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> The open web existed, still exists, and will always be buried under a mountain of corporate shit; Thinking about the time from 2003 onwards (my personal dot-

> The open web existed, still exists, and will always be buried under a mountain of corporate shit; Thinking about the time from 2003 onwards (my personal dot-com era) until maybe 2009-ish, I nowadays miss the forums. Not so much because of the interaction with others (I get that on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Discord too), but because of "searchability". I typed my question into Google, and got greeted with several links to different forums or blogs. There is no similar searchability of Discord, Facebook and Twitter that I'm aware of. Maybe that's where the "more open back in the days" comes from.

noduerme 5y ago
The thing about the forums (and probably why we're here on HN) is that they were personally run, cared for and moderated by people who were good in their field, who cared about the environment they were cultivating. This was especially true in the dialup era when sysops literally read every comment and hung up their modem on people who were spreading something stupid. It led to a culture of total free speech and tolerance, as long as you found the right place to meet your peers, and as long as what you were saying made some kind of intelligent sense. That doesn't exist in any social media platform today. Social media rewards people for saying the dumbest possible thing that everyone else will agree with, or else the dumbest thing that will anger people. For context, we're on the old web and the BBS forums right now. Upvoting is a modest improvement. The way a place is run, the culture, is everything. Twitter is the Carnival Cruise. Smart speech is always on the leaky freighter. People with smart phones forget that the internet was for nerds, outcasts and rebels, while they were absorbed in TV. The nerds and rebels haven't disappeared. (We just need to stop the really angry ones who took over retail and software).
- hrh 5y ago
  Upvoting and downvoting especially incentivizes echo chambers. I take it you've never had people follow you around threads and downvote everything you posted? Happens bizarrely often. HN disappoints me more than the average Reddit or Twitter thread because some of the highs are really high here, but when you see brilliant people arguing about stuff they were arguing about six years ago, or adults that are so ideological that they aren't even rational, that happens all the time on HN and I feel in a way it is worse because we should know better. I think HN, as a place for nerds, largely succeeds, but it also has a very very limited demographic.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    Sure. Comparatively, I find it far less ideological and more cerebral than most places. Nothing's perfect. I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems. As it happens, the less dogmatic are people who gravitate toward hacking solutions to things. People might deride that as seeking technological fixes to intractable problems, but it's essentially apolitical - and critiquing logic in the form of code is immune to emotional arguments to some extent, even though those arguments arise around the borders of what code is used for. I have a kind of similar view about Judaism and Buddhism. You can argue endlessly about the state of the universe but you have to agree that logic is logic. Weirdly, we live in a world where that agreement is vanishingly rare in everyday discourse.
    - luffapi 5y ago
      > The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems. This is a gross simplification that ironically lacks logical rigor. As long as you live in a society and have opinions about how it should work, you have politics. The two dimensional left/right spectrum is less than helpful. The quadrant model that includes authoritarian->libertarian is slightly more useful. The “politic free” group you’re speaking about are presumably the classic center-right libertarians. It’s definitely an ideology.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      @luffapi Taking into account what I meant by "ideological", the northbound side of the authoritarian axis is fully covered by those groups. You're right, I took it for granted that anti-authoritarian sentiment was a prerequisite for the third set of society I'm describing. But I don't view that as a political opinion. I'm not trying to describe the prevailing group-think technocratic culture in silicon valley. But ideologically, anyone who has no ideology except answering logical problems fits into a category that is always going to be reviled by people who have a political agenda, because their answers won't necessarily comport with what you want them to look like.
- MrGilbert 5y ago
  I think I'd sign that, yes. I wonder if there is a road back to this era…
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    The Fediverse is basically organized the exact same way, with federation as a purely additional layer on top of the individual content hosts.

noduerme 5y ago

The thing about the forums (and probably why we're here on HN) is that they were personally run, cared for and moderated by people who were good in their field, who cared about the environment they were cultivating. This was especially true in the dialup era when sysops literally read every comment and hung up their modem on people who were spreading something stupid. It led to a culture of total free speech and tolerance, as long as you found the right place to meet your peers, and as long as what you were saying made some kind of intelligent sense. That doesn't exist in any social media platform today. Social media rewards people for saying the dumbest possible thing that everyone else will agree with, or else the dumbest thing that will anger people. For context, we're on the old web and the BBS forums right now. Upvoting is a modest improvement. The way a place is run, the culture, is everything. Twitter is the Carnival Cruise. Smart speech is always on the leaky freighter. People with smart phones forget that the internet was for nerds, outcasts and rebels, while they were absorbed in TV. The nerds and rebels haven't disappeared. (We just need to stop the really angry ones who took over retail and software).

hrh 5y ago
Upvoting and downvoting especially incentivizes echo chambers. I take it you've never had people follow you around threads and downvote everything you posted? Happens bizarrely often. HN disappoints me more than the average Reddit or Twitter thread because some of the highs are really high here, but when you see brilliant people arguing about stuff they were arguing about six years ago, or adults that are so ideological that they aren't even rational, that happens all the time on HN and I feel in a way it is worse because we should know better. I think HN, as a place for nerds, largely succeeds, but it also has a very very limited demographic.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Sure. Comparatively, I find it far less ideological and more cerebral than most places. Nothing's perfect. I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems. As it happens, the less dogmatic are people who gravitate toward hacking solutions to things. People might deride that as seeking technological fixes to intractable problems, but it's essentially apolitical - and critiquing logic in the form of code is immune to emotional arguments to some extent, even though those arguments arise around the borders of what code is used for. I have a kind of similar view about Judaism and Buddhism. You can argue endlessly about the state of the universe but you have to agree that logic is logic. Weirdly, we live in a world where that agreement is vanishingly rare in everyday discourse.
  - luffapi 5y ago
    > The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems. This is a gross simplification that ironically lacks logical rigor. As long as you live in a society and have opinions about how it should work, you have politics. The two dimensional left/right spectrum is less than helpful. The quadrant model that includes authoritarian->libertarian is slightly more useful. The “politic free” group you’re speaking about are presumably the classic center-right libertarians. It’s definitely an ideology.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    @luffapi Taking into account what I meant by "ideological", the northbound side of the authoritarian axis is fully covered by those groups. You're right, I took it for granted that anti-authoritarian sentiment was a prerequisite for the third set of society I'm describing. But I don't view that as a political opinion. I'm not trying to describe the prevailing group-think technocratic culture in silicon valley. But ideologically, anyone who has no ideology except answering logical problems fits into a category that is always going to be reviled by people who have a political agenda, because their answers won't necessarily comport with what you want them to look like.
MrGilbert 5y ago
I think I'd sign that, yes. I wonder if there is a road back to this era…
- zozbot234 5y ago
  The Fediverse is basically organized the exact same way, with federation as a purely additional layer on top of the individual content hosts.