8 ms·

> Every person on the planet should have their own website, on their own domain name, and blog about whatever they want. Let's keep in mind that most people do

• stavros 3y ago
  > Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety. Ok, "every person on the planet should have access to basic hygiene and food safety, their own website, on their own domain name, and blog about whatever they want."
  • pessimizer 3y ago
    I can't believe you went out on a limb like this. I've been assured that the fact that many people don't have access to basic water and food safety means that they shouldn't have a website either. I suppose you think they should have the vote, too? How can you give people the vote if they don't have indoor toilets?
    • stavros 3y ago
      Also, it doesn't make sense to try and solve any problems for anyone before the biggest problems are solved.
• edf13 3y ago
  > But a notebook in the attic definitely will Unless you move and lose it... or there is a house fire... or someone finds it and burns it... etc.
  • onion2k 3y ago
    The same is true of a website. Imagine if you hosted it on Google Sites...
    • xigoi 3y ago
      A website can be backed up.
• matricaria 3y ago
  > But a notebook in the attic definitely will. A notebook in the attic is probably the least persistent medium you could choose. Fire? Gone. Water? Gone. 20 years of heat. Probably unreadable.
  • blowski 3y ago
    Mine are still in the attic after 30 years and look absolutely fine.
    • amadvance 3y ago
      When you die, that notebook will be thrown away. archive.org will still be there.
      • throwuwu 3y ago
        I’m not sure archive.org will be there either. Institutions aren’t immortal
        • blowski 3y ago
          Also, if my kids are going to throw away my notebooks, who's going to be looking at my old blog posts?
          • klyrs 3y ago
            It's pristine LLM training data. The author is shilling for the forthcoming robot overlords. I personally think we'd all be better off playing outside and loving life, than cooped up staring at blogs on phones.
        • schon 3y ago
          [dead]
  • PUSH_AX 3y ago
    OP is right, it will survive bar some destructive process, and it's in your control. Hosted content is susceptible to destructive processes as well, Data loss? Gone. Org gives up and shuts down? Gone. Deindexed or lost in some future search LLM to rule them all? Gone. it's mostly out of your control.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ngcazz 3y ago
  > Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety. Agree, whole thing comes across as notionally adjacent to shit like "effective altruism" and disguising a greedy disregard for material reality as equitabiity
  • eutectic 3y ago
    I don't see the connection.
  • luplex 3y ago
    I feel the need to remind you that the Effective Altruism community is also moving billions of dollars to substantially help the extreme poor. And the original commenter is wrong, 91% of people do have access to basic hygiene (i.e. hand washing facilities), according to https://ourworldindata.org/hygiene https://ourworldindata.org/hygiene And only 28% of people suffer from moderate to severe food insecurity: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-moderate-or-severe-food-insecurity?tab=chart&country=SRB~ROU~NER~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-... So really most people have the basics covered.
    • tgv 3y ago
      Only 28%? That's over 2 billion people. > I feel the need to remind you that the Effective Altruism community is also moving billions of dollars to substantially help the extreme poor. The Dutch government alone spends $5B per year on aid to the poorest country, and The Netherlands is a small country. Effective Altruism is just a guise to get political influence through capital.
      • mrguyorama 3y ago
        It doesn't even have to be a scheme. It's just selfish and greedy people trying to rationalize their selfishness and greed by being even more selfish and greedy. Of course people who already think they are god's divine gift to the world will think they would be the best to give out or pick the recipient of billions in charity over a more democratic system.
• foverzar 3y ago
  > Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety. "Most"?
  • potatototoo99 3y ago
    You're right, it's only 46% according to the latest estimates.
    • XorNot 3y ago
      What they have is still going to be a lot less then you or I are used to even then.
• jrflowers 3y ago
  > my grand-grand-grand-father was a farrier in one of the Napoleons' army I am hopeful that the author did not mean for this idea to apply retroactively. > There is also no guarantee that archive.org will survive a couple decades. But a notebook in the attic definitely will. Houses burn down all the time. Pointing out that everybody has access to a theoretically fireproof house is a bit funny for a thought that began with an admonishment about hygiene and food safety.
  • JadoJodo 3y ago
    > Houses burn down all the time. Pointing out that everybody has access to a theoretically fireproof house is a bit funny for a thought that began with an admonishment about hygiene and food safety. While I do get your follow-up criticism, I took the notebook comment to mean that if I stop paying my “notebook bill”, or a massive solar flare strikes my house, the notebook in my attic doesn’t vanish from existence.
• Aeolun 3y ago
  > Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety. Internet is a _lot_ easier to provide than basic hygiene and food safety. Look at most of India.
  • fragmede 3y ago
    Is it? Look at Etreia or Ethiopia. You need a smartphone or computer, and then you need power for it. You need Internet distribution that isn't going to get stolen for copper. It's easy if you have the money for a distribution network for them, but hygine and food safety is also a lot easier if you pour money into them. Humans' need for access to food and clean water predates the Internet and it'll be there after it as well.
• carschno 3y ago
  > Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety. Not to be pedantic, but since another comment questioned that, the numbers for 2020: > 3.6 billion people lacked safely managed services, including 1.9 billion people with basic services, 580 million with limited services, 616 million using unimproved facilities, and 494 million practising open defecation. Source: https://washdata.org/sites/default/files/2021-07/jmp-2021-wash-households.pdf https://washdata.org/sites/default/files/2021-07/jmp-2021-wa... To be clear: I don't care whether this is technically "most people", it is far too many people lacking decent sanitation. (edit: fix wrong negation in last sentence).
  • twodave 3y ago
    To be clear, since it wasn’t to me: - safely managed water is 1) clean, 2) immediately available water 3) in the household - basic is if one of those above three criteria are missing but water can be accessible w/ a <30 minute round trip - unimproved is people drinking surface water from lakes, ditches, etc.
  • harlanji 3y ago
    > Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety. I've had a website since I was in my early teens and throughout most of my career as a programmer, 20+ years. In 2018 I became homeless in SF and still had some websites for the first couple years where I started posting stuff about being homeless. When I lack basics like hygiene and safe food is when I've felt having a website would do the most good. I've been pretty vocal about being homeless and it's taken over my social media channels, but you can bet the content isn't surfaced much or to people who I knew in real life who might've cared or helped me out if they knew sooner. If my RSS feed wasn't dead, who knows? Even $5/mo or $10 for a domain renewal is too much most months, lacking said and similar resources. I've not had phone service in a year, phone in need of repair and now lost to forced migration due to domestic violence. I'm aware of Obama phone but I'm also aware of spyware, data privacy and similar and have done the math--no thanks. Not a happy story at all (I feel joy and peaceful, personally). Makes most people feel super bad. Not feeling like a victim either... I totally understand why mainstream sites don't surface real content that I post. I still post it, but having my own website with a feed or forum now of all times would be superior. Especially when I have to hold my tongue about various topics that fall too far outside of community guidelines / algorithmic fairness and could get my account suspended. Long winded I know, just underlining that people without basic hygiene or safe food may be perfectly capable of running a web site and even custom apps with novel features, and may need to have a voice more than anyone or ever. There are mainstream options but most here can probably get behind the idea of running one's own services and owning the registration. A solution I've had in mind is libraries running decades-long hosting services attached to member cards. Various people have expressed a little interest but I've not been persistent in following up or pushing anything forward myself. Lack of stability makes me come off as really flaky and poor at communication online and more--and look like an excuse maker for expressing such things.
• vidarh 3y ago
  > Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety. Hyperbole for the sake of making an argument does not mean the writer is unable to construe of or consider situations where what they wish for is impractical or far down peoples priority list. > I never understood why this kind of injonctions for us to do things keep on coming up to the front page of HN. I understand that they make good titles, though. Because they set out ideas about society that may or may not be something we agree with, but that makes for interesting discussion. > But a notebook in the attic definitely will. Most of my dads notes have survived, but certainly not all. One of my grandparents diaries have survived. To my knowledge no writing by the other tree has survived; if it has it has already diffused among siblings two out of three which are dead, with no clear knowledge where any documents might have ended up. None of my great grandparents or great great grandparents writing survives other than a couple of words written on the handful of photographs and two drawings which have survived, even though I know for a fact that some of them wrote regular letters to family after emigrating the the US. The written records we have even from a time when people used to write a lot on paper are only a tiny fraction of the records made. Some families will be lucky and have a lot, some will have nearly nothing, and often when you have a lot it quickly difuses out among descendants to the point that soon many will not have more than small fractions of even what is available about their ancestors, if any. E.g. I only got hold of one of the handful of surviving pictures of one of my great grandfathers because I stumbled on my grandmothers half brothers daughter doing genealogy and found her daughters on Facebook, and she happened to have one picture. I do agree there's no guarantee about archive.org, and so I'm certainly ambivalent about people putting all their eggs in that basket, but this admonition for all of us to have a website will never reach anyone to start with, and nothing prevents both and/or at least keeping local copies of the site as well.
• zikzak 3y ago
  So many thoughts: - knowing this about you ancestor is interesting but thinking they are the inspiration for the "for want of a nail" cautionary tale is what most people are expecting when they start looking into the past. The reality is most people's lives are pretty mundane and they personal connections are what make it interesting. - notebook in the attic - there's a movement to digitize all the notebooks in attics we are losing over time. This is especially a thing in agriculture because of all the information about local weather, crop yields, etc. It would be great if there was some publicily funded service that you could send these to for free instead of throwing them out (possibly with drop off at public libraries that could either digitize them or send them in bulk). They could scan and return for a fee.
  • susiecambria 3y ago
    Re: notebook in the attic, one of the things I've recommended historical societies do is conduct public scanning days so that individuals/families can preserve their pics and docs and at the same time share them in a curated collection with DPLA (dp.la), Digital Public Library of America. Few organizations are interested. I've never expected them to drop everything to do it, but I at least expect them to contemplate broader community engagement, increasing membership, generating interest in families beyond those already interested in genealogy, etc.
  • starkparker 3y ago
    they didn't say "write in a notebook and put it in an attic and make sure as a ghost that you kill anyone who attempts to digitize it"
    • zikzak 3y ago
      Sorry, I was trying to endorse the notebook in the attic and lamenting people throwing them away instead of preserving them.
• brokenkebaby 3y ago
  I recently tried to search for my own web presence from late 90s early 00s, and I found the famous claim that nothing dsappears from the internet to be greatly exaggerated. A few snapshots made its way to web archive, but incomplete, and not very useful for any purpose. But to be fair I lost a big chunk of my own paper archive as well for various reasons.
  • toast0 3y ago
    > I found the famous claim that nothing dsappears from the internet to be greatly exaggerated. It is exaggerated, but many cautions are. Some things you post on the internet will likely disappear, but many won't, and the key factor is after you've posted it, you quickly lose control over its ultimate fate.
  • _xivi 3y ago
    I always understood that saying more like: "you can't put the genie back in the bottle" Once you share something online, there's a big chance someone is keeping a copy, it might not be accessible on the internet anymore, but it's never lost
• ompogUe 3y ago
  > Everyone should be writing in public. Some of the best conversations on the early Net were closed communities where users had a safe zone. Things like The Well and Screen Porch/Caucus "virtual communities" were mostly "conversations", but lots of just informative posts.
• yxre 3y ago
  > False Consensus Bias. Everyone is like me, so everyone should do the things that work for me. The author makes interesting points, and "everyone" makes more sense when you scope it to the HN crowd.
  • last_responder 3y ago
    >"everyone" makes more sense when you scope it to the HN crowd. Still no. So you are saying that everyone who reads HN should have a website?
• waynesonfire 3y ago
  This is one way seem to produce more AI training data. The capitalists wouldn't mind having access to everyones thoughts, at such low cost.
• mholt 3y ago
  I'm a bit pedantic about our family's information being stored on other people's computers. I simply don't trust access to it long-term. So I'm building Timelinize: https://twitter.com/timelinize https://twitter.com/timelinize -- the idea is that everyone can get their data out of the cloud and off their devices and into a single, unified timeline on their own computer. And their timeline is just one shard of a global universal timeline, and timelines can be meshed together seamlessly. Still much work to do but my family is hopefully going to start using this in the next few years! And maybe yours too :)
  • aposm 3y ago
    I am fascinated (mostly genuinely, not in a snarky way) by the fact that you express concern about storing your information on other people's untrusted/unreliable computers, then link to a twitter page - which notably decided to suddenly restrict access without a login last week. Maybe you should link an independent website page instead?
    • mholt 3y ago
      Oh I really, really want to. But honestly, I've been way too busy making Caddy's new website, preparing the upcoming Caddy 2.7 release, and building Timelinize itself to have any time to work on a website for Timelinize. But I'll eventually get around to it. The reality is, the quickest way for me to get updates out to wide swath of people (at the time) was to set up a Twitter. Things have changed a lot since then... ironically validating the need for something like Timelinize, I guess.