6 ms·

The weird internet went away not because people on the internet became boring, but because the internet opened up to non weird people. The article talks about h

The weird internet went away not because people on the internet became boring, but because the internet opened up to non weird people. The article talks about how complicated it can seem to build your own site now, but it's easier then ever to build your own website - the whole point is that the internet isn't necessarily dominated by the types of people that are willing to put in that kind of work anymore. Its not like there are some mysterious new barriers preventing you from building a custom site on the internet that have been thrown up now. This post itself didn't have to be on medium - but medium and Facebook and YouTube deliver that "boring, non weird" audience that you want to read your stuff.

1337biz 7y ago
And the battle is long from over. The whole anti free speech crowd is just living on a similar effect. People who are so intolerant to weirdness that they want to censor it away just because they feel offended by it.
- dinkudunk 7y ago
  That feels like a straw man. Perhaps we have to define weirdness before we pass judgement. Blatant fascism/racism/homophobia etc.: Justifiably censurable according to the ECHR [0], specifically see Article 10.2, Article 11.2 and Article 17. See for example _E.S v Austria_. Google hammer: Weird but not in violation of human rights conventions. [0]: https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf
- Volundr 7y ago
  Sorry who is trying to censor weirdness? Last I knew albinoblacksheep.com and zombo.com where doing just fine, and no one was trying to take them down. Maybe you are aware of something I'm not, and there really is a campaign against weirdness that I just haven't seen, but it feels to me like you are trying to drag this topic down an unrelated political tangent. Please don't.
  - jameskegel 7y ago
    This reply seems needlessly obstinate and accusatory
    - Volundr 7y ago
      Accusatory? Probably. I'll acknowledge that I'm making assumptions about GPs motivations based on the language he used. Obstinate however implies stubbornness in the face of reason, and there is absolutely none in the original comment to be stubborn in the face of. It simply states, with no evidence, that there is an "anti-free speech" crowd, and that it hates weirdness. If there is a real campaign against weirdness on the internet, I'd genuinely like to know about it and where it's coming from.
- drngdds 7y ago
  The people you consider anti-free-speech don't dislike your ideas because they're weird.
  - yoz-y 7y ago
    Only if they are "one weird tricks".
lkrubner 7y ago
"but because the internet opened up to non weird people" For my tastes, the original blogosphere of 2000-2008 was one of the finest things the human race ever created, and the intellectual stimulation of the debates has no equal in any other age. But also there was still plenty of weirdness. I'd extend the era of "early Web" all the way to 2008, and I'd focus on advertising as the thing that killed it. In 2000 advertising on the Web meant banner ads, which had the reputation of being over-priced and ineffective. Especially when the crash hit in 2001, many companies swore they would never again waste money on advertising on the Web. But Overture came up with the idea of buying keywords for specific searches, and then Overture was absorbed into Google and became the Google business model, and by 2007 or 2008 many businesses were willing to get serious about advertising on the Web. At which point advertising, as a business model, took off, and it helped drive the consolidation of the Web, and it helped give us the boring Web of today. I should add, the worst aspects of the consolidation were driven, specifically, by the adoption of algorithms that are designed to maximize engagement, because the goal is to serve as many ads as possible. The algorithms have a deadening effect. To his endless credit, Clay Shirky sketched out some of the forces that were likely going to lower quality on the Web over time: http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_weblog.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w... That was way back in 2003. The key passage is: "Finally, there is no real A-list, because there is no discontinuity. Though explanations of power laws (including the ones here) often focus on numbers like "12% of blogs account for 50% of the links", these are arbitrary markers. The largest step function in a power law is between the #1 and #2 positions, by definition. There is no A-list that is qualitatively different from their nearest neighbors, so any line separating more and less trafficked blogs is arbitrary." But this turned out to be incorrect: "Third, the stars exist not because of some cliquish preference for one another, but because of the preference of hundreds of others pointing to them. Their popularity is a result of the kind of distributed approval it would be hard to fake." The algorithms are designed to fake a kind of preference, or to distort those preferences, because of the desperation of the company to move higher on the power law curve. The point is, Shirky pointed to a natural process, and advertising money provided a powerful incentive to hack that natural process and try to distort it for the benefit of the company.
- buboard 7y ago
buboard 7y ago
That is a common trope. But what if it is only half true? Tech has been moving in the direction of oversimplifying technology and telling people white lies (such as that they can be private and secure on the internet). They created tablets and phones, removed any "quirky" options that might cause their owners to think a little harder , and often dumbed down devices. I think smartphone is a misnomer, it's not smart, and it doesnt really think for you, it just removes most of the optionality for creativity leaving a device that does one thing well: consume mindnumbing amounts of trivial information. All people are weird, just ask them to explain their dream or paint a picture if you want to be disturbed by their weirdness. But when all that creativity is funneled through single-purpose devices, it evaporates. We need to add back complexity and optionality to devices and interfaces.
- jasode 7y ago
  >That is a common trope. But what if it is only half true? It's mostly true and the "mainstream mass audience" has always exhibited low active participation rates. There's a wikipedia article[1] about this that happens to focus on the internet and its low ratio of contributors. However, this phenomenon of passive consumption has been happening all through history before the internet and it is independent of technology. Whether it's the Gutenberg Press or earlier primitive technology as simple as the quill pen & paper, there's always been a very small group of people that create the content vs the much larger group that consumes it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
  - buboard 7y ago
    > It's mostly true and the "mainstream mass audience" has always exhibited low you 're speaking of a different thing, and as u said participation was low even before the internet's eternal september of 2005-10 happened.
    - jasode 7y ago
      >you 're speaking of a different thing. No, I was responding to your claim of smartphone technology being the barrier to creativity by the mainstream audience: >smartphone [...], it just removes most of the optionality for creativity leaving a device that does one thing well: consume mindnumbing amounts of trivial information.[...] But when all that creativity is funneled through single-purpose devices, it evaporates. That claim assumes that there's a pent up wave of creativity that's being held back by smartphones. However, that misunderstands the fact that new technology doesn't really change the ratio of the people expressing creativity vs those that consume it. There wasn't really any massive creativity to "evaporate"; the desire to "be creative" was never there in the mainstream audience. You can't put the blame on technologies such as smartphones / Gutenberg press / pen & paper.
ravenstine 7y ago
There's a lot of truth to that, though I think what makes the situation even worse is algorithms. Algorithms can be good for the individual(or at least seem as such), but they can be bad for a community that could benefit from a more common experience. The internet does still have interesting stuff on it, but discovering it may be difficult for the average person when algorithms are steering them towards things they either know the user already likes or things that are profitable.
- petra 7y ago
  As for the good stuff, who says it's bad for it to be hard to find? Or maybe it's the opposite, the fact that information is so easy to find, and everybody knows it, had devalued it. But the hard stuff ? Because it's hard to find, it has some value. Maybe you could become better at your job, comparatively, and earn more money. Or develop a unique skill and gain self esteem. Or offer some helpful bit of info for someone, and help the relationship.
Zak 7y ago
> This post itself didn't have to be on medium - but medium and Facebook and YouTube deliver that "boring, non weird" audience that you want to read your stuff. I think the problem here is that content discovery and hosting have become complected. Most people reading Hacker News can figure out how to self-host a video, for example, but if it's to reach a mainstream audience, it must be on Youtube.
jsgo 7y ago
> but it's easier then ever to build your own website Is it though? When I was 9, I created a site on Angelfire (and loved the fact that the default page was this craptastic html example where you could view source and kind of learn various html tags relating to lists, tables I believe, and various other things as a quick primer for those uneducated in HTML). I also created one on Geocities (different use cases in the end, but more or less I just wanted to see which was better/easier. Ended up with Angelfire as my main one as you could actually "name" your site as opposed to the generic "city"/"street" name-ish thing of Geocities). And if memory serves, there were other hosts that were similarly popular too. One iirc would allow for subdomains instead of the nesting that Angelfire/Geocities does, but if I believe by default they would have big branding somewhere on your page. Tried it, think there was a work around for that one, but I didn't like battling it so didn't retain. Now, sure, I can find a host that I can pay $x to host the HTML that I build outright, but I don't know if kids coming up have the same resources I did as it relates to starting up a free site and having a default page with various HTML elements (too many at this point for a single page to be of value. Would probably have to look something like W3Schools or whatever with a list on the left you could go through). Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I first got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still around which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are posted of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  Back in 1996 a friend of mine with no computer training put together a simple website in Notepad and uploaded it to free web space provided by her ISP. That doesn't happen today. People bumble along with Wordpress or services like Wix, but the customisation options for non-experts are very limited and generic. Hosting has become much more complicated and confusing, and the web simply doesn't do simple any more. Even a small blog is a moderately complicated project, especially if it uses a build system. And building even a minimal independent commercial site requires very specialised skills and plenty of time. There really isn't anything equivalent to AF/Geo. And even if there were, CSS and HTML - never mind js - are now so complex beginners can't just pick them up by dabbling.
bamboozled 7y ago
Yes if you think weird stuff is no longer available on the Internet, look a bit harder.
JohnBooty 7y ago
but it's easier then ever to build your own website It's almost irrelevant though, right? Because the bigger thing is that the web itself is going away. Kids don't browse the web. Most people don't browse the web. People, particularly kids, use apps. Let's suppose you could create a high-quality website literally at the speed of thought. For free. Who would look at it? (to be clear, I hate this state of affairs)
krapp 7y ago
It can't be the case that the "weird internet" went away because the "internet opened up to non weird people," because it opened up to everyone as soon as it was available outside of university research labs, and there are exponentially more weird people on the internet now than there ever were. You seem to be mistaking the creation of layout with the creation of content and assuming, incorrectly, that one must be boring, uncreative or uninteresting to not want to put in the effort of manually creating an HTML page, maybe with a black starry background and some flames and a spinning skull gif. That because layouts have become homogeneous and centralized in services, content and the web itself must as well. You don't think there's "weird" content on Youtube and Facebook? I would assert that there is more of it, and more of higher quality, than there ever was on the old web. Sure, there are real barriers preventing someone from creating their own website and hosting their own fan group or videos or whatever, but people don't do so because it's a waste of time when what they want to do is create content. Once making your own site no longer became necessary, it became a specialized interest.

1337biz 7y ago

And the battle is long from over. The whole anti free speech crowd is just living on a similar effect. People who are so intolerant to weirdness that they want to censor it away just because they feel offended by it.

dinkudunk 7y ago
That feels like a straw man. Perhaps we have to define weirdness before we pass judgement. Blatant fascism/racism/homophobia etc.: Justifiably censurable according to the ECHR [0], specifically see Article 10.2, Article 11.2 and Article 17. See for example _E.S v Austria_. Google hammer: Weird but not in violation of human rights conventions. [0]: https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf
Volundr 7y ago
Sorry who is trying to censor weirdness? Last I knew albinoblacksheep.com and zombo.com where doing just fine, and no one was trying to take them down. Maybe you are aware of something I'm not, and there really is a campaign against weirdness that I just haven't seen, but it feels to me like you are trying to drag this topic down an unrelated political tangent. Please don't.
- jameskegel 7y ago
  This reply seems needlessly obstinate and accusatory
  - Volundr 7y ago
    Accusatory? Probably. I'll acknowledge that I'm making assumptions about GPs motivations based on the language he used. Obstinate however implies stubbornness in the face of reason, and there is absolutely none in the original comment to be stubborn in the face of. It simply states, with no evidence, that there is an "anti-free speech" crowd, and that it hates weirdness. If there is a real campaign against weirdness on the internet, I'd genuinely like to know about it and where it's coming from.
drngdds 7y ago
The people you consider anti-free-speech don't dislike your ideas because they're weird.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  Only if they are "one weird tricks".

lkrubner 7y ago

"but because the internet opened up to non weird people" For my tastes, the original blogosphere of 2000-2008 was one of the finest things the human race ever created, and the intellectual stimulation of the debates has no equal in any other age. But also there was still plenty of weirdness. I'd extend the era of "early Web" all the way to 2008, and I'd focus on advertising as the thing that killed it. In 2000 advertising on the Web meant banner ads, which had the reputation of being over-priced and ineffective. Especially when the crash hit in 2001, many companies swore they would never again waste money on advertising on the Web. But Overture came up with the idea of buying keywords for specific searches, and then Overture was absorbed into Google and became the Google business model, and by 2007 or 2008 many businesses were willing to get serious about advertising on the Web. At which point advertising, as a business model, took off, and it helped drive the consolidation of the Web, and it helped give us the boring Web of today. I should add, the worst aspects of the consolidation were driven, specifically, by the adoption of algorithms that are designed to maximize engagement, because the goal is to serve as many ads as possible. The algorithms have a deadening effect. To his endless credit, Clay Shirky sketched out some of the forces that were likely going to lower quality on the Web over time: http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_weblog.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w... That was way back in 2003. The key passage is: "Finally, there is no real A-list, because there is no discontinuity. Though explanations of power laws (including the ones here) often focus on numbers like "12% of blogs account for 50% of the links", these are arbitrary markers. The largest step function in a power law is between the #1 and #2 positions, by definition. There is no A-list that is qualitatively different from their nearest neighbors, so any line separating more and less trafficked blogs is arbitrary." But this turned out to be incorrect: "Third, the stars exist not because of some cliquish preference for one another, but because of the preference of hundreds of others pointing to them. Their popularity is a result of the kind of distributed approval it would be hard to fake." The algorithms are designed to fake a kind of preference, or to distort those preferences, because of the desperation of the company to move higher on the power law curve. The point is, Shirky pointed to a natural process, and advertising money provided a powerful incentive to hack that natural process and try to distort it for the benefit of the company.

buboard 7y ago

buboard 7y ago

That is a common trope. But what if it is only half true? Tech has been moving in the direction of oversimplifying technology and telling people white lies (such as that they can be private and secure on the internet). They created tablets and phones, removed any "quirky" options that might cause their owners to think a little harder , and often dumbed down devices. I think smartphone is a misnomer, it's not smart, and it doesnt really think for you, it just removes most of the optionality for creativity leaving a device that does one thing well: consume mindnumbing amounts of trivial information. All people are weird, just ask them to explain their dream or paint a picture if you want to be disturbed by their weirdness. But when all that creativity is funneled through single-purpose devices, it evaporates. We need to add back complexity and optionality to devices and interfaces.

jasode 7y ago
>That is a common trope. But what if it is only half true? It's mostly true and the "mainstream mass audience" has always exhibited low active participation rates. There's a wikipedia article[1] about this that happens to focus on the internet and its low ratio of contributors. However, this phenomenon of passive consumption has been happening all through history before the internet and it is independent of technology. Whether it's the Gutenberg Press or earlier primitive technology as simple as the quill pen & paper, there's always been a very small group of people that create the content vs the much larger group that consumes it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
- buboard 7y ago
  > It's mostly true and the "mainstream mass audience" has always exhibited low you 're speaking of a different thing, and as u said participation was low even before the internet's eternal september of 2005-10 happened.
  - jasode 7y ago
    >you 're speaking of a different thing. No, I was responding to your claim of smartphone technology being the barrier to creativity by the mainstream audience: >smartphone [...], it just removes most of the optionality for creativity leaving a device that does one thing well: consume mindnumbing amounts of trivial information.[...] But when all that creativity is funneled through single-purpose devices, it evaporates. That claim assumes that there's a pent up wave of creativity that's being held back by smartphones. However, that misunderstands the fact that new technology doesn't really change the ratio of the people expressing creativity vs those that consume it. There wasn't really any massive creativity to "evaporate"; the desire to "be creative" was never there in the mainstream audience. You can't put the blame on technologies such as smartphones / Gutenberg press / pen & paper.

ravenstine 7y ago

There's a lot of truth to that, though I think what makes the situation even worse is algorithms. Algorithms can be good for the individual(or at least seem as such), but they can be bad for a community that could benefit from a more common experience. The internet does still have interesting stuff on it, but discovering it may be difficult for the average person when algorithms are steering them towards things they either know the user already likes or things that are profitable.

petra 7y ago
As for the good stuff, who says it's bad for it to be hard to find? Or maybe it's the opposite, the fact that information is so easy to find, and everybody knows it, had devalued it. But the hard stuff ? Because it's hard to find, it has some value. Maybe you could become better at your job, comparatively, and earn more money. Or develop a unique skill and gain self esteem. Or offer some helpful bit of info for someone, and help the relationship.

Zak 7y ago

> This post itself didn't have to be on medium - but medium and Facebook and YouTube deliver that "boring, non weird" audience that you want to read your stuff. I think the problem here is that content discovery and hosting have become complected. Most people reading Hacker News can figure out how to self-host a video, for example, but if it's to reach a mainstream audience, it must be on Youtube.

jsgo 7y ago

> but it's easier then ever to build your own website Is it though? When I was 9, I created a site on Angelfire (and loved the fact that the default page was this craptastic html example where you could view source and kind of learn various html tags relating to lists, tables I believe, and various other things as a quick primer for those uneducated in HTML). I also created one on Geocities (different use cases in the end, but more or less I just wanted to see which was better/easier. Ended up with Angelfire as my main one as you could actually "name" your site as opposed to the generic "city"/"street" name-ish thing of Geocities). And if memory serves, there were other hosts that were similarly popular too. One iirc would allow for subdomains instead of the nesting that Angelfire/Geocities does, but if I believe by default they would have big branding somewhere on your page. Tried it, think there was a work around for that one, but I didn't like battling it so didn't retain. Now, sure, I can find a host that I can pay $x to host the HTML that I build outright, but I don't know if kids coming up have the same resources I did as it relates to starting up a free site and having a default page with various HTML elements (too many at this point for a single page to be of value. Would probably have to look something like W3Schools or whatever with a list on the left you could go through). Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I first got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still around which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are posted of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Back in 1996 a friend of mine with no computer training put together a simple website in Notepad and uploaded it to free web space provided by her ISP. That doesn't happen today. People bumble along with Wordpress or services like Wix, but the customisation options for non-experts are very limited and generic. Hosting has become much more complicated and confusing, and the web simply doesn't do simple any more. Even a small blog is a moderately complicated project, especially if it uses a build system. And building even a minimal independent commercial site requires very specialised skills and plenty of time. There really isn't anything equivalent to AF/Geo. And even if there were, CSS and HTML - never mind js - are now so complex beginners can't just pick them up by dabbling.

bamboozled 7y ago

Yes if you think weird stuff is no longer available on the Internet, look a bit harder.

JohnBooty 7y ago

but it's easier then ever to build your own website It's almost irrelevant though, right? Because the bigger thing is that the web itself is going away. Kids don't browse the web. Most people don't browse the web. People, particularly kids, use apps. Let's suppose you could create a high-quality website literally at the speed of thought. For free. Who would look at it? (to be clear, I hate this state of affairs)

krapp 7y ago

It can't be the case that the "weird internet" went away because the "internet opened up to non weird people," because it opened up to everyone as soon as it was available outside of university research labs, and there are exponentially more weird people on the internet now than there ever were. You seem to be mistaking the creation of layout with the creation of content and assuming, incorrectly, that one must be boring, uncreative or uninteresting to not want to put in the effort of manually creating an HTML page, maybe with a black starry background and some flames and a spinning skull gif. That because layouts have become homogeneous and centralized in services, content and the web itself must as well. You don't think there's "weird" content on Youtube and Facebook? I would assert that there is more of it, and more of higher quality, than there ever was on the old web. Sure, there are real barriers preventing someone from creating their own website and hosting their own fan group or videos or whatever, but people don't do so because it's a waste of time when what they want to do is create content. Once making your own site no longer became necessary, it became a specialized interest.