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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 th

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
    - tycho-newman 2y ago
      Central control of money supply is a good thing. It helps avoid counterfeiters. It also helps make sure that we are broadly using the same means of exchange. Crypto moves control from the state to whoever runs the tech stack or has cheap enough power to mine crypto. Which in many places is still … checks notes … the state! Had Russia kept its reserves in Bitcoin or any other crypto, I am skeptical that the clever finance ministries of Europe and America would be unable to reach them. Moreover, the holders of these reserves haven’t sold them. They’re holding them to secure other financing for Ukraine. Which is honestly what anyone does with money they hold - they use it to invest and generate revenue. An integrated financial world makes armed conflict more costly by threatening a belligerent’s access to markets. That is a good thing and why blockades (i.e sanctions) can be effective in shortening or ending a conflict.
      - kragen 2y ago
        your argument about 'central control of money supply' is exactly backwards. the problem with 'counterfeiters', if we look only at the facts and avoid the question-begging derogatory term, is that they can print money while providing nothing in return; that's exactly what a mint printing paper money does, as do other entities with central control of the money supply. so, far from avoiding counterfeiters, it officially licenses them. you could as well say that stand-your-ground laws help avoid murder because the killings they permit are not murder, since the law permits them most states are unwilling to allow a foreign power to print unlimited amounts of the money they use, because this would represent a major concession of sovereignty. this ensures that almost no two countries use the same means of exchange your argument about who has control has more merit. but you're overlooking structural differences; it's like saying that democracy moves control from the king to whoever is popular enough to get votes, or that freedom of speech moves control from the ministry of truth to whoever has enough money to run a printing press. the structural differences prevent cryptocurrency miners and exchanges like coinbase from simply inflating bitcoin into worthlessness the way my local currency has been inflated over the last year. the most extreme event we've seen along those lines was ethereum's controversial unwinding of the dao theft; nothing similar has ever happened in bitcoin, and probably nothing similar will happen in the future in ethereum or zcash it is definitely true that russia could not have kept its reserves in bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, because the market capitalization of bitcoin was far too small to provide 300 billion dollars of liquidity if it had to sell off those reserves. that is probably still true and may possibly remain true forever. but you can bet your life that every head of state who saw that confiscation is formulating a strategy to ensure it won't happen to them; that will have the opposite effect on financial integration from the one you want i'm skeptical about your integration thesis, though, partly because it was very popular in 01914, and partly because of the limited repercussions from the usa's completely unprovoked invasion of iraq in 02003. (arguably the invasion of the ukraine is one of those repercussions, but that hardly seems like a major disincentive to future us presidents who find tempting countries to invade!)
johnnyanmac 2y ago
>You just have to seek them out. been looking for a while. But my hobbies are either too niche or these groups aren't in the public eye to begin with. I guess that's the other issue: more of these remaining bastions are retreating off the indexable web at best to minimize spam management and at worst to avoid having all their data scraped without consent.
blooalien 2y ago
Much of the (true) "open source" movement / community is still all about that mentality / spirit. Much of the "hacker" / Maker crowd, too. So much of what made the early Internet great still lives on in later generations who keep that spirit alive and continue to share it with others.

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
  - tycho-newman 2y ago
    Central control of money supply is a good thing. It helps avoid counterfeiters. It also helps make sure that we are broadly using the same means of exchange. Crypto moves control from the state to whoever runs the tech stack or has cheap enough power to mine crypto. Which in many places is still … checks notes … the state! Had Russia kept its reserves in Bitcoin or any other crypto, I am skeptical that the clever finance ministries of Europe and America would be unable to reach them. Moreover, the holders of these reserves haven’t sold them. They’re holding them to secure other financing for Ukraine. Which is honestly what anyone does with money they hold - they use it to invest and generate revenue. An integrated financial world makes armed conflict more costly by threatening a belligerent’s access to markets. That is a good thing and why blockades (i.e sanctions) can be effective in shortening or ending a conflict.
    - kragen 2y ago
      your argument about 'central control of money supply' is exactly backwards. the problem with 'counterfeiters', if we look only at the facts and avoid the question-begging derogatory term, is that they can print money while providing nothing in return; that's exactly what a mint printing paper money does, as do other entities with central control of the money supply. so, far from avoiding counterfeiters, it officially licenses them. you could as well say that stand-your-ground laws help avoid murder because the killings they permit are not murder, since the law permits them most states are unwilling to allow a foreign power to print unlimited amounts of the money they use, because this would represent a major concession of sovereignty. this ensures that almost no two countries use the same means of exchange your argument about who has control has more merit. but you're overlooking structural differences; it's like saying that democracy moves control from the king to whoever is popular enough to get votes, or that freedom of speech moves control from the ministry of truth to whoever has enough money to run a printing press. the structural differences prevent cryptocurrency miners and exchanges like coinbase from simply inflating bitcoin into worthlessness the way my local currency has been inflated over the last year. the most extreme event we've seen along those lines was ethereum's controversial unwinding of the dao theft; nothing similar has ever happened in bitcoin, and probably nothing similar will happen in the future in ethereum or zcash it is definitely true that russia could not have kept its reserves in bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, because the market capitalization of bitcoin was far too small to provide 300 billion dollars of liquidity if it had to sell off those reserves. that is probably still true and may possibly remain true forever. but you can bet your life that every head of state who saw that confiscation is formulating a strategy to ensure it won't happen to them; that will have the opposite effect on financial integration from the one you want i'm skeptical about your integration thesis, though, partly because it was very popular in 01914, and partly because of the limited repercussions from the usa's completely unprovoked invasion of iraq in 02003. (arguably the invasion of the ukraine is one of those repercussions, but that hardly seems like a major disincentive to future us presidents who find tempting countries to invade!)

johnnyanmac 2y ago

>You just have to seek them out. been looking for a while. But my hobbies are either too niche or these groups aren't in the public eye to begin with. I guess that's the other issue: more of these remaining bastions are retreating off the indexable web at best to minimize spam management and at worst to avoid having all their data scraped without consent.

blooalien 2y ago

Much of the (true) "open source" movement / community is still all about that mentality / spirit. Much of the "hacker" / Maker crowd, too. So much of what made the early Internet great still lives on in later generations who keep that spirit alive and continue to share it with others.