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I could survive without HN. The internet existed before it. We had things like webrings and mailing lists that were highly personal forms of communication & a

I could survive without HN. The internet existed before it. We had things like webrings and mailing lists that were highly personal forms of communication & aggregation. You could even find content that you wanted online before Google made search pay-to-play. Killing social media and requiring services (like email, etc) not be an ad-supported free model (where the product is the user) would completely transform the internet (and its balance of power) as we know it and for the better. SomethingAwful charging $10 for an account was always/accidentally the right idea.

NoGravitas 5y ago
This, 100%. I only come to the Orange Website to see what bad ideas are currently popular in the industry, and it never fails to provide.
handrous 5y ago
My consistent answer to the "if companies weren't allowed to spy on you and do other horrible shit, and if ad dollars dried up, all these sites would go away!" argument is that all those sites have value approaching zero anyway. So they go away. Oh well. The Web loses 1% of its decent content, while the remaining 99% gets higher visibility, more funding, more interest/attention (which can improve quality, as in, say, collaborative communities like Wikipedia, or open source). The rest of the cost is the loss of a bunch of shit content that most people could/would replace with time-wasters like sudoku or Tetris or entertainment magazines, and carry on with life. Seems like a bargain to me.
- busterarm 5y ago
  You also couldn't have megalithic companies like Google that bait you into their ecosystem with "free shit" like Gmail and search completely bankrolled out of their other primary enterprise. Google uses Ads to unevenly compete with every other software company on the planet. Google can buy your company and outpay you for engineers with what is essentially their financial fingernail clippings. The thing that's gained in this scenario is all of the talent that could be going to other things besides optimizing ads.
  - handrous 5y ago
    They use those advantages to compete with other companies and with volunteer efforts. That's another reason I'm not too worried about doom-and-gloom predictions of what would happen if we killed the ads (and spying-fed ML) golden goose: we do not know how much better protocols, free (open source) products, non-profit services (as in Wikipedia), and paid software/services would be without ad-fed giants sucking all the air out of the room at best, and deliberately using their advantages to kill things (competitors, protocols, et c.) at worst. I suspect all of those would be a whole lot better, absent the money-firehoses dependent on bad & dangerous behavior.
    - nwiswell 5y ago
      Excellent point, it is easy to forget the minor miracle of FOSS. Plus, without the ad revenues there would be no mega-corps vacuuming up all the new grads, so I would anticipate a significantly greater rate of innovation and FOSS contribution broadly.
      - handrous 5y ago
        There's even an interest or social-reward factor to participating in these kinds of things. Working on an open-protocol messaging client for free is a lot less rewarding when the userbase of the entire protocol is 1% or less of all online messaging, because most of that market's captured by closed platforms that forbid and/or discourage other clients, than when it works with 20+% of clients and even your non-geek friends are using the protocol, if not your particular client. I truly think we couldn't launch something like the email protocol these days and have it gain traction, and I don't mean because of its flaws. I judge that a pretty crappy state of affairs, and I think the #1 cause is that it's so lucrative to keep your users in a position where you can track & spy on them very well, while avoiding leaking anything they're doing so that competitors can see it—IOW incentives are set up to greatly reward successful closed platforms while discouraging interoperability, so we get even more of that than we otherwise might.
        busterarm 5y ago
caf 5y ago
I was around at the time, and webrings were useless from the start. Mailing lists, usenet and IRC were fine but they were just as viciously combative and abusive as any social media we have now. You're looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. You might also be forgetting that Google first became big because they created a search engine that actually worked. Getting Altavista or Lycos to find what you were looking for was a real skill.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Webrings definitely were not useless from the start, but they were useless after a couple of months. For a very short while though, they were great, and there are even some efforts to revive the concept today.
- busterarm 5y ago
  That Google also isn't the same Google that's pay-to-play.

NoGravitas 5y ago

This, 100%. I only come to the Orange Website to see what bad ideas are currently popular in the industry, and it never fails to provide.

handrous 5y ago

My consistent answer to the "if companies weren't allowed to spy on you and do other horrible shit, and if ad dollars dried up, all these sites would go away!" argument is that all those sites have value approaching zero anyway. So they go away. Oh well. The Web loses 1% of its decent content, while the remaining 99% gets higher visibility, more funding, more interest/attention (which can improve quality, as in, say, collaborative communities like Wikipedia, or open source). The rest of the cost is the loss of a bunch of shit content that most people could/would replace with time-wasters like sudoku or Tetris or entertainment magazines, and carry on with life. Seems like a bargain to me.

busterarm 5y ago
You also couldn't have megalithic companies like Google that bait you into their ecosystem with "free shit" like Gmail and search completely bankrolled out of their other primary enterprise. Google uses Ads to unevenly compete with every other software company on the planet. Google can buy your company and outpay you for engineers with what is essentially their financial fingernail clippings. The thing that's gained in this scenario is all of the talent that could be going to other things besides optimizing ads.
- handrous 5y ago
  They use those advantages to compete with other companies and with volunteer efforts. That's another reason I'm not too worried about doom-and-gloom predictions of what would happen if we killed the ads (and spying-fed ML) golden goose: we do not know how much better protocols, free (open source) products, non-profit services (as in Wikipedia), and paid software/services would be without ad-fed giants sucking all the air out of the room at best, and deliberately using their advantages to kill things (competitors, protocols, et c.) at worst. I suspect all of those would be a whole lot better, absent the money-firehoses dependent on bad & dangerous behavior.
  - nwiswell 5y ago
    Excellent point, it is easy to forget the minor miracle of FOSS. Plus, without the ad revenues there would be no mega-corps vacuuming up all the new grads, so I would anticipate a significantly greater rate of innovation and FOSS contribution broadly.
    - handrous 5y ago
      There's even an interest or social-reward factor to participating in these kinds of things. Working on an open-protocol messaging client for free is a lot less rewarding when the userbase of the entire protocol is 1% or less of all online messaging, because most of that market's captured by closed platforms that forbid and/or discourage other clients, than when it works with 20+% of clients and even your non-geek friends are using the protocol, if not your particular client. I truly think we couldn't launch something like the email protocol these days and have it gain traction, and I don't mean because of its flaws. I judge that a pretty crappy state of affairs, and I think the #1 cause is that it's so lucrative to keep your users in a position where you can track & spy on them very well, while avoiding leaking anything they're doing so that competitors can see it—IOW incentives are set up to greatly reward successful closed platforms while discouraging interoperability, so we get even more of that than we otherwise might.
      - busterarm 5y ago

caf 5y ago

I was around at the time, and webrings were useless from the start. Mailing lists, usenet and IRC were fine but they were just as viciously combative and abusive as any social media we have now. You're looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. You might also be forgetting that Google first became big because they created a search engine that actually worked. Getting Altavista or Lycos to find what you were looking for was a real skill.

jacquesm 5y ago
Webrings definitely were not useless from the start, but they were useless after a couple of months. For a very short while though, they were great, and there are even some efforts to revive the concept today.
busterarm 5y ago
That Google also isn't the same Google that's pay-to-play.