12 ms·

My first thought is that stuff like this always leads to yet another "content churn" iteration, where even more user-authored stuff drops off the Internet, leav

by gary_0 5y ago

My first thought is that stuff like this always leads to yet another "content churn" iteration, where even more user-authored stuff drops off the Internet, leaving behind an even more desolate wasteland of SEO spam and dead links. We've lost so much already... the old Flash content, the GeoCities pages, the forums fallen under Facebook's iron curtain, the archives of obscure culture erased by copyright lawyers. The lit windows of the Internet that went dark, one by one, only to be replaced by gaudy commercial signage.

TobyTheDog123 5y ago
This is absolutely spot-on, and I think a lot of HN will agree with you here… …which makes it all the more baffling why many on HN decry decentralization and web3 as scam artistry.
- ngc248 5y ago
  Because web3 decentralization is not the solution. The web when it started out was pretty decentralized. Consolidation and centralization happened because of economies of scale and it was convenient for the users also as compared to self hosting. Even in web3 there will be a similar cycle. In fact we are already seeing this.
- xenadu02 5y ago
  > …which makes it all the more baffling why many on HN decry decentralization and web3 as scam artistry Because "web3" is a scam. Claiming to solve this problem is not the same thing as solving it or solving it well.
  - viksit 5y ago
    All solutions to problems generally start off as toys or proofs of concepts. and they improve over time. See: The Wright Brothers.
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      What was the problem, from an end-user perspective, again?
      - cuteboy19 5y ago
        User End Problem: The state of not being scammed
        NicoJuicy 5y ago
        I think he bailed after making big claims.
- fladrif 5y ago
  My problem here, and correct me if I'm interpreting this incorrectly, is that web3 calls only for decentralization around current authorities and proposes recentralization around new authorities. The web as it is already has the technology and possibility for "decentralized" content creation and publishing, but as with all things it is easier to do so on "centralized" platforms. I don't see what web3 offers beyond that. We will still rely on DNS, BGP, and all host of other technologies to connect our digital world, and within this framework decentralization is ingrained.
- viksit 5y ago
  Agree. I’ve actually seen an interesting shift in such arguments. People will talk about decentralization being a good thing — but rather than talk about web3 from the economic lens of decentralization the arguments always flow to crypto scams and environmental factors.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    > People will talk about decentralization being a good thing — but rather than talk about web3 from the economic lens of decentralization the arguments always flow to crypto scams and environmental factors. "web3", by the bulk of use, is a pile of crypto advocacy. I want decentralization. I don't want web3. They're not the same. (Even if at one point they were.)
- dewey 5y ago
  If you'd look into most "web3" projects you'll see they are extremely centralized.
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  Not wanting to disturb your "Web 3.0" tangent, but you're aware you're writing on a forum where most anyone is bringing their project and clicks to github.com without a second thought?
  - homarp 5y ago
    >github good example: git, fully decentralized. Github: centralized git and of course web3 git: own a NFT of that specific revision.
    - input_sh 5y ago
      > Own an NFT with a link to that specific revision. Fixed that for you. NFTs don't store actual data, just links to them. And having an NFT with a link to something really brings nothing to the table when talking about link rot.
- dgb23 5y ago
  No. This is just yet another attempt to monetize social interactions so it’s pretty much going into the wrong direction. All of the things GP mentioned were just open, free, ways to communicate without attachments. This is why they have been beautiful and exciting and often of higher quality and honesty.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  I have still to see one thing this web3 is supposed to solve that cannot reasonably be solved with the standard web1.0
- root_axis 5y ago
  Web3 is a scam for extracting cash from the uninformed, it's not a solution to any problems and it's orders of magnitude costlier to operate than a centralized server.
- rchaud 5y ago
  It shouldn't be baffling at all. The methods of decentralization already exist and would be known to people that frequent this forum. "Web3" is a marketing term created by venture capitalists that want to fuse a tokenization layer to it from which they can extract perpetual payments.
db48x 5y ago
https://archive.org/details/flash_badger https://archive.org/details/flash_badger
Joeri 5y ago
I suppose there is always archive.org and wikipedia, but the more we rely on those to keep old content around the more worried I get about single points of failure. I remember when I first went online in the 90’s the vision of the internet was decentralized content, where information would never go away once it was pushed online. The reality is that the internet is now a decentralized network of central depots, with information rarely jumping between those central depots, and with old layers of content shedding off the edge of those depots and falling into the abyss. Gatekeeping is essential to the modern web. Content is valuable and/or dangerous and therefore (b)locked away instead of freely copied. Some exceptions exist, of course, but we are very far from that 90’s vision.
- gary_0 5y ago
  > locked away instead of freely copied Remember the slogan "information wants to be free"? I haven't heard that one in a while. Seems like once the Internet was profitable enough, everyone wanted their slice of the pie after all. Happens to every generation, I suppose.
  - telmo 5y ago
    The slogan was always cut short. Here's the entire thing: "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away." Well, it's even slightly more complicated than that but you can read the details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free Deep thinkers were always aware of these tensions. Cyberpunk writers in the 90s and even 80s correctly predicted a lot of what is going on right now, namely the use of technology to cover reality in gaudy advertisements (that could look back at you), as well as corporations gaining powers that used to be associated with nation states (for example, policing speech). People just hoped it would not turn out like this... I still have a feeling that it didn't have to.
    - mewse 5y ago
      I sometimes wonder how much those things were “predicted” and how much it was a case of the people with lots of money having read the same books we did and being primed toward those outcomes. I mean, we all read Snow Crash when we were teenagers and now the ones who grew up to be billionaires are all excited to build the Metaverse. Did Snow Crash “predict” that? Or is this just another (perhaps somewhat extreme) form of fandom? Similarly, would there be as many scientists trying to figure out how to make a “warp” drive if Star Trek hadn’t popularised the concept? And if/when they eventually succeed in making warp drives practical, will we say that Star Trek “predicted” it? It feels like there should be a better term for “making a fictional concept compelling enough that it is forced into reality by fans of the fictional work.” But I don’t know what that term would be.
archhn 5y ago
The internet was a magical place back in the day. We were all super excited to contribute to something so transformative. I remember my father excitedly putting up his 3d gifs on his GeoCites page. Then the corporations came with their legions of desk jockeys, all competing with each other for promotions dependent upon squeezing the internet of every last drop of value. The internet became less human, just like modern society. Everything about the almighty dollar. Human creativity and freedom be dammed.
- drran 5y ago
  We can start Internet 2.0, a HackNet, just for hackers. Create your own DNS server, register non-commercial hacker sites only, create catalogue and decentralized search engine for these servers. Commercial operators will see no value in this parallel network, because google will be unable to index it, so spam problem will gone.
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    >We can start Internet 2.0 we're already at ipv6 and web3.0 /s deep/dark web does still exist
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Hmm, not a bad idea. I’ll add that to my feature list for newnet.
  - lloydatkinson 5y ago
    I would love to be involved in this
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    > "because google will be unable to index it" Creating a DNS server is beyond Googles abilities? Why will Google be unable to index it? If you can read the catalogue, they surely can. > "Commercial operators will see no value in this parallel network" If people are using it, they will want to put ads on it. Why wouldn't they? And why are 'hackers' separate from 'people who want money for their work' in this scenario?
avazhi 5y ago
As you alluded to, unfortunately we aren't even left with gaudy corporatism. It's just an SEO shitshow now. For certain searches, Google is basically useless. It's the same fucking content copy pasted across 15 results.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  I have to do weird tricks when searching for dll problems to throw off those long lists of fix my pc spam sites. This is for fairly obscure third party dlls. They just round up all the names and create a spam page for each dll. Then probably black hat them to the top.
  - lloydatkinson 5y ago
    What kind of tricks do you do?
    - criddell 5y ago
      Not the OP, but search for some of the exported methods can sometimes bring up details.
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      Normally add something technical and related that I expect to be mentioned in a stackoverflow style forum but not in a spam. You made me think… just search stackoveflow should be step 1. Roll out Google if desperate.
- arlcode 5y ago
  It feels like there is a nieche opening up. With SEO copy content being useless to anyone but the provider and Google and the tech giants coming slowly but surely under scrutiny from lawmakers, it seems like there might be an opening to develop a more open web (commercially speaking) especially in those countries and regions that lost the "Big Tech" race. I know HN isn't a fan of regulations but I think FAANG and friends overplayed their hands and the screws are slowly tightening.
- 5y ago
xenihn 5y ago
Discord has done more to kill traditional forums than Facebook has.
- raverbashing 5y ago
  Which frankly, should have been a complement of forums but not a replacement (And more frankly, the forum board softwares haven't evolved gracefully)
javajosh 5y ago
As I get older I get more circumspect about loss. Loss is the default - an expression of the universality of decay. Almost all information from almost all of human history has been lost. There is a long list of extinction events in natural history[0], some smaller, some larger. In every case, millions of years of 'progress' were wiped out along with trillions of individual lives. And yet here we are! If it weren't for those past disasters, we would not be here. It does seem wasteful to lose so much, at first. But then when you put it in context, you realize it's not as bad as other fates that have, can and probably will befall us. Plus, the alternative is far worse: dreadful "stable dystopias" like 1984 and Brave New World, which afford no exit from within, by construction, can only be stopped in this way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events
- WanderPanda 5y ago
  Luckily these types of dystopias are only stable in fiction. Lets hope future ones will destabilise faster than the e.g. soviet union did (after 70 or so years of existence), though.
  - danuker 5y ago
    Everything accelerates when you have Internet.
  - beckman466 5y ago
    > dystopias > soviet union what about the american imperialism covering much of the globe today? this world is a deep dystopia for a very large amount of people already... (and growing) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
    - ThunderSizzle 5y ago
      With the current state of affairs, I wouldn't be surprised if the American intelligence community world order collapses within the decade, either from within or from international pressure.
james_in_the_uk 5y ago
"Copyright lawyers" != "Rights-holders" Say what you like about lawyers, but one thing I think we'll agree on is that they rarely do stuff unless someone else is paying for their time (IAAL fwiw :) I'm only half joking, because blaming lawyers deflects from the real issue here, which is the fitness-for-purpose of statutory fair use / fair dealing doctrine. There are quite a few eminent academic lawyers worth reading on this topic, e.g. Boyle, Lessig, Litman, Vaidhyanathan.
antihero 5y ago
The internet has become gentrified. Money ruins everything. People's greed and in our terms "optimisation" is counter to creativity and genuine expression. We are part of the problem.
altcognito 5y ago
Bandwidth is cheaper and cheaper yet our MBA driven world seems to find a way to charge more and more. Capitalism isn’t about finding cheapest pricing anymore, it is unlimited power of business to charge the absolute maximum the customer is willing to expend because competition is gone. All of us on the cloud are just going to sit there with pikachu faces when rates get higher and higher.
bayindirh 5y ago
I'm planning/trying to restart my personal page/blog thing for a while now, and was considering good ole' Wordpress.com for some time, and looked to the plans and so on. Today's news just removed that option again. Internet is dividing further. Either you overpay for the convenience or self-host the whole stack yourself. Second one, backed by a static page generator looks more and more enticing now.
- cube00 5y ago
  There is a middle ground, generate the static site content yourself and then there are plenty of providers who will host your static content for free and even let you use your own domain name. Although I'm not sure why I'm telling you this when the website in your HN "about" already uses Jekyll.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    Of course, I already started building my page via Jekyll (and I have the domain and the hardware to host it), but wanted to see if there are any more carefree options, just for fun actually. Looks like I'll continue building that page via Jekyll on the same hardware. Probably automating the "generate-publish" cycle a bit with some little CI/CD pipeline and calling it a day is a safe bet.
  - matthewdgreen 5y ago
    I have a Wordpress.com blog at https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com. I switched there from Blogger. Moving all that content took me most of a summer (part time) even with the Blogger import tooling, and will be much harder if I have to go to some markdown tool. This is made worse due to the fact that my site contains finicky images and formatting and (some) LaTeX math. I know a move to a static site is possible but I absolutely dread having to do this again. The transition cost for existing content (and comments!) is really high. I chose Wordpress.com because (despite the fact that security people make fun of Wordpress) it’s full-featured and could handle my usage for about $100/yr. Now it’ll apparently be $180, which is an annoying surprise price increase. But the real annoyance is 100,000 visits per month for the paid plan: I’ve had months that easily blow past this limit (due to HN hugs) and I genuinely don’t know what will happen to the site if this happens in the future. That limit is extremely problematic and makes me wonder if the company is entering a terminal decline.
syntaxfree 5y ago
Please divert all of your charity spending to archive.org
jmyeet 5y ago
The sad reality is that much of what is "lost" wasn't worth keeping. There's a world of difference between being a curator and a hoarder. You don't remember everything that happens to you. You remember things that are noteworthy for some reason. There is a natural process for the brain to preserve certain memories. The Internet is really no different. Things get preserved largely because they're worth preserving. Things that aren't... don't. As for forums, IMHO they've largely disappeared because they're a terrible format for maintaining information. I mean how many times have you done a search for "how do you do X?" and the first search result is a forum title asking exactly that... with no replies (side note: why doesn't Google downrank these scenarios?). Or someone asks a question and there are a bunch of irrelevant responses (eg "first!"), outdated information, sidetracks, personal attacks over some long-forgotten beef, etc. A chronological thread is almost never useful for finding information. Pinned comments are just bandaids. Stackoverflow's ranked answer system is better but still has issues with stale information. It also relies on moderation. As for Facebook, IMHO this whole hiding information in a walled garden I tend to find completely overblown for much the same reasons why forums are mostly useless. The trend I absolutely hate however is using Discord as the primary repository for, say, an open source project. This is something that is meant to be available yet the discoverability is absolutely horrendous. Even if you're on the right Discord, the search is woefully abysmal.
- cxr 5y ago
  > You don't remember everything that happens to you. You remember things that are noteworthy for some reason. There is a natural process for the brain to preserve certain memories. The Internet is really no different. Things get preserved largely because they're worth preserving. Things that aren't... don't. This line of thinking seems insightful. Its flawed, though, in more ways than one. For one thing, it's glib. There's an attempt to respond to an question of ought by gesturing at what is, as if that settles it. It doesn't, even if the premises are granted. Which brings us to the second thing: they shouldn't be. People can and do forget things that are worth remembering. People remember things that are inconsequential.
game_the0ry 5y ago
> We've lost so much already... the old Flash content, the GeoCities pages, the forums fallen under Facebook's iron curtain, the archives of obscure culture erased by copyright lawyers. The lit windows of the Internet that went dark, one by one, only to be replaced by gaudy commercial signage. Have we? I disagree. Why not self host with Ghost? [1] I think a golden age of decentralized tooling (payments, content, etc) is starting to emerge [2, 3], you just have to be optimistic enough to see it. Let's not reminisce about the "good old days," bc the good days could be ahead too. [1] https://ghost.org/docs/hosting/ https://ghost.org/docs/hosting/ [2] https://balajis.com/set-up-a-paid-newsletter-at-your-own-domain/ https://balajis.com/set-up-a-paid-newsletter-at-your-own-dom... [3] https://balajis.com/how-to-gradually-exit-twitter/ https://balajis.com/how-to-gradually-exit-twitter/
xhkkffbf 5y ago
They're not being kicked off the web by copyright lawyers. The bloggers still own their copyright. Indeed, copyright is what keeps them being exploited by others. They're disappearing because they don't want to pay what it costs in time or fees to keep their words around. If you believe enough in this-- and I'm not being sarcastic -- I hope you'll donate the time and servers and bandwidth to offer free hosting for these folks.
deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

by gary_0 5y ago

TobyTheDog123 5y ago

This is absolutely spot-on, and I think a lot of HN will agree with you here… …which makes it all the more baffling why many on HN decry decentralization and web3 as scam artistry.

ngc248 5y ago
Because web3 decentralization is not the solution. The web when it started out was pretty decentralized. Consolidation and centralization happened because of economies of scale and it was convenient for the users also as compared to self hosting. Even in web3 there will be a similar cycle. In fact we are already seeing this.
xenadu02 5y ago
> …which makes it all the more baffling why many on HN decry decentralization and web3 as scam artistry Because "web3" is a scam. Claiming to solve this problem is not the same thing as solving it or solving it well.
- viksit 5y ago
  All solutions to problems generally start off as toys or proofs of concepts. and they improve over time. See: The Wright Brothers.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    What was the problem, from an end-user perspective, again?
    - cuteboy19 5y ago
      User End Problem: The state of not being scammed
      - NicoJuicy 5y ago
        I think he bailed after making big claims.
fladrif 5y ago
My problem here, and correct me if I'm interpreting this incorrectly, is that web3 calls only for decentralization around current authorities and proposes recentralization around new authorities. The web as it is already has the technology and possibility for "decentralized" content creation and publishing, but as with all things it is easier to do so on "centralized" platforms. I don't see what web3 offers beyond that. We will still rely on DNS, BGP, and all host of other technologies to connect our digital world, and within this framework decentralization is ingrained.
viksit 5y ago
Agree. I’ve actually seen an interesting shift in such arguments. People will talk about decentralization being a good thing — but rather than talk about web3 from the economic lens of decentralization the arguments always flow to crypto scams and environmental factors.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  > People will talk about decentralization being a good thing — but rather than talk about web3 from the economic lens of decentralization the arguments always flow to crypto scams and environmental factors. "web3", by the bulk of use, is a pile of crypto advocacy. I want decentralization. I don't want web3. They're not the same. (Even if at one point they were.)
dewey 5y ago
If you'd look into most "web3" projects you'll see they are extremely centralized.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
Not wanting to disturb your "Web 3.0" tangent, but you're aware you're writing on a forum where most anyone is bringing their project and clicks to github.com without a second thought?
- homarp 5y ago
  >github good example: git, fully decentralized. Github: centralized git and of course web3 git: own a NFT of that specific revision.
  - input_sh 5y ago
    > Own an NFT with a link to that specific revision. Fixed that for you. NFTs don't store actual data, just links to them. And having an NFT with a link to something really brings nothing to the table when talking about link rot.
dgb23 5y ago
No. This is just yet another attempt to monetize social interactions so it’s pretty much going into the wrong direction. All of the things GP mentioned were just open, free, ways to communicate without attachments. This is why they have been beautiful and exciting and often of higher quality and honesty.
DocTomoe 5y ago
I have still to see one thing this web3 is supposed to solve that cannot reasonably be solved with the standard web1.0
root_axis 5y ago
Web3 is a scam for extracting cash from the uninformed, it's not a solution to any problems and it's orders of magnitude costlier to operate than a centralized server.
rchaud 5y ago
It shouldn't be baffling at all. The methods of decentralization already exist and would be known to people that frequent this forum. "Web3" is a marketing term created by venture capitalists that want to fuse a tokenization layer to it from which they can extract perpetual payments.

db48x 5y ago

https://archive.org/details/flash_badger https://archive.org/details/flash_badger

Joeri 5y ago

I suppose there is always archive.org and wikipedia, but the more we rely on those to keep old content around the more worried I get about single points of failure. I remember when I first went online in the 90’s the vision of the internet was decentralized content, where information would never go away once it was pushed online. The reality is that the internet is now a decentralized network of central depots, with information rarely jumping between those central depots, and with old layers of content shedding off the edge of those depots and falling into the abyss. Gatekeeping is essential to the modern web. Content is valuable and/or dangerous and therefore (b)locked away instead of freely copied. Some exceptions exist, of course, but we are very far from that 90’s vision.

gary_0 5y ago
> locked away instead of freely copied Remember the slogan "information wants to be free"? I haven't heard that one in a while. Seems like once the Internet was profitable enough, everyone wanted their slice of the pie after all. Happens to every generation, I suppose.
- telmo 5y ago
  The slogan was always cut short. Here's the entire thing: "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away." Well, it's even slightly more complicated than that but you can read the details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free Deep thinkers were always aware of these tensions. Cyberpunk writers in the 90s and even 80s correctly predicted a lot of what is going on right now, namely the use of technology to cover reality in gaudy advertisements (that could look back at you), as well as corporations gaining powers that used to be associated with nation states (for example, policing speech). People just hoped it would not turn out like this... I still have a feeling that it didn't have to.
  - mewse 5y ago
    I sometimes wonder how much those things were “predicted” and how much it was a case of the people with lots of money having read the same books we did and being primed toward those outcomes. I mean, we all read Snow Crash when we were teenagers and now the ones who grew up to be billionaires are all excited to build the Metaverse. Did Snow Crash “predict” that? Or is this just another (perhaps somewhat extreme) form of fandom? Similarly, would there be as many scientists trying to figure out how to make a “warp” drive if Star Trek hadn’t popularised the concept? And if/when they eventually succeed in making warp drives practical, will we say that Star Trek “predicted” it? It feels like there should be a better term for “making a fictional concept compelling enough that it is forced into reality by fans of the fictional work.” But I don’t know what that term would be.

archhn 5y ago

The internet was a magical place back in the day. We were all super excited to contribute to something so transformative. I remember my father excitedly putting up his 3d gifs on his GeoCites page. Then the corporations came with their legions of desk jockeys, all competing with each other for promotions dependent upon squeezing the internet of every last drop of value. The internet became less human, just like modern society. Everything about the almighty dollar. Human creativity and freedom be dammed.

drran 5y ago
We can start Internet 2.0, a HackNet, just for hackers. Create your own DNS server, register non-commercial hacker sites only, create catalogue and decentralized search engine for these servers. Commercial operators will see no value in this parallel network, because google will be unable to index it, so spam problem will gone.
- hansel_der 5y ago
  >We can start Internet 2.0 we're already at ipv6 and web3.0 /s deep/dark web does still exist
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Hmm, not a bad idea. I’ll add that to my feature list for newnet.
- lloydatkinson 5y ago
  I would love to be involved in this
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  > "because google will be unable to index it" Creating a DNS server is beyond Googles abilities? Why will Google be unable to index it? If you can read the catalogue, they surely can. > "Commercial operators will see no value in this parallel network" If people are using it, they will want to put ads on it. Why wouldn't they? And why are 'hackers' separate from 'people who want money for their work' in this scenario?

avazhi 5y ago

As you alluded to, unfortunately we aren't even left with gaudy corporatism. It's just an SEO shitshow now. For certain searches, Google is basically useless. It's the same fucking content copy pasted across 15 results.

quickthrower2 5y ago
I have to do weird tricks when searching for dll problems to throw off those long lists of fix my pc spam sites. This is for fairly obscure third party dlls. They just round up all the names and create a spam page for each dll. Then probably black hat them to the top.
- lloydatkinson 5y ago
  What kind of tricks do you do?
  - criddell 5y ago
    Not the OP, but search for some of the exported methods can sometimes bring up details.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    Normally add something technical and related that I expect to be mentioned in a stackoverflow style forum but not in a spam. You made me think… just search stackoveflow should be step 1. Roll out Google if desperate.
arlcode 5y ago
It feels like there is a nieche opening up. With SEO copy content being useless to anyone but the provider and Google and the tech giants coming slowly but surely under scrutiny from lawmakers, it seems like there might be an opening to develop a more open web (commercially speaking) especially in those countries and regions that lost the "Big Tech" race. I know HN isn't a fan of regulations but I think FAANG and friends overplayed their hands and the screws are slowly tightening.
5y ago

xenihn 5y ago

Discord has done more to kill traditional forums than Facebook has.

raverbashing 5y ago
Which frankly, should have been a complement of forums but not a replacement (And more frankly, the forum board softwares haven't evolved gracefully)

javajosh 5y ago

As I get older I get more circumspect about loss. Loss is the default - an expression of the universality of decay. Almost all information from almost all of human history has been lost. There is a long list of extinction events in natural history[0], some smaller, some larger. In every case, millions of years of 'progress' were wiped out along with trillions of individual lives. And yet here we are! If it weren't for those past disasters, we would not be here. It does seem wasteful to lose so much, at first. But then when you put it in context, you realize it's not as bad as other fates that have, can and probably will befall us. Plus, the alternative is far worse: dreadful "stable dystopias" like 1984 and Brave New World, which afford no exit from within, by construction, can only be stopped in this way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events

WanderPanda 5y ago
Luckily these types of dystopias are only stable in fiction. Lets hope future ones will destabilise faster than the e.g. soviet union did (after 70 or so years of existence), though.
- danuker 5y ago
  Everything accelerates when you have Internet.
- beckman466 5y ago
  > dystopias > soviet union what about the american imperialism covering much of the globe today? this world is a deep dystopia for a very large amount of people already... (and growing) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
  - ThunderSizzle 5y ago
    With the current state of affairs, I wouldn't be surprised if the American intelligence community world order collapses within the decade, either from within or from international pressure.

james_in_the_uk 5y ago

"Copyright lawyers" != "Rights-holders" Say what you like about lawyers, but one thing I think we'll agree on is that they rarely do stuff unless someone else is paying for their time (IAAL fwiw :) I'm only half joking, because blaming lawyers deflects from the real issue here, which is the fitness-for-purpose of statutory fair use / fair dealing doctrine. There are quite a few eminent academic lawyers worth reading on this topic, e.g. Boyle, Lessig, Litman, Vaidhyanathan.

antihero 5y ago

The internet has become gentrified. Money ruins everything. People's greed and in our terms "optimisation" is counter to creativity and genuine expression. We are part of the problem.

altcognito 5y ago

Bandwidth is cheaper and cheaper yet our MBA driven world seems to find a way to charge more and more. Capitalism isn’t about finding cheapest pricing anymore, it is unlimited power of business to charge the absolute maximum the customer is willing to expend because competition is gone. All of us on the cloud are just going to sit there with pikachu faces when rates get higher and higher.

bayindirh 5y ago

I'm planning/trying to restart my personal page/blog thing for a while now, and was considering good ole' Wordpress.com for some time, and looked to the plans and so on. Today's news just removed that option again. Internet is dividing further. Either you overpay for the convenience or self-host the whole stack yourself. Second one, backed by a static page generator looks more and more enticing now.

cube00 5y ago
There is a middle ground, generate the static site content yourself and then there are plenty of providers who will host your static content for free and even let you use your own domain name. Although I'm not sure why I'm telling you this when the website in your HN "about" already uses Jekyll.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  Of course, I already started building my page via Jekyll (and I have the domain and the hardware to host it), but wanted to see if there are any more carefree options, just for fun actually. Looks like I'll continue building that page via Jekyll on the same hardware. Probably automating the "generate-publish" cycle a bit with some little CI/CD pipeline and calling it a day is a safe bet.
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  I have a Wordpress.com blog at https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com. I switched there from Blogger. Moving all that content took me most of a summer (part time) even with the Blogger import tooling, and will be much harder if I have to go to some markdown tool. This is made worse due to the fact that my site contains finicky images and formatting and (some) LaTeX math. I know a move to a static site is possible but I absolutely dread having to do this again. The transition cost for existing content (and comments!) is really high. I chose Wordpress.com because (despite the fact that security people make fun of Wordpress) it’s full-featured and could handle my usage for about $100/yr. Now it’ll apparently be $180, which is an annoying surprise price increase. But the real annoyance is 100,000 visits per month for the paid plan: I’ve had months that easily blow past this limit (due to HN hugs) and I genuinely don’t know what will happen to the site if this happens in the future. That limit is extremely problematic and makes me wonder if the company is entering a terminal decline.

syntaxfree 5y ago

Please divert all of your charity spending to archive.org

jmyeet 5y ago

The sad reality is that much of what is "lost" wasn't worth keeping. There's a world of difference between being a curator and a hoarder. You don't remember everything that happens to you. You remember things that are noteworthy for some reason. There is a natural process for the brain to preserve certain memories. The Internet is really no different. Things get preserved largely because they're worth preserving. Things that aren't... don't. As for forums, IMHO they've largely disappeared because they're a terrible format for maintaining information. I mean how many times have you done a search for "how do you do X?" and the first search result is a forum title asking exactly that... with no replies (side note: why doesn't Google downrank these scenarios?). Or someone asks a question and there are a bunch of irrelevant responses (eg "first!"), outdated information, sidetracks, personal attacks over some long-forgotten beef, etc. A chronological thread is almost never useful for finding information. Pinned comments are just bandaids. Stackoverflow's ranked answer system is better but still has issues with stale information. It also relies on moderation. As for Facebook, IMHO this whole hiding information in a walled garden I tend to find completely overblown for much the same reasons why forums are mostly useless. The trend I absolutely hate however is using Discord as the primary repository for, say, an open source project. This is something that is meant to be available yet the discoverability is absolutely horrendous. Even if you're on the right Discord, the search is woefully abysmal.

cxr 5y ago
> You don't remember everything that happens to you. You remember things that are noteworthy for some reason. There is a natural process for the brain to preserve certain memories. The Internet is really no different. Things get preserved largely because they're worth preserving. Things that aren't... don't. This line of thinking seems insightful. Its flawed, though, in more ways than one. For one thing, it's glib. There's an attempt to respond to an question of ought by gesturing at what is, as if that settles it. It doesn't, even if the premises are granted. Which brings us to the second thing: they shouldn't be. People can and do forget things that are worth remembering. People remember things that are inconsequential.

game_the0ry 5y ago

> We've lost so much already... the old Flash content, the GeoCities pages, the forums fallen under Facebook's iron curtain, the archives of obscure culture erased by copyright lawyers. The lit windows of the Internet that went dark, one by one, only to be replaced by gaudy commercial signage. Have we? I disagree. Why not self host with Ghost? [1] I think a golden age of decentralized tooling (payments, content, etc) is starting to emerge [2, 3], you just have to be optimistic enough to see it. Let's not reminisce about the "good old days," bc the good days could be ahead too. [1] https://ghost.org/docs/hosting/ https://ghost.org/docs/hosting/ [2] https://balajis.com/set-up-a-paid-newsletter-at-your-own-domain/ https://balajis.com/set-up-a-paid-newsletter-at-your-own-dom... [3] https://balajis.com/how-to-gradually-exit-twitter/ https://balajis.com/how-to-gradually-exit-twitter/

xhkkffbf 5y ago

They're not being kicked off the web by copyright lawyers. The bloggers still own their copyright. Indeed, copyright is what keeps them being exploited by others. They're disappearing because they don't want to pay what it costs in time or fees to keep their words around. If you believe enough in this-- and I'm not being sarcastic -- I hope you'll donate the time and servers and bandwidth to offer free hosting for these folks.

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