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Yes, it feels like a return to the walled-garden days of America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, etc. Essentially, they seem to be want to create a separate netw
by rudyfink 5y ago
Yes, it feels like a return to the walled-garden days of America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, etc. Essentially, they seem to be want to create a separate network that they control--one that is not "internet-ed" to other networks in an open fashion.
- fouc 5y agoThat's an interesting comparison, I never before thought of AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe as belonging to the walled-garden.
- samplatt 5y agoIt's also a very American-centric view. The rest of the world is going back to forums and single-platform chatrooms and avoiding reddit/twitter/facebook, but never had an AOL/ProdigyCompuServe phase to go through. If we could just get discord to <insert short feature wishlist> then I reckon the golden IRC days would be back with a vengence.
- imwillofficial 5y agoThe early internet was largely America centric.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dathinab 5y agoIRC won't come back for the masses, it's UX doesn't allow it.
- youareafool 5y ago
- eyelidlessness 5y agoIRC’s UX never went away for the masses, people use IRC semantics all the time on Slack and Discord. The UX that never became mainstream once the internet was, is the same as it ever was: people by and large don’t value decentralization and don’t understand how to use it effectively. The closest it’s ever gotten was torrents, and even then most people didn’t branch out from TPB.
- dathinab 5y agoNo, the only similarity Slack on Discord have is that they are "chat like" and have "chat rooms"/"channels". But the whole UX around using them is very very different. And that is what matters for the normal user. Just the list of lacking default features is quite long, like: predictable display of formatting, emoji, pictures, file sharing, voice chat, nested conversations/threads, chat history, different user roles, user avatars, etc. And yes you can bolt all of this on top of IRC, but that doesn't matter. Defaults matter. At least for the common users UX. And as long as the IRC standard doesn't include most of this points by default (especially chat history, avatars, etc.) it won't have another golden time. Also no msg-commands as the default way to do things, programmers might like them, the common user doesn't.
- Underphil 5y agoIs that really true though? Do you have any sources to verify that? I'm from England and AOL felt pretty pervasive here.
- iechoz6H 5y agoCorrection: Free AOL disks felt very pervasive here.
- glandium 5y agoFree AOL disks were everywhere in France too.
- pjerem 5y agoEspecially in my uncle’s cherry trees to scare the birds.
- dylan604 5y agoFuture archaeologists are going to be sifting through the landfills and determine that AOL discs are going to either be some sort of currency or curious religious artifacts.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoI was on AOL for a big stretch of that time, and those archaeologists wouldn’t be wrong. It was so pervasive that it was a thing of wonder and majesty on the actual www (eg the classic viral Web 1.0 post about getting a license plate starting with ASL).
- Underphil 5y agoI almost remember the exact moment I realised that AOL in fact wasn't the internet but rather some shovelware that sat above it. As soon as I got winsock working I never went back.
- 5y ago
- oldsecondhand 5y agoDiscord is just another walled garden.
- kortilla 5y agoUnless “short feature wishlist” is “open source both the client and the server”, then the golden IRC days are not coming back. The whole point of IRC is that there isn’t a central point of control.
- robocat 5y ago> The rest of the world [snip] never had an AOL/ProdigyCompuServe phase In the Phillipines, Facebook is tied in with your mobile provider so most people only got Facebook (when I was there some years ago). Facebook is what some people there called the internet. Definitely a walled in garden, and definitely a strategy by Facebook to create a moat in some countries.
- oska 5y agoI'm aware of this 'colonising strategy' of FB in developing markets and I find it really sad that many people's first experience of the net and the web will have been FB.
- dagw 5y agoI lived in England in the mid 90s and CompuServe (and to a lesser extent AOL) was the way I and most people I knew got 'online'.
- harikb 5y agoIt was a walled garden in a slightly different sense. AOL tried their best to force companies to buy AOL “keyword” so that the clueless user doesn’t have to type .com or .net at the end. If you want a comparison, that is like Google putting “I am feeling lucky” as the only option and then auctioning off that result.
- egfx 5y agoYep I guess the pull to be a walled garden is too great. Even Twitter, a product that should have been the true antithesis to walled garden pigeon holed themselves into walled garden state. I wrote a blog post about it a long time ago https://medium.com/@shareU/we-built-this-city-2cb97437942f https://medium.com/@shareU/we-built-this-city-2cb97437942f
- totony 5y ago>walled garden >links medium blog post which can only be accessed behind a login
- Underphil 5y agoIt didn't ask me for a login (?)
- Utkarsh_Mood 5y agodepends on whether you've finished your free articles for the month
- quaintdev 5y agoFree products sooner or later end up becoming walled gardens unless it is open source and self hosted.
- 5y ago