8 ms·

Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

74 points by sen_armstrong 3y ago

f_allwein 3y ago
“It is said that what is called "the spirit of an age" is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.” Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai via goodreads
- H8crilA 3y ago
  This goes well with "Technology is an independent variable" by Stanislaw Lem. Yet so many think they can control it.
AnEro 3y ago
It is interesting to see that every time there has been another layer of commercialization on the internet everyone thinks it was better before. Linking a 4chan archive on here is a uuhh bold move, I think its a fun snapshot of the time but still
- Hjkgt009 3y ago
  I read mostly 2 web sites that look the same: HN and /pol/. Orange, text based, almost anonymous.
  - tenpies 3y ago
    But to my knowledge, no one has ever been able to triforce on HN. It's like a perpetual summer.
    - isoprophlex 3y ago
      ▲ ▲ ▲ Easy, see?
      - sen_armstrong 3y ago
        ▲ ▲ ▲
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      I was about to correct you and ask if you meant Eternal September, but that's at least two Eternal Septembers older than the one you're talking about.
  - ignatiusj 3y ago
    [dead]
  - AnEro 3y ago
    /pol/ ???????? oh honey no
  - GingerMidas 3y ago
    [dead]
- DoItToMe81 3y ago
  Less people pearl clutch over Chans than you think. Most of the shock is performative.
sigg3 3y ago
> > Geocitites > Oh yes, the 90's was so much better... Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall. You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting offers, it was up to you. Now you have the illusion of autonomy in a carefully crafted walled garden of ads. Or rather: freedom is more easily found offline.
- bagels 3y ago
  You don't remember intrusive popup ads that took over the whole screen?
  - blantonl 3y ago
    How about the pop-under ads that sat back there behind your browser just waiting to shock you with something stupid when you closed your browser window. Good times.
  - highwaylights 3y ago
    Yes, and I miss them every day. The ads were sleazy and brazen and right in your face trying to dragnet as many people as possible into buying something 99.999% had no interest in. Not like now, where massive dossiers are built on you automatically and you're tracked all over the internet by ad companies regardless of the steps you take as an individual to convince yourself you have privacy (like VPN/Private Relay/Incognito/Tor).
    - drdaeman 3y ago
      > where massive dossiers are built on you automatically and you're tracked all over the internet by ad companies ...that still utterly fail to provide relevant ads. This is my pet peeve - I periodically disable adblocker and - suprise, no surprise - 100% of ads I see are irrelevant to me. I can even see how they're trying to target me, but they're totally missing what I really want or interested in. "Personalized" news feeds are sensationalist click-bait crapfests with accidentally useful local news (just by the virtue of local news being more relevant, in general). Book recommendations only work in "more from the same author I've read and liked" category. Summing it up, those massive dossiers aren't seem to be worth shit. Either the industry needs to drastically ramp up their models' complexity (and maybe something will start to happen - although I wonder about the economy of this) or maybe someday they will have to admit all those profile data hoards were the new tulips. The Internets of old at least hadn't pretended that ads were "useful" or "relevant". There typically was no positive quality to them, except for honest "this shit brings site owner (or host) some money".
karaterobot 3y ago
The purpose of posting this may be to reiterate that old canard about "twenty years ago, people were saying what we're saying now, therefore it isn't true." If not, I apologize for assuming so. In any case, my reading is, it was true in 2007, and it is much worse now. The predictions about centralization were incorrect only in the names of some of the players, and in not having the benefit of knowing about the role of mobile devices in consolidating and controlling attention.
- basch 3y ago
  If anything, it shows that the blogspam repost problem still hasnt been solved. Still no browser extension that finds the original and replaces all rehosts with it.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    > Still no browser extension that finds the original and replaces all rehosts with it. You'd think that'd be a job for search engines, but they don't seem to care about the product.
    - basch 3y ago
      No matter where I get linked from, Reddit, Facebook, an email, if nbc.com reposted an AP/Reuters story either verbatim or poorly summarized with no additional information, I just want to be sent to the AP/Reuters story. Techmeme.com hand selects either the first or best source for each headline. Something community maintained like that, where any duplicate story redirects to the primary, unless it’s a follow up or editorialized comment that has actual substance.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  Relatedly, some old quote from the Romans or Greeks is often brought up where someone laments youth behavior as lazy and immoral, and it’s referenced as proof that old(er) people always say that so it doesn’t mean anything. However, isn’t it possible that they were on a downward trajectory, and we are too? And that at other points in time, not referenced, old(er) people may have felt differently?
fsflover 3y ago
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230078.
mberning 3y ago
Google and search in general is definitely worse than 10 years ago. It seems like I can’t find anything useful now. Years ago a few searches could turn up very arcane and niche data. Nowadays it’s like it never even existed.
bamfly 3y ago
'07 was the height of Google's cat-and-mouse game with webspammers. It'd degrade to near-uselessness for a month or two, suddenly get a ton better, repeat. This went on though the whole of the middle years of the '00s. '08 or '09 is when they seemed to surrender that fight, and just give up on indexing the entire Web. Major sites got a huge boost, and a great deal of the Web seemed to just drop off the index entirely. Google's never been really good since.
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  Coincides with the iPhone, then the beginning of Android, and the rise of mobile overtaking desktop.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    Also IIRC right around the same time they totally abandoned "don't be evil" and started doing ads inline with search results, basing much of their future revenue on tricking unwary users. [EDIT] They might also have switched from their text-only ads to being a more ordinary, crappy web advertiser not long after, which started to partially align their interests with webspammers, which may explain why they didn't mind yielding the whole middle (if that makes sense) of the search-result space to them.
AlbertCory 3y ago
Kind of like radio (hello, ClearChannel) or TV. There are still a few holdouts from corporatism. On radio, there's KKUP (online at https://kkup.org/ https://kkup.org/) which has no ads and does all kinds of weird shit. We need the equivalent of the 88 MHz - 92 MHz band on FM that's reserved for non-profit stations, and you know that in a strange city you can dial around and find something there. Equivalent things do exist on the Web, but it needs to be easier to find them. Yes, you do get religious stations and NPR, but there are also college radio stations and oddballs like KKUP.
jknoepfler 3y ago
As someone who came of age in the era the OC waxes nostalgic about, I can't find a lot to recommend about this post, nor do I think it's accurate. From where I sit, the internet today is richer, more diverse, and more accessible than it was in the 90's, the 00's, or the 10's. Consider that one of the top links on HN is the OpenMW project. What a great project. If I want to go deep on that, there's a forum with a wiki, a discord and an IRC and a public gitlab. I don't want to go deep on that. But there are literally hundreds of thousands of communities into which I could dive deep, some of which I do. I've been involved in home hydroponics groups, poker forums, online chess study groups, an Everquest emulation community, community-run RTS and fighting game tournaments. I've dug into sites hosting side-by-side translations of the Tao Te Ching, Soto Zen communities, forums for recovering from addiction. I've found music and books and events that I never otherwise would have found. I've learned to read rudimentary Japanese using web apps. I've vastly improved my classical guitar form using YouTube channels. ... and on and on and on. I'm on this wonderful internet every day for much of my day, co-creating communities with other people. There are deep, rich, giving communities everywhere on the internet today, not gated behind walled gardens. I wouldn't describe these as "shit" (or the homophobic slur the author seems think constitutes peak internet diction). I'm glad these communities also existed in the 90's. Personally I grew up into things like the Quake 2 modding community and MUDs. Great stuff. I'm glad the internet has continued to grow and thrive and has evolved into what it is today. edit: correction, by "more accessible" I meant "discoverable." I genuinely don't know whether or not the internet is more or less supportive of visually impaired users, for example (I can imagine it being far worse).
archsurface 3y ago
Well "hacker news" is basically a VC promo - does anyone care?
coldtea 3y ago
He was very right. And if he's around in 2023, things are immensely worse than 2007 too.
lolive 3y ago
Internet, just as cinema, television, books, people, travels, etc needs you to become aware of what you want from it. Honestly, if we consider the Internet[/the Web] as a kind of information utopia, it can definitely be! I will cite a quote [that I think is] from William Gibson: "The absolute most important skill to master in those days is to find the correct words to type in Google". I will add: "don't let anyone choose them for you !!!"

74 points by sen_armstrong 3y ago

“It is said that what is called "the spirit of an age" is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.” Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai via goodreads

H8crilA 3y ago
This goes well with "Technology is an independent variable" by Stanislaw Lem. Yet so many think they can control it.

AnEro 3y ago

It is interesting to see that every time there has been another layer of commercialization on the internet everyone thinks it was better before. Linking a 4chan archive on here is a uuhh bold move, I think its a fun snapshot of the time but still

Hjkgt009 3y ago
I read mostly 2 web sites that look the same: HN and /pol/. Orange, text based, almost anonymous.
- tenpies 3y ago
  But to my knowledge, no one has ever been able to triforce on HN. It's like a perpetual summer.
  - isoprophlex 3y ago
    ▲ ▲ ▲ Easy, see?
    - sen_armstrong 3y ago
      ▲ ▲ ▲
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    I was about to correct you and ask if you meant Eternal September, but that's at least two Eternal Septembers older than the one you're talking about.
- ignatiusj 3y ago
  [dead]
- AnEro 3y ago
  /pol/ ???????? oh honey no
- GingerMidas 3y ago
  [dead]
DoItToMe81 3y ago
Less people pearl clutch over Chans than you think. Most of the shock is performative.

sigg3 3y ago

> > Geocitites > Oh yes, the 90's was so much better... Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall. You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting offers, it was up to you. Now you have the illusion of autonomy in a carefully crafted walled garden of ads. Or rather: freedom is more easily found offline.

bagels 3y ago
You don't remember intrusive popup ads that took over the whole screen?
- blantonl 3y ago
  How about the pop-under ads that sat back there behind your browser just waiting to shock you with something stupid when you closed your browser window. Good times.
- highwaylights 3y ago
  Yes, and I miss them every day. The ads were sleazy and brazen and right in your face trying to dragnet as many people as possible into buying something 99.999% had no interest in. Not like now, where massive dossiers are built on you automatically and you're tracked all over the internet by ad companies regardless of the steps you take as an individual to convince yourself you have privacy (like VPN/Private Relay/Incognito/Tor).
  - drdaeman 3y ago
    > where massive dossiers are built on you automatically and you're tracked all over the internet by ad companies ...that still utterly fail to provide relevant ads. This is my pet peeve - I periodically disable adblocker and - suprise, no surprise - 100% of ads I see are irrelevant to me. I can even see how they're trying to target me, but they're totally missing what I really want or interested in. "Personalized" news feeds are sensationalist click-bait crapfests with accidentally useful local news (just by the virtue of local news being more relevant, in general). Book recommendations only work in "more from the same author I've read and liked" category. Summing it up, those massive dossiers aren't seem to be worth shit. Either the industry needs to drastically ramp up their models' complexity (and maybe something will start to happen - although I wonder about the economy of this) or maybe someday they will have to admit all those profile data hoards were the new tulips. The Internets of old at least hadn't pretended that ads were "useful" or "relevant". There typically was no positive quality to them, except for honest "this shit brings site owner (or host) some money".

karaterobot 3y ago

The purpose of posting this may be to reiterate that old canard about "twenty years ago, people were saying what we're saying now, therefore it isn't true." If not, I apologize for assuming so. In any case, my reading is, it was true in 2007, and it is much worse now. The predictions about centralization were incorrect only in the names of some of the players, and in not having the benefit of knowing about the role of mobile devices in consolidating and controlling attention.

basch 3y ago
If anything, it shows that the blogspam repost problem still hasnt been solved. Still no browser extension that finds the original and replaces all rehosts with it.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  > Still no browser extension that finds the original and replaces all rehosts with it. You'd think that'd be a job for search engines, but they don't seem to care about the product.
  - basch 3y ago
    No matter where I get linked from, Reddit, Facebook, an email, if nbc.com reposted an AP/Reuters story either verbatim or poorly summarized with no additional information, I just want to be sent to the AP/Reuters story. Techmeme.com hand selects either the first or best source for each headline. Something community maintained like that, where any duplicate story redirects to the primary, unless it’s a follow up or editorialized comment that has actual substance.
pfannkuchen 3y ago
Relatedly, some old quote from the Romans or Greeks is often brought up where someone laments youth behavior as lazy and immoral, and it’s referenced as proof that old(er) people always say that so it doesn’t mean anything. However, isn’t it possible that they were on a downward trajectory, and we are too? And that at other points in time, not referenced, old(er) people may have felt differently?

fsflover 3y ago

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230078.

mberning 3y ago

Google and search in general is definitely worse than 10 years ago. It seems like I can’t find anything useful now. Years ago a few searches could turn up very arcane and niche data. Nowadays it’s like it never even existed.

bamfly 3y ago

'07 was the height of Google's cat-and-mouse game with webspammers. It'd degrade to near-uselessness for a month or two, suddenly get a ton better, repeat. This went on though the whole of the middle years of the '00s. '08 or '09 is when they seemed to surrender that fight, and just give up on indexing the entire Web. Major sites got a huge boost, and a great deal of the Web seemed to just drop off the index entirely. Google's never been really good since.

tenebrisalietum 3y ago
Coincides with the iPhone, then the beginning of Android, and the rise of mobile overtaking desktop.
- bamfly 3y ago
  Also IIRC right around the same time they totally abandoned "don't be evil" and started doing ads inline with search results, basing much of their future revenue on tricking unwary users. [EDIT] They might also have switched from their text-only ads to being a more ordinary, crappy web advertiser not long after, which started to partially align their interests with webspammers, which may explain why they didn't mind yielding the whole middle (if that makes sense) of the search-result space to them.

AlbertCory 3y ago

Kind of like radio (hello, ClearChannel) or TV. There are still a few holdouts from corporatism. On radio, there's KKUP (online at https://kkup.org/ https://kkup.org/) which has no ads and does all kinds of weird shit. We need the equivalent of the 88 MHz - 92 MHz band on FM that's reserved for non-profit stations, and you know that in a strange city you can dial around and find something there. Equivalent things do exist on the Web, but it needs to be easier to find them. Yes, you do get religious stations and NPR, but there are also college radio stations and oddballs like KKUP.

jknoepfler 3y ago

As someone who came of age in the era the OC waxes nostalgic about, I can't find a lot to recommend about this post, nor do I think it's accurate. From where I sit, the internet today is richer, more diverse, and more accessible than it was in the 90's, the 00's, or the 10's. Consider that one of the top links on HN is the OpenMW project. What a great project. If I want to go deep on that, there's a forum with a wiki, a discord and an IRC and a public gitlab. I don't want to go deep on that. But there are literally hundreds of thousands of communities into which I could dive deep, some of which I do. I've been involved in home hydroponics groups, poker forums, online chess study groups, an Everquest emulation community, community-run RTS and fighting game tournaments. I've dug into sites hosting side-by-side translations of the Tao Te Ching, Soto Zen communities, forums for recovering from addiction. I've found music and books and events that I never otherwise would have found. I've learned to read rudimentary Japanese using web apps. I've vastly improved my classical guitar form using YouTube channels. ... and on and on and on. I'm on this wonderful internet every day for much of my day, co-creating communities with other people. There are deep, rich, giving communities everywhere on the internet today, not gated behind walled gardens. I wouldn't describe these as "shit" (or the homophobic slur the author seems think constitutes peak internet diction). I'm glad these communities also existed in the 90's. Personally I grew up into things like the Quake 2 modding community and MUDs. Great stuff. I'm glad the internet has continued to grow and thrive and has evolved into what it is today. edit: correction, by "more accessible" I meant "discoverable." I genuinely don't know whether or not the internet is more or less supportive of visually impaired users, for example (I can imagine it being far worse).

archsurface 3y ago

Well "hacker news" is basically a VC promo - does anyone care?

coldtea 3y ago

He was very right. And if he's around in 2023, things are immensely worse than 2007 too.

lolive 3y ago

Internet, just as cinema, television, books, people, travels, etc needs you to become aware of what you want from it. Honestly, if we consider the Internet[/the Web] as a kind of information utopia, it can definitely be! I will cite a quote [that I think is] from William Gibson: "The absolute most important skill to master in those days is to find the correct words to type in Google". I will add: "don't let anyone choose them for you !!!"