5 ms·

"the internet was a gift economy, like burning man: people giving away things of value to all comers because if you don't do that maybe it's because you can't.

by lukan 2y ago

"the internet was a gift economy, like burning man: people giving away things of value to all comers because if you don't do that maybe it's because you can't. the good parts of it still are" But it feels like more and more are taken over by money from advertisement. It is allways a relieve to me, find a site in the old spirit.

fsflover 2y ago
> It is allways a relieve to me, find a site in the old spirit. Here is the corresponding search engine for that: https://wiby.me https://wiby.me
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  Also: https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu
- malfist 2y ago
  Kagi has a small web thing too. But very few of those places are a community
  - kragen 2y ago
    kagi is explicitly not a community; it's a service you pay for. it's organized around a them/us distinction, and the users are the (atomized) outgroup, individually paying the ingroup for the service provided by that ingroup there is nothing wrong with that; it's a perfectly good way of organizing things. but it's important not to confuse it with the relationship between, for example, linux users, any of whom is free at any moment to improve the kernel for everyone
    - zargon 2y ago
      Nobody suggested Kagi is a community.
    - malfist 2y ago
      I think you misinterpreted what I was saying. Kagi is indeed a paid service and not a community. I was saying it has a way to find small web type sites, but lamenting the fact that part of what made those sites so useful in the past was a tiny community, is gone, and probably not coming back.
      - kragen 2y ago
        i did! thank you for explaining
    - jart 2y ago
      That's exactly why it should be a community. Being willing to pay a monthly fee for a search engine sets a higher bar for affluence and caring about the web. So I wish they would do something like create a "Kagi Web" search engine that just consists of their websites, since I'm sure Kagi users have interesting things to say.
ThinkingGuy 2y ago
I'm old and fortunate enough to have gotten on the Internet in 1993, when it was smaller, more communal, and less commercial. As much as we old-timers lament the direction things have gone, there are still corners of the Internet where people still help each other, where people seek to share their knowledge freely, and help other humans, even strangers, without regard to artificial reputational or commercial gain. You just have to seek them out.
- kragen 2y ago
  i only lament some things; others have gotten better. there's enormously more free software and better information, and disks are big enough for kiwix to be a thing. consider: wikipedia, openstreetmap, library genesis, sci-hub, the internet archive, bitcoin, stack exchange, tor, debian, termux, f-droid, and lineageos. heck, even firefox is noticeably better than lynx was when i joined the internet! and, as i alluded to in my comment, it's not clear that people were ever purely altruistic; artificial reputational gain was always a consideration
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Ah man, thanks, I was trying to remember the name of "Kiwix" for a while now!
  - immibis 2y ago
    Bitcoin can come off that list - it's real estate trading for people who can't grasp real estate trading. Cool concept when it was invented, but its net effect has been rather negative, serving to further concentrate wealth.
    - kragen 2y ago
      i don't agree, but that's probably just because you don't know what you're talking about, which is probably because you're here to do ideological battles instead of share knowledge (for evidence, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41685852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41685852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41678925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41678925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677494 which are all, astoundingly, within the last two days, and mostly content-free hate-filled political flaming unrelated to bitcoin) to post an actual argument rather than just the one-line shallow dismissals you're here for, several of the other items on the list depend on bitcoin to survive. several others will start to depend on it as soon as they are banned in the usa, probably after the next major terrorist incident. and, in my actual experience, the people who benefit most from bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies) on a personal level are impoverished venezuelans supported by family remittances from abroad despite economic sanctions by the usa more broadly, the reason the internet is good is that sharing knowledge is a positive-sum game: the social benefit that results from sharing what you know is far greater than the cost of doing so, while it's comparatively more difficult for bad actors to do harm by spreading misinformation. it's not that nobody vandalizes wikipedia; it's that undoing and blocking vandalism is easier than the vandalism itself. this makes it possible to collaborate effectively on a wider scale than the social scaling of dunbar's number permits unlike knowledge, though, some things are zero-sum, like the ownership of computers and houses, and the allocation of human effort to competing goals. as it turns out, having 'money', an impartial way to keep score in voluntary transactions regarding those things, is also publicly beneficial, because such 'markets' also permit collaboration on a wider scale than the social scaling of dunbar's number. money and sharing of knowledge have different strengths, so we cannot simply replace one with the other the dramatic irony of this bears repeating: having an impartial institution for zero-sum transactions is a positive-sum outcome a problem with money systems so far has been that they mostly depend on a central authority to regulate the money supply. this opens many vulnerabilities to the abuse of that power; the money in my pocket today buys a quarter of what it bought a year and a half ago, for example, evidently because a disproportionate expansion of the money supply made our domestic inflation here the worst in the world. and, when russia invaded ukraine, 300 billion dollars of its overseas reserves were confiscated by ukraine's allies, who were in a position to do so because they controlled the international money system—a power which, though used justly in this case, is too great to be entrusted to any potential belligerent in future international conflicts on a smaller scale, in 02022, the canadian government froze the bank accounts of people suspected but not convicted of donating to fund a protest against some of the government's domestic policies, the so-called 'trucker's strike'. in this case, in the end, the government backed down and returned the money, but it's another clear case of structural vulnerabilities in the current money system cryptocurrencies make it possible to have money without these vulnerabilities when bitcoin appeared, i thought this would probably destroy civilization. now i think civilization is doing a fine job of that on its own despite cryptocurrencies slowing the collapse
ipaddr 2y ago
People were running adsense and Amazon affilates in 2004. I visited many websites who would let you spin a wheel and send you a check if you won. Browsers would pay you to surf. Money was a big factor and you would have to go pre dot.com or the bbs world to find it. Geocities had ads. Punch the monkey was everywhere.
- kragen 2y ago
  2004 was yesterday i was on the internet in 01992: before adsense, before monkey punchers, before geocities, before amazon, but not before dot-com, as my references to lynx and the nsf should have told you. money was a big factor but not in the way you are describing
  - amatecha 2y ago
    same year for me. I have such fond memories of those few years where you could just scour through university FTPs and websites for hours, finding so much cool (and informative) stuff. It felt like getting a peek into so many worlds I knew nothing about, and it felt limitless (especially as I was a kid at the time). Indeed, the openness and "generosity" of people online in those days set such a good example for me, that I try to "pay forward" in my daily actions and work.
    - kragen 2y ago
      one way in which firefox is worse now is that ftp support got broken a few years ago
  - Phiwise_ 2y ago
    1992 was 7 years before 2004, which was 20 years before today.
    - Thorrez 2y ago
      >1992 was 7 years before 2004 1992 was 12 years before 2004
rectang 2y ago
It feels to me like the old lovingly curated and crafted internet sites are being pillaged and displaced by a wave of AI regurgitations — with the cheerleading of "information wants to be free" advocates.
davidhs 2y ago
Also, everything you publicly write today is just used as AI fodder. :/
- wiether 2y ago
  I had a discussion around this with a friend a few days ago. They saw it as a bad thing. But to me it's the same as before : what I decide to share on the Internet is for everyone. If someone find a way to make money with it, it's probably because they made it more easy to find or use for users (customers), so good on them! As someone who relies on AI quite often to work on new topics, I'm fully aware that what I get is the result of someone else's content being digested by an LLM. With Kagi's Assistant I even got the sources if I want to access it. If I publish some niche content that is fed to an LLM and then just one person got the answer to their problem through the LLM instead of finding my website through an ad-ridden search engine, I'm more than happy, I helped someone!

by lukan 2y ago

fsflover 2y ago

> It is allways a relieve to me, find a site in the old spirit. Here is the corresponding search engine for that: https://wiby.me https://wiby.me

082349872349872 2y ago
Also: https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu
malfist 2y ago
Kagi has a small web thing too. But very few of those places are a community
- kragen 2y ago
  kagi is explicitly not a community; it's a service you pay for. it's organized around a them/us distinction, and the users are the (atomized) outgroup, individually paying the ingroup for the service provided by that ingroup there is nothing wrong with that; it's a perfectly good way of organizing things. but it's important not to confuse it with the relationship between, for example, linux users, any of whom is free at any moment to improve the kernel for everyone
  - zargon 2y ago
    Nobody suggested Kagi is a community.
  - malfist 2y ago
    I think you misinterpreted what I was saying. Kagi is indeed a paid service and not a community. I was saying it has a way to find small web type sites, but lamenting the fact that part of what made those sites so useful in the past was a tiny community, is gone, and probably not coming back.
    - kragen 2y ago
      i did! thank you for explaining
  - jart 2y ago
    That's exactly why it should be a community. Being willing to pay a monthly fee for a search engine sets a higher bar for affluence and caring about the web. So I wish they would do something like create a "Kagi Web" search engine that just consists of their websites, since I'm sure Kagi users have interesting things to say.

ThinkingGuy 2y ago

I'm old and fortunate enough to have gotten on the Internet in 1993, when it was smaller, more communal, and less commercial. As much as we old-timers lament the direction things have gone, there are still corners of the Internet where people still help each other, where people seek to share their knowledge freely, and help other humans, even strangers, without regard to artificial reputational or commercial gain. You just have to seek them out.

kragen 2y ago
i only lament some things; others have gotten better. there's enormously more free software and better information, and disks are big enough for kiwix to be a thing. consider: wikipedia, openstreetmap, library genesis, sci-hub, the internet archive, bitcoin, stack exchange, tor, debian, termux, f-droid, and lineageos. heck, even firefox is noticeably better than lynx was when i joined the internet! and, as i alluded to in my comment, it's not clear that people were ever purely altruistic; artificial reputational gain was always a consideration
- amatecha 2y ago
  Ah man, thanks, I was trying to remember the name of "Kiwix" for a while now!
- immibis 2y ago
  Bitcoin can come off that list - it's real estate trading for people who can't grasp real estate trading. Cool concept when it was invented, but its net effect has been rather negative, serving to further concentrate wealth.
  - kragen 2y ago
    i don't agree, but that's probably just because you don't know what you're talking about, which is probably because you're here to do ideological battles instead of share knowledge (for evidence, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41685852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41685852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41678925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41678925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677494 which are all, astoundingly, within the last two days, and mostly content-free hate-filled political flaming unrelated to bitcoin) to post an actual argument rather than just the one-line shallow dismissals you're here for, several of the other items on the list depend on bitcoin to survive. several others will start to depend on it as soon as they are banned in the usa, probably after the next major terrorist incident. and, in my actual experience, the people who benefit most from bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies) on a personal level are impoverished venezuelans supported by family remittances from abroad despite economic sanctions by the usa more broadly, the reason the internet is good is that sharing knowledge is a positive-sum game: the social benefit that results from sharing what you know is far greater than the cost of doing so, while it's comparatively more difficult for bad actors to do harm by spreading misinformation. it's not that nobody vandalizes wikipedia; it's that undoing and blocking vandalism is easier than the vandalism itself. this makes it possible to collaborate effectively on a wider scale than the social scaling of dunbar's number permits unlike knowledge, though, some things are zero-sum, like the ownership of computers and houses, and the allocation of human effort to competing goals. as it turns out, having 'money', an impartial way to keep score in voluntary transactions regarding those things, is also publicly beneficial, because such 'markets' also permit collaboration on a wider scale than the social scaling of dunbar's number. money and sharing of knowledge have different strengths, so we cannot simply replace one with the other the dramatic irony of this bears repeating: having an impartial institution for zero-sum transactions is a positive-sum outcome a problem with money systems so far has been that they mostly depend on a central authority to regulate the money supply. this opens many vulnerabilities to the abuse of that power; the money in my pocket today buys a quarter of what it bought a year and a half ago, for example, evidently because a disproportionate expansion of the money supply made our domestic inflation here the worst in the world. and, when russia invaded ukraine, 300 billion dollars of its overseas reserves were confiscated by ukraine's allies, who were in a position to do so because they controlled the international money system—a power which, though used justly in this case, is too great to be entrusted to any potential belligerent in future international conflicts on a smaller scale, in 02022, the canadian government froze the bank accounts of people suspected but not convicted of donating to fund a protest against some of the government's domestic policies, the so-called 'trucker's strike'. in this case, in the end, the government backed down and returned the money, but it's another clear case of structural vulnerabilities in the current money system cryptocurrencies make it possible to have money without these vulnerabilities when bitcoin appeared, i thought this would probably destroy civilization. now i think civilization is doing a fine job of that on its own despite cryptocurrencies slowing the collapse

ipaddr 2y ago

People were running adsense and Amazon affilates in 2004. I visited many websites who would let you spin a wheel and send you a check if you won. Browsers would pay you to surf. Money was a big factor and you would have to go pre dot.com or the bbs world to find it. Geocities had ads. Punch the monkey was everywhere.

kragen 2y ago
2004 was yesterday i was on the internet in 01992: before adsense, before monkey punchers, before geocities, before amazon, but not before dot-com, as my references to lynx and the nsf should have told you. money was a big factor but not in the way you are describing
- amatecha 2y ago
  same year for me. I have such fond memories of those few years where you could just scour through university FTPs and websites for hours, finding so much cool (and informative) stuff. It felt like getting a peek into so many worlds I knew nothing about, and it felt limitless (especially as I was a kid at the time). Indeed, the openness and "generosity" of people online in those days set such a good example for me, that I try to "pay forward" in my daily actions and work.
  - kragen 2y ago
    one way in which firefox is worse now is that ftp support got broken a few years ago
- Phiwise_ 2y ago
  1992 was 7 years before 2004, which was 20 years before today.
  - Thorrez 2y ago
    >1992 was 7 years before 2004 1992 was 12 years before 2004

rectang 2y ago

It feels to me like the old lovingly curated and crafted internet sites are being pillaged and displaced by a wave of AI regurgitations — with the cheerleading of "information wants to be free" advocates.

davidhs 2y ago

Also, everything you publicly write today is just used as AI fodder. :/

wiether 2y ago
I had a discussion around this with a friend a few days ago. They saw it as a bad thing. But to me it's the same as before : what I decide to share on the Internet is for everyone. If someone find a way to make money with it, it's probably because they made it more easy to find or use for users (customers), so good on them! As someone who relies on AI quite often to work on new topics, I'm fully aware that what I get is the result of someone else's content being digested by an LLM. With Kagi's Assistant I even got the sources if I want to access it. If I publish some niche content that is fed to an LLM and then just one person got the answer to their problem through the LLM instead of finding my website through an ad-ridden search engine, I'm more than happy, I helped someone!