8 ms·

I loved this line, cause I hadn't looked at it from this angle before: "For some reason, people who would never read an article in the Wall Street Journal abou

by jtode 4y ago

I loved this line, cause I hadn't looked at it from this angle before: "For some reason, people who would never read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Procter and Gamble acquiring a new shampoo company will devour content about Microsoft acquiring a tech startup they’ve never heard of." This is so true. I've known people who get this instant passion for an area they know nothing about, if it brushes up against an area they do know something about, and want to start analyzing it like baseball card stats or something. But they're basically reading a card that's a square kilometre in size about a sport they have never played or watched for any amount of time longer than it takes to momentarily look at, and then flip past, a PBS cricket match (if you're North American and have no British relatives). edit: Only modification I would make to the article would be to emphasize that not only does Mastadon work in a way that is antithetical to contemporary understandings of how the internet works, it more importantly embodies the way that the Internet worked before capitalism showed up. I gave up on slogans as a means of social change decades ago, but I would love to see "Protocols Not Platforms" get more traction in the zeitgeist.

Dalewyn 4y ago
>it more importantly embodies the way that the Internet worked before capitalism showed up. Does it really? I miss the internet of the late 90s and early 2000s, but Mastadon feels like precisely none of that.
- ergonaught 4y ago
  For me, "Mastodon" more closely resembles the BBS-with-Fidonet experience, which I suppose might be similar to UUCP/Usenet to a degree "before capitalism".
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    Thank you. I never had a Twitter account and so never migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, and hadn't checked it out otherwise either. But this comment is the first thing I've heard that makes me think I might love it. I loved the message subs on bbs networks. The fact that an ordinary user/commenter conveyed that useful essential impression that all those journalists never did in the years since it's been newsworthy, would seem to fit right in with the article's point. This article itself also finally presented some useful "what is the point? why might I want this?" points too about no algorithm manipulation. Mostly all I've seen are vague stuff that it's not Twitter and that it's federated kind of like email. But that really doesn't say anything useful. If it's like email, we already have email. How is email an alternative to Twitter and Facebook? They really have failed to write effectively about it.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  It feels kludgy and slow and unreliable to get what you want. That’s kind of like my 90s web experience.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    On ‘slow’, this is very instance dependent; perhaps try another. My original one was pretty painful, but my current one is fast, certainly faster than Twitter of late.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      You’re right. But that’s a non-start for the majority of potential users. Recommending it to family and friends feels like I’m recommending Ubuntu. I really want it to succeed but the current landscape isn’t going to cut it.
      - micromacrofoot 4y ago
        to be fair most of my family and friends without tech jobs didn’t really get twitter either
        kalleboo 4y ago
        A lot of people have forgotten just how long it took for Twitter to get the mainstream appeal it has, and for a long time just how confusing all @, # and RT stuff was, and how hard it was for people to find good people to follow etc. Twitter has been working hard on that for many years with all the onboard and the algorithmic stuff.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  The internet but with only privileged people, is it still the internet?
- wkat4242 4y ago
  It's the "let's do this together" attitude. Whatever than the "how can we get rich quick" one that powers most of the internet now
- mepian 4y ago
  By the late 90s capitalism was already there, even Microsoft was already dominating.
- WeylandYutani 4y ago
  The dot com bubble was the very definition of capitalism. It's the MBAs (that HN hates) that turn "the internet" into a product that makes money- or that they can convince investors will make money some day.
- jtode 4y ago
  It does really, and that's why it doesn't work as well in this current environment. Mastadon is a DIY app/platform, which constitutes one of any number of implementations of ActivityPub, which is the underlying protocol, and can speak to any of the other implementations without limitation, save those imposed by the protocol and self-imposed by the two implementations currently speaking to each other. There are multiple types of SMTP/POP/IMAP servers out there, but they all implement the same protocols, which means that my email client can reach your email client no matter what our clients, or the servers we connect to, look like. This is how the internet works; platforms will always be a limited subset of this fundamental reality. It's also how ActivityPub works, you can wrap whatever user interface you want around it, Mastadon or otherwise, but the protocol, not the platform, defines what is and is not an ActivityPub packet. Platforms, FB, Twitter, Tiktok, Insta, none of these work this way, they are closed platforms that you enter through secure gates and must play according to their rules, and they will always decide who gets amplification and who does not based on what makes them money, and good luck taking anything back out to the open internet with you, even if it's 100% your work. If you put it there, don't expect to get it back easily, and forget about control. It is a fundamentally hostile user relationship that cannot be improved without removing the profit motive. There have been other recent posts on HN about User Hostile software design. It's a thing and it's a bad thing. Mastadon is... tofu dogs. Mastadon is an attempt to feed healthy, protocol-based internet food to people who have been subsisting on bad, algorithmically-manipulated corporate internet food (the aforementioned user-hostile platforms) in a way that feels familiar to them while they get used to the idea of not consuming the internet equivalent of Twinkies and Pork Rinds and Liquor for the rest of their lives. It doesn't taste as good as Twitter, sure. Maybe that's not the most important thing.
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    > Mastadon is... tofu dogs. Mastadon is an attempt to feed healthy, protocol-based internet food to people who have been subsisting on bad, algorithmically-manipulated corporate internet food (the aforementioned user-hostile platforms) in a way that feels familiar to them while they get used to the idea of not consuming the internet equivalent of Twinkies and Pork Rinds and Liquor for the rest of their lives. Mastadon is hand-rolling cigarettes instead of buying them at the gas station. Brewing gin in your bathtub, instead of going to a liquor store.
yosefk 4y ago
Protocols Not Platforms - like Bitcoin which is mostly traded on a few exchanges, or email which is mostly handled by a few giant services? Mastodon will be no exception with high likelihood. Choose it over eg Twitter if you prefer where it's going _as a platform._ I actually prefer where Twitter seems to be going, but to each his own
- ido 4y ago
  Where is Twitter going?
  - 0x445442 4y ago
    Toward a platform and away from a publisher.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      What exactly is that supposed to mean? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-it-doesnt-matter https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...
      - 0x445442 4y ago
        Did you read the Twitter files? Everything they were doing resembled the New York Times news room vetting a story?
      - 2devnull 4y ago
        Users will pay instead of the FBI. At least that’s one interpretation.
        ceejayoz 4y ago
        The FBI paid legally required reimbursement for records requests. Twitter has kept this policy under Musk: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-law-enforcement-support#13.5 https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-law-e... > Twitter may seek reimbursement for costs associated with information produced pursuant to legal process and as permitted by law (e.g., under 18 U.S.C. §2706). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2706 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2706 > a governmental entity obtaining the contents of communications, records, or other information under section 2702, 2703, or 2704 of this title shall pay to the person or entity assembling or providing such information a fee for reimbursement for such costs as are reasonably necessary and which have been directly incurred in searching for, assembling, reproducing, or otherwise providing such information $3M out of about $5,000M worth of annual revenue, and again, it’s reimbursement.
hannofcart 4y ago
What's a PBS Cricket match? Am an avid Cricket follower but haven't come across the term so far.
- geoduck14 4y ago
  PBS is an American TV channel - Public Broadcast Station. I'm guessing that is what OP ment
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    Crucially, PBS member stations[0] run a lot of international—-often British—-shows, so it’s one of the few places you might possibly find cricket on American TV. Otherwise, your only bet might be one of the niche cable sports channels: not the main ESPN, but maybe ESPN2 or something. [0] PBS is more like a network (the S is for ‘service’) that provides member stations with a common identity and a shared pool of programmming. They’re usually non-profits, and so would not be able to afford a national news bureau (etc) on their own.
- jtode 4y ago
  As Geoduck put it, PBS stands for Public Broadcasting Service, which is a publicly-funded and viewer-supported network of highbrow and foreign content that's been around for my whole life, not sure if or how much longer than that. It's also the primary way that North Americans have consumed British culture for my whole life, until the internet brought widespread, umm, "availability". So all through my Canadian youth I would flip through channels and periodically happen upon a Dr Who episode, or a British sport like Cricket, and wonder at the strangeness of my ancestral line (I'm extremely British, genetically speaking, and my family were both heavy socialists and also kind of cryptically proud of being part of the Empire. But they never admitted that, even to themselves I think...). It's no surprise that it was hard to key into why Dr Who - for one example of a show I came to love as an adult - is so cool. I would read about it in Starlog, here and there, and the doctor sounded like a real badass on paper, but when I came across Tom Baker for the first time, he was no Han Solo, shall we say. Which is great, cause there are aspects of Star Wars that I kinda hate now (mostly the fans), but maybe not so much when you're 8 years old and have been watching laser blasts and ships exploding and whatnot. Even godawful tripe like Jason Of Star Command was more captivating at the time.
europeanguy 4y ago
> "For some reason, people who would never read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Procter and Gamble acquiring a new shampoo company will devour content about Microsoft acquiring a tech startup they’ve never heard of." Good point, I'll grand you that, but I'm on the other side. I don't want to hear less about Microsoft acquiring tech startups, I want to hear more about Procter and Gamble acquiring shampoo companies. My guess is that journalists that write such articles exist, but possibly they publish in specialist journals / magazines...?
- jtode 4y ago
  You seem like a prime candidate for a subscription to the WSJ, my good europeanguy.
  - europeanguy 4y ago
    Can you go on the WSJ front page and point out to me one story that's like the "Procter and gamble acquire something obscure"? The WSJ send to be to be exactly like regular news, but themed to look like business, as opposed to what I'm looking for, actual business.
    - dlgeek 4y ago
      Admitedly it wasn't on the front page, but how about "Kroger-Albertsons Antitrust Review Likely to Focus on Local Store Overlap" (https://www.wsj.com/articles/kroger-albertsons-antitrust-review-likely-to-focus-on-local-store-overlap-11666344601 https://www.wsj.com/articles/kroger-albertsons-antitrust-rev...)
      - europeanguy 4y ago
        Fun, thank you!
paulcole 4y ago
> I've known people who get this instant passion for an area they know nothing about, if it brushes up against an area they do know something about See also every HN thread about nutrition, sleep, health, exercise.
cjbgkagh 4y ago
Before capitalism? As in pre-AOL? The internet was the exclusive purview of the monied elite and the highly motivated tech nerds. The motivation was needed to spend so much money as everything was so expensive. The only way I could afford entry was by repairing old equipment. What ruined the culture for me was the Eternal September and I’ve been complaining about that ever since. The people yelling get off my lawn need to get off my lawn. Personally I’d like a BBS front end to Mastodon (does one exist? I haven’t checked) so my experience of the internet can go full circle and end up where it started.
- robswc 4y ago
  I find that comment funny too. Internet has only gotten more accessible. I do miss when it seemed almost everyone you talked to was a hacker in their own way but at the end of the day... you have everyone from kids on tablets to your grandma being able to use it now.
- pentachoron 4y ago
  Mastodon (and potentially other ActivityPub-based Fediverse services) has Toot (https://toot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html https://toot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html) which is a CLI/TUI interface that probably looks like you want? (I know there's also at least one other project for Pleroma + forks specifically called Pleroma-CLI too...)
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    Interesting, thanks. I did look it up after writing the comment and it appears that I’m not the only one getting BBS vibes. I do wonder how much the ability to post images changes the culture and if a text only for everyone social network could be an alternative.
- jtode 4y ago
  I feels ya buddy. I just said to someone yesterday that it's kind of a Law Of The Internet that it got ruined basically a short time after the subjective "you" onboarded, and the longer you're here, the more grumpy you get about it. This is true of me and anyone I know who thinks of this place as a figurative home. There are endless high-profile examples, such as the time that Stephen Fry, having just recently achieved some major follower milestone (million I think), got very upset about being called out on some faux pas or other - in retrospect, a minor offense and a failed attempt at cancellation, if it was even an attempt - and decided to leave the internet, with this long almost-crying essay about the internet he had gotten onto, which made it sound like some sort of Victorian fairy glade where the air was laden with cocaine and he got to make out with Oscar Wilde, vs the stinky plebian unsubtle and bestial place it had become. It was an overreaction worthy of Chris De Burgh, and one he obviously didn't follow through on in the long run. But even as I was loling at the tone of his rejection letter, I also recognized an emotional stream of my own in it. I have a somewhat different view of AOL than you. I was firmly middle class, neither monied elite nor genuine nerd, but my family could afford to buy me a C64 and as a young adult I bought myself a 386, strictly for the fun of it. I also started out on BBSes and was a sysop on both 8-bit and 32-bit systems, but I did have an uncle who logged me into the local U's mainframe as a kid, and I found my way to the early, command line internet before the WWW was born, though I mostly just hung out on irc, I was no leet hackz0r. But once the winsock era ramped up and that "invasion" of AOL kiddies happened, I have to say, I had a very good few years in alt.music.ween as well as some groups centred on my local community. a.m.ween had quite a few great contributors from AOL, actually, so for that group, it was a net benefit. The band also pioneered direct interaction by participating in the group, at one point doing an all-request livestream (this is maybe 2000 I'm talking about, very early, and it was awesome) which newsgroup members voted on. Deaner, the guitarist, was especially active in internet fan engagement, and would phone in from on tour using AOL as an easy onramp. Nothing salesy or memey, he'd just do your typical "tour diary" letters like any band of the time might have done for a fan club, which we more or less were. Perhaps places with too wide a net, such as rec.pets.cats, took the brunt of it in ways that niche bands or interests didn't have to. I recall a great war between them and alt.tasteless, many casualties. I was also put in a room once, this would be in the late 90s, to see if I could in any way help a woman who had complained some time previously to local media about porn on early usenet, and it ended with a newsgroup created by trolls called alt.sex.herlastname; mostly I had to reassure her, after looking at the content of the group, that there was no troll army keeping tabs on her movements, it was a totally dead group that someone probably created in a moment of f-you energy and never looked at again, but the internet never forgets. Not that I could have done more than that anyways, other than maybe send emails to every usenet admin I could find begging them to blacklist the group. But that incident, which I could definitely dig up some receipts about but I don't want to revive that part of her life for her, there are some undeniable resonances with Gamergate, are there not? The truth is, this place is exactly the same place it always was, just bigger and more dangerous, and that was inevitable when people came. That being said, I would say that there was definitely a pre-capitalist Internet, which had a certain culture and - say it with me - netiquette. I don't know, and could not begin to speculate, where the line is between the pre-capitalist internet and now. If I was going to put forward a candidate for when Capitalism "arrived" here, I think one good candidate would be, whatever day it was that Joshua Quittner handed over mcdonalds.com to the McDonalds corporation.
dale_glass 4y ago
I'd say that's because shampoo is a commodity and has next to zero side effects for most people. I'm sure there's people out there with very special needs who care about whether a given brand dies or goes multinational, but that's a very niche thing. But take say, Facebook buying Oculus. Oculus revived an effectively dead technology. Facebook gave them the ability to build much better tech, sell much more of it, and then coupled it with Facebook's love for sucking in private data. It absolutely had a huge effect on that part of the industry.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  No normal person cares about either of those things except insofar as it affects them. That’s the point. Facebook acquiring some startup is as relevant to the life of a heavy FB user as P&G acquiring a consumer goods company is to a heavy user of P&G products. Oh, it’s virtual reality. Who cares? If it ever becomes genuinely relevant it will show up in real life. If not reading about it is a waste of time. Remember, most people care about friends, family, work and things that come up relevant to those, and they mostly don’t care about work.

by jtode 4y ago

Dalewyn 4y ago

>it more importantly embodies the way that the Internet worked before capitalism showed up. Does it really? I miss the internet of the late 90s and early 2000s, but Mastadon feels like precisely none of that.

ergonaught 4y ago
For me, "Mastodon" more closely resembles the BBS-with-Fidonet experience, which I suppose might be similar to UUCP/Usenet to a degree "before capitalism".
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  Thank you. I never had a Twitter account and so never migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, and hadn't checked it out otherwise either. But this comment is the first thing I've heard that makes me think I might love it. I loved the message subs on bbs networks. The fact that an ordinary user/commenter conveyed that useful essential impression that all those journalists never did in the years since it's been newsworthy, would seem to fit right in with the article's point. This article itself also finally presented some useful "what is the point? why might I want this?" points too about no algorithm manipulation. Mostly all I've seen are vague stuff that it's not Twitter and that it's federated kind of like email. But that really doesn't say anything useful. If it's like email, we already have email. How is email an alternative to Twitter and Facebook? They really have failed to write effectively about it.
Waterluvian 4y ago
It feels kludgy and slow and unreliable to get what you want. That’s kind of like my 90s web experience.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  On ‘slow’, this is very instance dependent; perhaps try another. My original one was pretty painful, but my current one is fast, certainly faster than Twitter of late.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    You’re right. But that’s a non-start for the majority of potential users. Recommending it to family and friends feels like I’m recommending Ubuntu. I really want it to succeed but the current landscape isn’t going to cut it.
    - micromacrofoot 4y ago
      to be fair most of my family and friends without tech jobs didn’t really get twitter either
      - kalleboo 4y ago
        A lot of people have forgotten just how long it took for Twitter to get the mainstream appeal it has, and for a long time just how confusing all @, # and RT stuff was, and how hard it was for people to find good people to follow etc. Twitter has been working hard on that for many years with all the onboard and the algorithmic stuff.
birdyrooster 4y ago
The internet but with only privileged people, is it still the internet?
wkat4242 4y ago
It's the "let's do this together" attitude. Whatever than the "how can we get rich quick" one that powers most of the internet now
mepian 4y ago
By the late 90s capitalism was already there, even Microsoft was already dominating.
WeylandYutani 4y ago
The dot com bubble was the very definition of capitalism. It's the MBAs (that HN hates) that turn "the internet" into a product that makes money- or that they can convince investors will make money some day.
jtode 4y ago
It does really, and that's why it doesn't work as well in this current environment. Mastadon is a DIY app/platform, which constitutes one of any number of implementations of ActivityPub, which is the underlying protocol, and can speak to any of the other implementations without limitation, save those imposed by the protocol and self-imposed by the two implementations currently speaking to each other. There are multiple types of SMTP/POP/IMAP servers out there, but they all implement the same protocols, which means that my email client can reach your email client no matter what our clients, or the servers we connect to, look like. This is how the internet works; platforms will always be a limited subset of this fundamental reality. It's also how ActivityPub works, you can wrap whatever user interface you want around it, Mastadon or otherwise, but the protocol, not the platform, defines what is and is not an ActivityPub packet. Platforms, FB, Twitter, Tiktok, Insta, none of these work this way, they are closed platforms that you enter through secure gates and must play according to their rules, and they will always decide who gets amplification and who does not based on what makes them money, and good luck taking anything back out to the open internet with you, even if it's 100% your work. If you put it there, don't expect to get it back easily, and forget about control. It is a fundamentally hostile user relationship that cannot be improved without removing the profit motive. There have been other recent posts on HN about User Hostile software design. It's a thing and it's a bad thing. Mastadon is... tofu dogs. Mastadon is an attempt to feed healthy, protocol-based internet food to people who have been subsisting on bad, algorithmically-manipulated corporate internet food (the aforementioned user-hostile platforms) in a way that feels familiar to them while they get used to the idea of not consuming the internet equivalent of Twinkies and Pork Rinds and Liquor for the rest of their lives. It doesn't taste as good as Twitter, sure. Maybe that's not the most important thing.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  > Mastadon is... tofu dogs. Mastadon is an attempt to feed healthy, protocol-based internet food to people who have been subsisting on bad, algorithmically-manipulated corporate internet food (the aforementioned user-hostile platforms) in a way that feels familiar to them while they get used to the idea of not consuming the internet equivalent of Twinkies and Pork Rinds and Liquor for the rest of their lives. Mastadon is hand-rolling cigarettes instead of buying them at the gas station. Brewing gin in your bathtub, instead of going to a liquor store.

yosefk 4y ago

Protocols Not Platforms - like Bitcoin which is mostly traded on a few exchanges, or email which is mostly handled by a few giant services? Mastodon will be no exception with high likelihood. Choose it over eg Twitter if you prefer where it's going _as a platform._ I actually prefer where Twitter seems to be going, but to each his own

ido 4y ago
Where is Twitter going?
- 0x445442 4y ago
  Toward a platform and away from a publisher.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    What exactly is that supposed to mean? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-it-doesnt-matter https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...
    - 0x445442 4y ago
      Did you read the Twitter files? Everything they were doing resembled the New York Times news room vetting a story?
    - 2devnull 4y ago
      Users will pay instead of the FBI. At least that’s one interpretation.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        The FBI paid legally required reimbursement for records requests. Twitter has kept this policy under Musk: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-law-enforcement-support#13.5 https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-law-e... > Twitter may seek reimbursement for costs associated with information produced pursuant to legal process and as permitted by law (e.g., under 18 U.S.C. §2706). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2706 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2706 > a governmental entity obtaining the contents of communications, records, or other information under section 2702, 2703, or 2704 of this title shall pay to the person or entity assembling or providing such information a fee for reimbursement for such costs as are reasonably necessary and which have been directly incurred in searching for, assembling, reproducing, or otherwise providing such information $3M out of about $5,000M worth of annual revenue, and again, it’s reimbursement.

hannofcart 4y ago

What's a PBS Cricket match? Am an avid Cricket follower but haven't come across the term so far.

geoduck14 4y ago
PBS is an American TV channel - Public Broadcast Station. I'm guessing that is what OP ment
- mattkrause 4y ago
  Crucially, PBS member stations[0] run a lot of international—-often British—-shows, so it’s one of the few places you might possibly find cricket on American TV. Otherwise, your only bet might be one of the niche cable sports channels: not the main ESPN, but maybe ESPN2 or something. [0] PBS is more like a network (the S is for ‘service’) that provides member stations with a common identity and a shared pool of programmming. They’re usually non-profits, and so would not be able to afford a national news bureau (etc) on their own.
jtode 4y ago
As Geoduck put it, PBS stands for Public Broadcasting Service, which is a publicly-funded and viewer-supported network of highbrow and foreign content that's been around for my whole life, not sure if or how much longer than that. It's also the primary way that North Americans have consumed British culture for my whole life, until the internet brought widespread, umm, "availability". So all through my Canadian youth I would flip through channels and periodically happen upon a Dr Who episode, or a British sport like Cricket, and wonder at the strangeness of my ancestral line (I'm extremely British, genetically speaking, and my family were both heavy socialists and also kind of cryptically proud of being part of the Empire. But they never admitted that, even to themselves I think...). It's no surprise that it was hard to key into why Dr Who - for one example of a show I came to love as an adult - is so cool. I would read about it in Starlog, here and there, and the doctor sounded like a real badass on paper, but when I came across Tom Baker for the first time, he was no Han Solo, shall we say. Which is great, cause there are aspects of Star Wars that I kinda hate now (mostly the fans), but maybe not so much when you're 8 years old and have been watching laser blasts and ships exploding and whatnot. Even godawful tripe like Jason Of Star Command was more captivating at the time.

europeanguy 4y ago

> "For some reason, people who would never read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Procter and Gamble acquiring a new shampoo company will devour content about Microsoft acquiring a tech startup they’ve never heard of." Good point, I'll grand you that, but I'm on the other side. I don't want to hear less about Microsoft acquiring tech startups, I want to hear more about Procter and Gamble acquiring shampoo companies. My guess is that journalists that write such articles exist, but possibly they publish in specialist journals / magazines...?

jtode 4y ago
You seem like a prime candidate for a subscription to the WSJ, my good europeanguy.
- europeanguy 4y ago
  Can you go on the WSJ front page and point out to me one story that's like the "Procter and gamble acquire something obscure"? The WSJ send to be to be exactly like regular news, but themed to look like business, as opposed to what I'm looking for, actual business.
  - dlgeek 4y ago
    Admitedly it wasn't on the front page, but how about "Kroger-Albertsons Antitrust Review Likely to Focus on Local Store Overlap" (https://www.wsj.com/articles/kroger-albertsons-antitrust-review-likely-to-focus-on-local-store-overlap-11666344601 https://www.wsj.com/articles/kroger-albertsons-antitrust-rev...)
    - europeanguy 4y ago
      Fun, thank you!

paulcole 4y ago

> I've known people who get this instant passion for an area they know nothing about, if it brushes up against an area they do know something about See also every HN thread about nutrition, sleep, health, exercise.

cjbgkagh 4y ago

Before capitalism? As in pre-AOL? The internet was the exclusive purview of the monied elite and the highly motivated tech nerds. The motivation was needed to spend so much money as everything was so expensive. The only way I could afford entry was by repairing old equipment. What ruined the culture for me was the Eternal September and I’ve been complaining about that ever since. The people yelling get off my lawn need to get off my lawn. Personally I’d like a BBS front end to Mastodon (does one exist? I haven’t checked) so my experience of the internet can go full circle and end up where it started.

robswc 4y ago
I find that comment funny too. Internet has only gotten more accessible. I do miss when it seemed almost everyone you talked to was a hacker in their own way but at the end of the day... you have everyone from kids on tablets to your grandma being able to use it now.
pentachoron 4y ago
Mastodon (and potentially other ActivityPub-based Fediverse services) has Toot (https://toot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html https://toot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html) which is a CLI/TUI interface that probably looks like you want? (I know there's also at least one other project for Pleroma + forks specifically called Pleroma-CLI too...)
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  Interesting, thanks. I did look it up after writing the comment and it appears that I’m not the only one getting BBS vibes. I do wonder how much the ability to post images changes the culture and if a text only for everyone social network could be an alternative.
jtode 4y ago
I feels ya buddy. I just said to someone yesterday that it's kind of a Law Of The Internet that it got ruined basically a short time after the subjective "you" onboarded, and the longer you're here, the more grumpy you get about it. This is true of me and anyone I know who thinks of this place as a figurative home. There are endless high-profile examples, such as the time that Stephen Fry, having just recently achieved some major follower milestone (million I think), got very upset about being called out on some faux pas or other - in retrospect, a minor offense and a failed attempt at cancellation, if it was even an attempt - and decided to leave the internet, with this long almost-crying essay about the internet he had gotten onto, which made it sound like some sort of Victorian fairy glade where the air was laden with cocaine and he got to make out with Oscar Wilde, vs the stinky plebian unsubtle and bestial place it had become. It was an overreaction worthy of Chris De Burgh, and one he obviously didn't follow through on in the long run. But even as I was loling at the tone of his rejection letter, I also recognized an emotional stream of my own in it. I have a somewhat different view of AOL than you. I was firmly middle class, neither monied elite nor genuine nerd, but my family could afford to buy me a C64 and as a young adult I bought myself a 386, strictly for the fun of it. I also started out on BBSes and was a sysop on both 8-bit and 32-bit systems, but I did have an uncle who logged me into the local U's mainframe as a kid, and I found my way to the early, command line internet before the WWW was born, though I mostly just hung out on irc, I was no leet hackz0r. But once the winsock era ramped up and that "invasion" of AOL kiddies happened, I have to say, I had a very good few years in alt.music.ween as well as some groups centred on my local community. a.m.ween had quite a few great contributors from AOL, actually, so for that group, it was a net benefit. The band also pioneered direct interaction by participating in the group, at one point doing an all-request livestream (this is maybe 2000 I'm talking about, very early, and it was awesome) which newsgroup members voted on. Deaner, the guitarist, was especially active in internet fan engagement, and would phone in from on tour using AOL as an easy onramp. Nothing salesy or memey, he'd just do your typical "tour diary" letters like any band of the time might have done for a fan club, which we more or less were. Perhaps places with too wide a net, such as rec.pets.cats, took the brunt of it in ways that niche bands or interests didn't have to. I recall a great war between them and alt.tasteless, many casualties. I was also put in a room once, this would be in the late 90s, to see if I could in any way help a woman who had complained some time previously to local media about porn on early usenet, and it ended with a newsgroup created by trolls called alt.sex.herlastname; mostly I had to reassure her, after looking at the content of the group, that there was no troll army keeping tabs on her movements, it was a totally dead group that someone probably created in a moment of f-you energy and never looked at again, but the internet never forgets. Not that I could have done more than that anyways, other than maybe send emails to every usenet admin I could find begging them to blacklist the group. But that incident, which I could definitely dig up some receipts about but I don't want to revive that part of her life for her, there are some undeniable resonances with Gamergate, are there not? The truth is, this place is exactly the same place it always was, just bigger and more dangerous, and that was inevitable when people came. That being said, I would say that there was definitely a pre-capitalist Internet, which had a certain culture and - say it with me - netiquette. I don't know, and could not begin to speculate, where the line is between the pre-capitalist internet and now. If I was going to put forward a candidate for when Capitalism "arrived" here, I think one good candidate would be, whatever day it was that Joshua Quittner handed over mcdonalds.com to the McDonalds corporation.

dale_glass 4y ago

I'd say that's because shampoo is a commodity and has next to zero side effects for most people. I'm sure there's people out there with very special needs who care about whether a given brand dies or goes multinational, but that's a very niche thing. But take say, Facebook buying Oculus. Oculus revived an effectively dead technology. Facebook gave them the ability to build much better tech, sell much more of it, and then coupled it with Facebook's love for sucking in private data. It absolutely had a huge effect on that part of the industry.

barry-cotter 4y ago
No normal person cares about either of those things except insofar as it affects them. That’s the point. Facebook acquiring some startup is as relevant to the life of a heavy FB user as P&G acquiring a consumer goods company is to a heavy user of P&G products. Oh, it’s virtual reality. Who cares? If it ever becomes genuinely relevant it will show up in real life. If not reading about it is a waste of time. Remember, most people care about friends, family, work and things that come up relevant to those, and they mostly don’t care about work.