in. It was that you weren't operating under a perverse incentive to bring in as many new people as you could.
- jancsika 9y ago
  Such as being subject to the whims of random administrator/moderators and whatever random set of principles they wished to apply to their users. The most striking example I can remember was with Rick and Morty creator/writer Dan Harmon using mod powers to edit a forum user's posts to publicly humiliate the user until he/she left the forum. This was a forum for the monthly short-film festival Channel101-- a forum that is no longer alive, but it appears someone kept some of Dan's insults from that thread[1]. But that pales in comparison to more technically-oriented forums and mailing lists where insidious forms of passive-aggression flourished. These include: * making the new user feel stupid for failing to comprehend the poor documentation or poorly considered forum guidelines * making the new user feel stupid for asking a question and failing to read a relevant footnote from a message posted three years ago with an unrelated message topic * endlessly blathering on about top-posting, asking-about-asking, proper quoting, on-topic vs off-topic, reading-the-stickies, formats for uploading images/attachments, instead of making the software better so that humans don't have to deal with that bs. (The same way git makes it so that humans don't have to bicker about who gets repository permissions) * telling a user they will be ignored, then mentioning in a meta-discussion about the forum who is ignoring whom * other users rationalizing the behavior of trolls because those trolls were veteran members * general lack of mentors to help new users (if the purpose of the forum was to be a sort of community) There are of course exceptions. But I still remember the feeling of just crossing my fingers in the hopes that my query about a technical topic wouldn't trigger Socratic bombs from a forum's resident jerk. Stack Overflow proves there's a way to at least a way to discover and read relevant responses without that pain. I have no idea what the antidote to Facebook/Google is. But pining for single-point-of-failure, buggy backends serving up poor UIs with content that cannot easily bubble up to a wider audience isn't going to help. And forget the anti-social part-- you can't even technically achieve the spirit of such forums today because sock puppets and Sybil have become so sophisticated. Unless we confine ourselves to topics so ineffectual that nobody on the internet would ever decide to hate us. [1] http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Harmon/Quotes http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Harmon/Quotes

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

en-us 9y ago

You don't have to use corporate sites like Facebook and Pinterest. Check out scuttlebutt.nz for a serverless alternative, or Mastodon for one where anybody can host a server. Or just stick to forums and IRC.

throwanem 9y ago
No, you don't have to. But if everyone you know does, then you have to make a choice. I've had the same "just get on Facebook" experience as the article's author, and it isn't just about "what are we doing this weekend?" It's about human social behavior changing to fit the model implemented by Facebook, because Facebook tries so hard, and so successfully, to be sticky, that eventually everyone is on Facebook. If you're not, then once that's happened, you're no longer part of "everyone", because Facebook's design very successfully seeks to maximize the degree to which people prefer it as an exclusive medium of social interaction, because that's the same as maximizing its revenue stream. The people who run Facebook, and who build it, have by now gotten very, very good at doing exactly that. And their userbase is such that, whatever adverse effects their model of revenue maximization by social behavior monopolization may have, it is by now having them on about one-third of the entire human species. If we include all the other behemoths which use similar models, the fraction of humanity affected grows markedly - half? More? Yeah, I know, it sounds absurd and dystopian and like something you'd hear from an ideologue of the RMS stripe. Well, I have my differences with RMS, and we've had them out in public before now. And I'd have regarded the things I'm saying as dismissively as anyone might, if I'd heard someone saying them a few years ago. But that would've been a few years ago. Times change. It was around the time I missed the second wedding, followed by the second chance encounter with one of the parties thereto, and the second heartfelt apology, and the second "but you should really get on Facebook", that I started to really think something was up other than that everyone had just quietly and comprehensively dropped me, over the space of a few months, because I was just that unpleasant a person to have around. Sure, that was my default assumption. But it would seem unlikely in that case for the apologies to be so heartfelt, or indeed to occur at all; they needn't have, no more than the entire conversations in which they occurred, if those who made them hadn't chosen to engage when they saw me out and about. They could've quietly walked the other way. Instead they hailed me and started conversations, in order to apologize for having unintentionally snubbed me, and to warn me I'd better get on Facebook if I didn't want more of the same. So I had to think something else was up, something outside my own constant suspicion that I exist in the world purely on sufferance and should not be too surprised when that sufferance ceases - and I started looking around for what it might be. What I found was other people who'd had the same kinds of experiences that led me to start looking in the first place. People like the author of this article, who'd also watched their social circles disintegrate around them, and be reconstituted in a form which did no longer include them, in order to make a lot of money for a dozen or so thousand people mostly in California. Now I've got no problem with people making a lot of money. This is America, after all. And I don't think anyone who works for Facebook is evil, at least not in any higher proportion than the population at large; you get a few bastards in every hundred, sure, but there's no reason to imagine Facebook uniquely concentrates them somehow. But none of that changes the fact that, in the cause of building something that makes those people a lot of money, they have produced a machine for the deliberate mass modification of human social behavior, the like of which history has never yet seen. I don't know. I feel like there's nothing unreasonable in thinking such a situation has implications a bit beyond "well you don't have to use it". Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe I really am the problem here, and Facebook is just a bugaboo. Maybe that's true for everyone else with a story like mine, too. But what if it isn't? Wouldn't that seem a little dystopian to you, there being a website in a position to mediate your friendships? It seems a little dystopian to me.

fimdomeio 9y ago

my faith is that there will be a revival for this internet just like vinyl. I I dream it will be very based on physical location. Kind of a mix of mastodon with localwiki.

throwanem 9y ago
Optimizing for faddishness? Vinyl's been over for years.
- r3bl 9y ago
  And yet, they just keep selling more and more of them, a year after year. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/03/record-sales-vinyl-hits-25-year-high-and-outstrips-streaming https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/03/record-sales-v... https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/01/vinyl-sales-rose-26-in-2016-see-the-25-top-selling-releases/ https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/01/vinyl-sales-rose-26-i... https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanpassman/2017/01/12/vinyl-is-officially-booming-the-new-billion-dollar-music-business/#81905e54054b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanpassman/2017/01/12/vinyl-... https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/10/04/vinyl-records-sales-2017/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/10/04/vinyl-records-sa... https://thevinylfactory.com/news/vinyl-sales-q3-2017/ https://thevinylfactory.com/news/vinyl-sales-q3-2017/
  - throwanem 9y ago
    Didn't say that selling vinyl was over. Every fad gets commercialized some time after it's peaked. In a year or two, no one will remember.
    - r3bl 9y ago
      That "in a year or two" seems to be happening since 2007 for the Vinyl industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_revival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_revival

jesperlang 9y ago

I think a more fair view of the term social media should be as a marketing term? When these tech giants were growing they needed a name to refer to them as a whole, but that name reflected what they wanted those services to be viewed as, not the effects they came to have. We see this everywhere in how labelling of things appeal to some of our inner desires -- in this case the need of social interactions -- and not necessarily accurately describing their effects. I think the main reason these services exist at all is not to create social mediums but to tap into the flows of human communication for profit. And, since their version of communication is, in the true social aspect, an incredibly crippling one compared to the rich, immersive experience of more old ways of interacting -- no wonder we can be left with a deeply dissatisfying feeling when use social media services.

darrmit 9y ago

One of the biggest differences in my mind between the Internet described in the article and the social networks of today (at least for me) is the forums and IRC channels I frequented were filled with people who genuinely enjoyed talking to one another and even cared for one another. I still have friends 15 years later that I’ve never met and so many great memories. I can’t say the same for FB or Twitter. And the “heart of a sysadmin” statement hit so close to home.

styfle 9y ago
In 2005, I used to be in a Battlefield 2 online community with game servers, SMF Forums, and ventrilo for VOIP. I used to play pretty regularly, but when not playing we would all talk and learn from each other. There were maybe 30 people at most from age 15 to 50 years old. The way we sustained the servers was everyone pitching in to pay maybe $5 to $15 per month. Moderation and Adminstratuon was volunteer based and people who donated had priority. We eventually became some of the most popular BF2 servers and it made for interesting social interaction when the admins had to come together to make a decision if someone was cheating or just really good. I’m sure communities like that still exist but I haven’t played many online games since then. Those were the days :)

jaysonelliot 9y ago

We had ad-free social networking in 1994, and 1984. Usenet, IRC, BBSes, MUDs… heck, remember The Well? The Internet has always had ways for people to get together and socialize. Ello invented nothing.

nitrogen 9y ago
BBSes sometimes had full screen ANSI art interstitial ads, too, though.

keithpeter 9y ago

OP mentions Paul Ford's tilde club [1], [2]. I really must get around to putting up one of these locally soon - if only to learn about running a Web server in the wild. How would one go about that now? [1] https://medihttp://tilde.club/um.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf https://medihttp://tilde.club/um.com/message/tilde-club-i-ha... [2] http://tilde.club/ http://tilde.club/ [infinite waiting list... suspect dead]

veddox 9y ago
> How would one go about that now? If you know your way about Linux and the commandline, it's not that hard. There's plenty of good tutorials out there for (almost) anything you would want to do. Renting a small VPS is not particularly expensive either. I did it this year and can only recommend it - I learnt a ton in the process :-)
- keithpeter 9y ago
  That's a plan, thanks
veddox 9y ago
BTW, thanks for mentioning the tilde club! Hadn't heard about that before... A lovely passage from the Medium article: [Talking about the history of Unix] Fast forward 20 years: Your typical “cloud” Unix server, designed in the 1970s to be a very social place, is today a ghost town with one or two factories still clanking in the town square—factories that receive our email, or accept our Instagram photos and store them, and manage our data. But there’s no one walking around and chatting downtown. Thus when people talk about “cloud computing” they are talking about millions of tiny ghost towns. Ironic, because what do people build on these ghost towns but social networks.

codingdave 9y ago

> we had ad-free social networking in 2004. We had ad-free online communities in 1994... you just used telnet instead of a browser. We had BBSes in 1984. She is totally correct that online gathering spaces of various kinds are not new. The labels change, the tech changes, the scale changes... and that is why the ads came in. Because at some point we jumped from individuals making small systems into businesses making money via large systems.

z3t4 9y ago

Facebook killed most of the old social communities. The big ones where very lucrative basically swimming in cash, they where only replaced by a bigger fish. The non profit forums and IRC channels are still alive. What worries me though is that so many people use smartphones instead of work-station computers. With a smartphone you are mostly a consumer/by-stander. While on a work-station you are actively taking part by both producing and consuming. There are a lot of really high quality content produced by professionals for profit. But the best content and Internet culture is still made by "ordinary" people for the love of sharing. I hope the good content is not buried by monetized content. There should be more "Hacker News" and less Google and Facebook ads.

r3bl 9y ago
And you've just described how Instagram and Snapchat took off. You don't need a work-station to post the content. All you need is a camera and a couple of seconds of your life and you're contributing something. Sure, that content might be crappy photo of your breakfast or a short video of you puking rainbow, but it's a content that regular people submitted with little or no effort simply because they had a phone with a camera that they spend most of their time on the Internet on, not a laptop or a desktop.
- z3t4 9y ago
  Uploading photos is not that impressive. You've been able to do that on a PC from the 90's. While it has been interesting to see the 90's repeat itself on the phones, the smartphone's hardware have already surpassed, and there's really no excuse to have such a limited io-interface. The problem is the big players are just fine with their users being just consumers. One step in the right direction is the note (pen/stylus input) devices that give much better precision then using your thumbs, which makes it possible to take advantage of all that screen resolution. What we'll see next is an extra fold-able screen that will give more screen real estate. And general purpose hardware buttons on the sides and back, that apps can use for special functionality. And better voice processing using camera plus mic, so you can talk to the phone.
- ilammy 9y ago

archagon 9y ago

Hear, hear! My friend group in high school had its own Proboards forum and we spent so much of our free time on there. (And we weren't the only ones, either.) I'd say the split was 60-40 male/female. We talked about everything—political topics, gaming, arts and crafts, literature—and I owe much of my development as a kid to those conversations. It makes me sad that those kinds of half-online, half-offline communities don't seem to be around much anymore. It felt like we owned our own little plot of online land, tended to it, inhabited it. It was nothing like renting some page space on Facebook or standing on a Twitter soapbox. After reading the delightful chapter on Community Memory in "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", I've been thinking of ways to get back to this local, more intimate style of online conversation. It seems that with the centralized nature of the web, an abundance of resources leads to the formation of a limited few communication hubs to which everyone gravitates. How easy would it be to create some sort of mesh network hub or beacon that would only let people in a local area connect to each other and create their own decentralized forums or databases? Thinking back on my high school forum experiences, the success of things like Nextdoor, local community events such as UC Bekeley's Anoncon, and even things like Geocaching, I think this could be an incredible paradigm shift for those who are tired of the overwhelming numbers and impersonality of today's "social" web. It's only the spark of an idea, but few things excite me more than the social possibilities of a publicly-accessible network firmly and intrinsically rooted in a particular physical area!