Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?
jarredsumner.com
jarredsumner.com
https://pouet.net is the unofficial home of the demoscene, even though it's much weirder than the demoscene itself.
https://dwitter.net needs no comment
Stack Overflow has answers like: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454
Half of tumblr is totally out there.
I personally wouldn't call 4chan and its relatives fun, but they sure are weird.
There's dedicated, active, shitty phpbb forums for every single weird sexual fetish you can imagine.
And that's just the fun and weird patches of the internet that I happen to know about. There must be 3 orders of magnitude more. I'd wager that if you think the internet isn't fun and weird anymore, then you're just looking in the wrong places. The problem is with you and not the internet.
It is not a good community, jacoblambda.
Also, on your comment that it's just a cyberpunk focused /g/, well ya that's kind of the point. It's a cyberpunk board. It's centred around a lot of the themes from its namesake. As for the value of the threads on /λ/, most of them are either fairly focused discussions of various topics in Computer Science or language discussions. There's obviously some noise in the posts but the moderation results in fairly reasonable quality levels compared to the larger chans.
As for your final comment, I respectfully disagree. It's not for everyone but that's expected.
Also in case there was a misconception, I am not threwawasy1228 and they are not me.
Like a browser that records every page you see, exactly as you saw it.
Unfortunately it's probably just too difficult with Web 2.0 and its dynamically generated pages and needless flashing lights.
```saveAs(window.title+".html","<html>"+document.head.outerHTML+document.body.outerHTML+"</html>")```
Add something to the above so that it inlines referenced files in base64, and you're basically done (I tend not to bother as I'm only after the text content). For actually interactive files, it gets more complicated; you'll need to save the current JavaScript state as well as the page resources.
However, some of that weirdness has moved a level of abstraction "up" into mass platforms like YouTube, Reddit or Minecraft which some people might accuse of not being that under the radar.. yet the oddest subcommunities exist on such sites that few people are aware of. Amusingly, there are actually subreddits dedicated to unearthing such things on other sites, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepIntoYouTube/ :-)
For many people "the internet" is fbook. To some the net is what google says it is.
With F and B decided that some things should not exist at all, and other things should be downranked to basically never be seen, while promoting certain sets of sites -
I think the problem is more than the individual not really looking. It's more of an education problem where people don't understand the amount of censorship and how the down ranking and upranking is actually affecting the way most are using 'the internet' - which of course has the network effects of people only sharing what they (have been allowed to) see (and allowed to share) - sadly.
The time of web rings, less spam and less censorship made it more fun finding random things imho.
Times when tumblrs and torrents and geocities and others showed up in search results, along with click at the bottom to do a similar search with alta vista, lycos, etc..
was in some ways less weird, but more fun to surf and discover. at least for me.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/31/sex-censorship-killed-in...
Titled: How sex censorship killed the internet we love
I enjoyed here headings including: When was the last time the internet made you feel good? When was the last time the internet gave you hope? When was the last time you felt free on the internet? When was the last time you thought of the internet as a weird and wonderful place?
Glad to see others thinking of these issues. I worry that most people who connect online don't even realize the homogenized over pasteurized censored endless scroll publication is hiding stuff that multiple groups don't want to show - making so much basically not exist.
> This website is a wiki. All School of Art grad students, faculty, staff, and alums have the ability to change most of this site’s content (with some exceptions); and to add new content and pages.
So, you need to search for it. Be active about your intetests and seek them out.
In the Good Old Days, you were weird simply by being on the internet, so as an internet user you found it a bit more easily. That's unlikely to return. Improvise, adapt, be weird.
Thankfully due to the efforts of the longer-standing community this stuff ends up languishing at the bottom of the comment threads but it seems like it's only a matter of time. It's certainly become a lot more prevalent over the course of the 5 years that I've been here.
It's sort of a social web of trust, similar to HN/Reddit but about as different from those two as HN/Reddit are from each other. The way the site works is interesting: There is no moderation or downvoting, but if you do something lame, you'll be filtered out, at which point that person won't see anything you post anymore. In practice, it works very well. The content on it seems to be an order of magnitude more intelligent and interesting than HN or Reddit, but lacking in volume and discussion because there are so few people.
I am not worried about it being flooded with noise because of the way it is set up. It lends itself well to creating isolated subcommunities, and tends to reward thoughfulness rather than lowest common denominator content. When the Reddit community was looking for alternatives several years ago, a lot of people ended up at Hubski. But Hubski never became vile like a lot of other alternatives ended up.
Posts are tagged, and you follow tags and people you are interested in. It's possible to follow only people. When they post something or vote on something, it shows up in your feed. The frontpage when not logged in is fairly boring: it's all the stories voted above a certain amount.
If you go there, be nice. Talk to people like they're real people.
Ahhh, the busker economy. I have an opinion about this, much to the astonishment of the assembled intelligentsia.
Patreon, Indiegogo, Kickstarter, GoFundMe, the lot of them are basically ePaydayLoans. They charge an absurd amount for basically acting as a payments processor. We've developed a Kabuki whereby the supplicant does the Kickstarter Dance so that their friends and relatives are cajoled into giving you money through the sheen of legitimacy. It also allows the supplicant to disregard the nonmonetary help of any and all comers - no less than four asshole directors I've worked with have turned down my assistance as a creative in favor of begging for my money so they can "afford" to do the work themselves.
And really - who uses these services? Generally people who do not have a product viable enough to stand up on its own. I really enjoy John Dolan's commentary but no, I'm not going to pay $5 per podcast to hear him ramble. 2,681 people do, though. That makes him one of the 1%.
Kickstarter is basically a business loan that charges you 20%. That's pretty fuckin' horrible terms. But if you can't find better because your idea is shit, go for it I guess. And I say this having underwritten three Kickstarters. In all three cases, they were ideas that would have been underwritten by conventional financing if only their creators had looked a little harder. Patreon? Patreon is a tip jar for people too introverted to sit on a street corner with an open guitar case... and I say that having supported a couple Patreons.
But it's shit, and it makes the world worse, and I hate it."
Why is that? Basically: because not everyone had access. So if you were there, you belonged to some sort of minority (privileged artsy, IT student, etc).
The Internet nowadays is a commonplace thing. Billions more are online. It's not surprising that the stuff you used to trip over everywhere is now not as prominent - that just reflects the ratio of like-minded individuals in the real world better.
But that doesn't mean weird/funny doesn't exist anymore. It just means that - just like in the real world - you'll need to know where to go to find it.
But I think expecting the internet to only be one way is not only naive but also unrealistic. You may enjoy it being that way, but not everyone does, and the internet is for everyone. There's something for anyone, you just need to find your corner of the web.
Nowadays heavily discouraged, and would probably be deleted as unconstructive; that one still exists because of historical significance/was grandfathered in.
It's kind of the same as here on HN. If unconstructive comments weren't discouraged here, the comments section here would look like on Reddit.
If unconstructive answers weren't discouraged on SO, I'm quite sure the more popular questions would be full of flippant half-answers trying to be funny or people posting memes to grab attention.
The answers are ridiculing the OP for asking a totally reasonable question.
The question doesn't specify if the file to match against is unique/one-shot or if it's a general case. Without that info you can largely assume it has to handle any input. The regex will get unwieldy since you have to account for corner cases like:
<!-- <a href="foo"> -->
<div bar='<a href="foo">'></div>In any case, how would you use xpath or CSS to identity self-closing tags? They operate on the parsed tree, not on the token level, and the question is about identifying specific tokens.
Isn't this fairly common for stackoverflow nowadays?
I was ridiculed for posting a query about a C++ concept I was trying to learn from one of the authoritative books on the subject - I just couldn't 'get' the syntax being explained.
I persevered and then someone chimed in that, hey, there was a typo in the book's example!
That said, this answer frequently gets linked in discussions even where using regular expressions is an entirely valid approach.
A technically fair answer would be to point out that the regex would have to take other tokens like comments, CData etc. into consideration, so it is more like a five-line regex than a one-line regex. If someone recommended a XHTML tokenizer or other tool which could solve the OP's task, that would also be a great answer.
Yes, but that you can tokenize XHTML using regular expressions is not the same thing as being able to use a single regular expression to extract XHTML tokens. Remember that context free languages are a superset of regular expressions. I don't personally know enough about the XHTML syntax to say off the bat whether the syntax can be described with a regular expression, but generally a recursive definition of valid syntax is not possible to express with regular expressions.
> You cannot use a parser, since a parser does not emit tokens but emit the element tree and abstracts away syntactic details like the difference between <x></x> and <x />.
You can use a parser, just not any XHTML parser. The parser would need to be constructed with the objectives in mind, to parse into a data structure that doesn't abstract these details away.
That said, maybe an even simpler solution exists, such as to use several regular expressions to first remove comment and CDATA before matching. I'm not immediately aware of any other cases that would cause problems for the trivial match suggested in the question post.
This is completely wrong. One can also just write their own tokenizer reading one character at a time with a state machine. It's trivial compared to the complexity of the rest of the parser.
Regex is a family of languages each of which can have various implementations. You could have a regex implementation that instead uses mutually recursive functions etc.
What is true is that regexes are typically not turing complete and can be represented with simple state machines.
Where once we had Lycos, Hotbot, Dogpile, Excite, Yahoo, et. al., we have a fraction of the various search engines today and most people just know and use the big-G.
Reddit use to have all sorts of communities. Then they started banning everything, a CEO edited comments and didn't step down and now it's all 'safe' and single opinionated (Even /r/unpopularopinions went away).
This is a cute project and I hope it's self-hostable, because I might give it a shot. So far it doesn't seem like there's any code released.
I think the future of the Internet needs to be distributed. We need more things like Sandstorm, PeerTube, Pixelfed; thinks that make it easier for people to pay to host their own content and have control over it.
Most of our experience is controlled by an all-knowing black-box algorithms. The game is to converge all experience into a small set of patterns
An Example - youtube Earlier I could spend hours on youtube and discover everything from new music to weird funny videos. Today you literally get boxed into a list comprising of your history and recommendations that have hardly 1 degree of separation from your history
Getting lost in the weird side of the internet, outside your usual AI-generated recommendations is wonderful.
Human generated viralness >> machine learning recommendations.
--
A machine learning algorithm walks into a bar. The waiter asks: "What'll you have?", the algorithm responds: "What everyone else is having."
Wow. That's one of the funniest things I've seen on the Internet. Do you have any more like this?
And I agree you could work hard to try and somehow verify their code, but I doubt it's possible to let them do something useful and at the same time prevent any possible attack.
NeoCities is an attempt to revive the GeoCities days
And the work-safe boards remain "work-safe" with a huge amount of quotation marks :)
For me it is more psychological--there is a fair amount of decent content there, but being one click away from /b/ and /pol/ can be a detriment if I want to share a link or show something to my girlfriend. "Here's a bread recipe that sounds tasty or some /diy/ project--but don't use your work computer and you might want to fire up VPN."
Kids these days have significantly stronger design aesthetic and coding ability so it's less haphazard; though it still has a very personal style.
see: http://soda-slosher.tumblr.com/ http://forcomfort.tumblr.com/ http://undeveloped-future.tumblr.com/
There are still many jaw dropping demos and I recommend that people check them out and give some appreciation and respect to those absolutely l33t guyz
All this fun and weird stuff lives on separate disconnected islands from a practical point of view. Maybe it really has to do with coding becoming more elite - although by all rational means it got easier. On the other hand hardly anyone would dare to upload static html websites anymore without non-trivial css/js. That's a shame.
Maybe this also has to do with the general obsession for super clean and lean code. This design has to be like that as well, same goes for the whole gist of the endeavor.
FWIW shitty forums always have been there, but there used to be a lot actually useful forums. Now those have been eaten up by streamlined and polished high quality web or native apps.
The internet was a lot smaller and inhabited by curious nerds - to find similar fun and weirdness, just find a community today that shares those properties. Packet radio, infosec, crypto, gaming, music production, etc. - there's plenty of weird and fun to be found if you look for it.
In fact, it's something I really appreciate here on HN, the tone of discussions is rather pleasant and on topic and it's very rare to see people intentionally driving it into the ground, although in contrast to something like a Facebook group it's a lot less personal.
It was actually in September 2013 when it started ... or was it September 1993 ...? Uh, oh, how time flies, never mind.
But then you add the internet, and all these radically bad thinkers find each other and their ideas almost seem normal amongst their type. They not only normalize bad thinking, but they also push for even more radically bad thinking in an effort to out-do each other. End result, you end up with a vociferous contingent of town idiots who don't realize they are town idiots because they only listen to fellow town idiots. Add advertising companies who function on a metrics-first approach, and those town idiots dictate how companies act.
We need more people to be loud in the center.
Unfortunately, politicization is inevitable when double standards exist in moderation. If you're going to have rules, they need to be applied evenly. We've seen that several of the internet giants are incredibly inconsistent in their approaches to banning content or users from the two sides of the political spectrum. Nowhere seems to be safe, including HN.
When I was growing up, my father was a diplomat for the US Foreign Service. He was a small-d democrat. His best friend was a small-r republican. They both greatly valued each other's thoughts and opinions, and each allowed the other to sway their positions across convivial dinner-table discussion. I know such approaches are possible because I saw it on a regular basis, and I would like it if we could get back to said approach.
Uh, that's not what those mean, unless your father was a monarchist and his friend a believer in dictatorships?
"Small-p Partyname" is used to differentiate the actual word that the party's name is from the proper noun. A small-c conservative is someone who holds conservative beliefs, regardless of whether they support a Conservative party.
Could you give some examples?
Dave Rubin(https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/24/17883330/d...)
Jordan Peterson(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCGewQc9ktA)
And so on. But are these meaningful examples? I would argue both yes and no. No, because it's difficult to argue that the people calling them out are not a minority of activists who are just pushing their own political agenda.
Yes, because even if it's a minority viewpoint, it's effective - people apathetic to the given issue are likely to take the word of the activists as gospel, which leads to deplatforming.
A very visible example of the effectiveness of this tactic is Charles Murray and The Bell Curve. Regardless of the validity of more sophisticated criticism of his work, he has been effectively denounced as a racist and deplatformed.
This also leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where speakers presenting their ideas find themselves shunned by group X, and supported by group anti-X. As X step up silencing/deplatforming efforts, either the speaker fades into obscurity, or receives enough support from anti-X to continue their work, but now they can reliably be demonized via guilt by association(Jordan Peterson and the NBC news piece is an example).
>Charles Murray
Is a member of a right-wing think tank and the serious criticism of his work often alleges him of using scientific racism. Is it a far stretch to say that a proponent of scientific racism is himself a racist? Is it wrong to denounce people on such matters? Perhaps the critique can stretch beyond the mere empirical validity of the results and into the philosophy of what the authors are arguing. These methodological issues are in the purview of critical theory too.
>his also leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where speakers presenting their ideas find themselves shunned by group X, and supported by group anti-X.
I'm skeptical of the idea that the only reason why such people are supported by anti-X is because they have been shunned by X.
Instead, we know that there's been great effort to purposely troll and manufacture dissent for political and other purposes. It's really just coming into view as a sustained, organized, and scaled effort but, looking at the tactics on display, it's easy to believe that it's likely been going on much longer.
So, this trashing of the Internet has been deliberate and effective. Hence, the wastelands that YouTube comments, Twitter, FB, et. al. have become.
So what we've now got is weird, but certainly not fun.
In other forums I think it's easier to detect that you've been shadow banned, and that the reason only certain people are responding to you is that they're the only ones who can see your rants.
Someone with anorexia or another illness that destabilizes your perspective may find support in an online community. But they can also seek out and find communities that catalyze the destabilization.
Today people with stupid ideas are the ones who get most practice in rhetorics. And practice makes you good.
As a result you find very specific kinds of stupid. If you know Nassim Talebs IYI (intellectual yet idiot) there exist supermutants of that phenomenon. For example I just argued with self proclaimed Marxist who managed to have opinions of fascists straight from 40's. He had absolutely delusional view of multitude of things like not believing in industrial revolution, or that machines could outproduce people when making bulk materials. Yet he could muster huge array of minutiae from history, usually correct and supporting whatever weird point he was making. This dude actually was rhetorically decent and very passionate about.. I don't really know what.
Such individuals are far from stupid despite their stupid ideas and they seem to be able to shut down intelligent discussion on niche boards. Specifically because nothing seems to stick: they are not trolls, not really malevolent, not really belonging to any definite camp. Just really twisted, bored and eager to engage others.
Is this really a bad thing? Do fascists become less objectionable with time? I'd say they still hold the same abhorrent ideas as they did in the 40s.
>not believing in industrial revolution
As a Marxist myself, that's an odd thing for a Marxist to be saying, but Marx himself does not use that term, so there could be some confusion there - we should be careful with terminology, since they can and do convey particular histories and prejudices and ideologies.
>or that machines could outproduce people when making bulk materials
That's absurd, since Marx makes exactly the opposite point in the first 3 paragraphs of Capital.
Now before you categorise me as twisted, bored and eager to engage others, I'd like to do it first - I really am bored, and at least eager to engage others. When I see a post on a topic I'm relatively familiar with (in this case Marx) I feel the need to comment on it. Now I pledged that I would do that less, but I felt a kind of draw to reply to your comment. Why, I'm not even sure. Perhaps to correct the record on a topic I feel passionately about. But I hope you don't see me as shutting down intelligent discussion, anyway.
Since getting into philosophy I've started to become skeptical of calling people stupid if I don't have any grounds to disagree with them, even if Taleb would group such people, ideas we often think are bad or false at first sight can actually be very reasonable once we peer under the ideology.
What does "politicising" mean, and how do you know their motives? If you mean what I think you mean, i.e. women for example standing up for their right to be included in historically male-led organizations (say, a SDR club), I must admit skepticism - perhaps what you are witnessing isn't "doing something for attention," but instead "demanding to be treated as an equal?"
Example right here. For better or worse, some people will try to make everything about their pet issues. It doesn't really matter if their motives are good when every single discussion gets dragged into the 2010's version of Godwin's Law.
The OP gave no example, so I had to make a guess. In my experience, people that complain about "groups getting politicized" generally mean "a minority joined and was upset when we weren't inclusive."
Perhaps I should have simply left it at the question, but the internet is a frustrating place to have dialogues like that - clarifying every tiny point before running out of space for a counter argument.
Or I maybe just lost my internet innocence, seeing Big Game come in and decide on a whim to toss in the bin the place where I spent most of my after school time. Also where I learned how to un-ban myself by editing the right registry key. :D
Can you help me understand your argument by giving examples of what this means? What is "politicising" and what communities have you seened ruined by "some minority of users politicising it for attention?"
Twitter (and to a lesser extent, Tumblr).
> Given the misogynistic reputation that the community has, I think it would be good for people to go out of our way to send a message or say something about how her coming out is a positive thing.
Que the comments being about this inflammatory statement and not about what the post was meant to be about, and for good reason. People that criticised OP were met with angry replies and stuff like this:
> Lotsa male white fragility all over this thread.
2 hours later another user made a solid post highlighting nothing but her, her achievements and detailing just how influential she has been and still is for the community, the comments were nothing but praise, positivity and celebration.
IMO a pretty good example of something being politicised for no reason and directly being a detriment to the community.
I've been a member here since 2008, 10 odd years! It has been quite consistent, and an almost daily visit for me since joining. I don't know how they do it but I am glad that they do.
This does not mean that there aren't wonderful things available in today's web environment, too. There is no one to blame other than the natural evolution of a system. But something was lost, and it is ok to miss it.
Now that UUCP time has come and gone, I wonder if Usenet might have returned to its once former glory. It would be a really good place for technical conversation.
It's a decent ready-to-go forum. I only used it for the clojure groups, but then the clj community discovered slack. All that useful topically categorized awesomeness now must be mined from worthless slack logs.
Speaking just for myself, here, but this has not been my experience. In my opinion, that interest in the early internet was a niche was essentially orthogonal to what it offered. It just so happened that the mindset of folks who would be attracted to the early offerings was a small portion of the overall population. But it wasn't the fact that the group was comparatively small that was what was interesting.
But it's a different feeling than it was before, because of how things work. And some of that works against the process of forming smaller, tight-knit communities than how it used to be. And it's ok to lament loss.
Does that make more sense?
Is that a regression, though? I mean the state pre-ES was basically that the unwashed masses weren't able to use a special service for their more-refined betters.
To me, it's essentially the difference between a country club and a public park. Certainly, the country club is better maintained and more pleasant for its members than a public park. But there's, at minimum, a strong case to be made that a park that all may use is a greater social good than a country club limited to a few.
https://ineedcoffee.com/the-coffee-house-a-history/
They rapidly became a place where people from all walks of life could, and did, come for lively discussion. And their rapid increase in popularity caused them to collapse from their own success.
Early access to the internet was, by definition, limited to people who were on academic or military networks. But by the time BBS culture came about, it was the thrill of finding like-minded folks from wherever they might be- it was not a culture based on exclusion per se, like what you would find at a country club.
"All walks of life" is a polite fiction. The September in "Eternal September", after all, refers to university intake. "Wherever they might be" is a bit of a cop-out, because they weren't really "wherever", they were in other universities.
It wasn't a coffee shop, it was a strongly walled garden which only very specific groups of people could reasonably access.
Yes, but it was the introduction of easy-to-use 3D printers which actually, rather than theoretically, democratised it. As it was with AOL and Usenet.
[edit]- I found an article from 1987 talking about how amazingly fast (and cheap) the new 2400 baud modems were. I had to chuckle, as I still remember going from 300 (slow enough that your reading speed was baud-limited) to 1200 (wow! I can barely keep up!) 2400 and above was a speed that seemed almost decadent.
But the online services were really freaking pricey.
Here's a price list of online services from the 80s.
Compuserve was $11 an hour.
http://i53.tinypic.com/2janfrd.jpg
http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=1...
Can't both sides be correct? There is certainly a host of good feelings one gets when they're a part of something that is exclusive. (Not saying it's morally right, just making an observation.) Whether those feelings are altruistic or not is besides the point. From that person's point of view, they no longer have those good feelings when their club is no longer exclusive.
From the view of the larger public, the ends justify the means as the happiness of all is larger than the loss of happiness of the few. But for those few, it's still worse.
Global Climate Change is just one big Tragedy of the Commons.
new ~lands have:
- no regulations (yet)
- lots of unknowns
- very few hidden motives
I've read that some antique cultures believed in burning things to the ground. I wonder if that's not a useful thing.
Less room for fun, more room for tracking and click through rates.
Do you have any advice on finding it?
It's a difficult problem to solve.
• Discourages long-running discussions by burying (and ultimately locking) older content
• Discourages coversation in favour of fire-and-forget comments by making it impractical to continue where you left off
• Gamification of content (not quite as bad as some sites that grant extra privileges for scores, though)
• Numerically larger groups can bury content they would prefer others not see
E.g. a typical comparison between forums and reddit: A hobby forum often has a "I just bought X" megathread or two, where people post new things they've bought and want to share their excitement about, but that don't warrant a full thread. On hobby subreddits, a large amount of the threads can be "I just bought the thing everyone always recommends and everyone has seen 20 times this week, can't wait to use it!". Similarly, what would have been a single post on an old thread in a forum needs to be it's own thread on reddit, loosing context and making search harder (even if people try to link other relevant threads). Which in turn leads to more repeat questions etc.
For me, as with HN, I don't like the inherent stress of commenting on submissions before they fall off the front page. The earlier one comments, the higher the chances of getting eyeballs/responses. After that short ~24 hour window, people may still read the comments, but submitting new comments seems futile.
As opposed to older "style" forums, even today, threads often stay open, allowing people to post months or years later to revive "dead" threads.
I'm sure this approach also eases the moderation burden, and I'm pretty impressed overall with how dang handles things. So maybe it is a simple workload necessity. It does strike me that HN could be quite a bit more if these two restrictions were loosed.
How? I can't even search for shit anymore without being drowned in results that have nothing to do with what I searched for, but are kinda-sorta similar and get visited a lot more often.
> MySpace showed the world that if you make powerful and complicated tools (like coding) accessible to anyone, people are smart enough to figure out how to use them.
My own experience with MySpace was that every page I landed on looked like a dumpster fire. I can't recall a single person who exhibited competence in using the tools MySpace gave you. Everything was always poor contrast with a cockeyed layout.
Reading this, I finally get what people mean when they say "But Snapchat is supposed to have an unintuitive UI".
I was big into editing Myspace HTML back in the day. There were simply so many possibilities. The design was an extension of your style, howrver crude and unfinished it might have been.
Anyone tiktok-ing around couldn't care less about MySpace and the codeblog rant.
The real fun is, that you can make the internet fun. So the codeblog's shoot was a nice PR stunt, but that's it.
That Glitch is not as popular as My Space was tells something about what people that use internet want; and shows that the internet is still fun and weird for people that like fun and weird.
But back then, Geocities was popular and loads of people had heard of it. I have never heard of Glitch. It seems like there's become a re-division between "people who like to tinker" and "literally everyone else". On the one hand that's great but it kind of feels like everything is AOL again now.
The last vestige of fun, weird and popular is probably Tumblr, which everyone agrees has the absolute worst user interface. But you can theme your Tumblr page to your absolute heart's desire.
These days people have to focus more on the content because the presentation is so locked down. This may be for the better, but it can definitely feel antiseptic and corporate. The sense of fun is lost.
Facebook's clean design was what I actually wanted. Not some autoplay crap music.
In fact, back in the day, everything in Facebook was a search. I could click on your residence or your class/section and see everyone else in it. It was awesome and useful.
It also started out simple and therefore there was little to make it cluttered.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...
...Bro, do you even code?
Honestly, I can't fathom how you could make such a statement. Granted, most people can't express themselves through code - but that doesn't mean in general you can't.
Does it, though? Google used to give search results, now it gives Google Search Results™ and most navigation is dictated by what appears in social media feeds. The behemoths are able to enforce a sense of legitimacy in their own products while marginalizing any threats to their dominance. If they really can't stop a rising star that is pulling away users by squashing or copying them then it is no issue to throw some money at the problem and buy them out.
The big appeal of the early internet was that anyone could make something neat with simple HTML shenanigans, and learn to code by hacking the HTML templates to their needs. Many coders got their start by hacking Neopets storefronts. (there were actual coding puzzles on Neopets too for their events!)
Well, we've only been at this for a little while, and we don't even have a way to follow other people or invite your friends yet. :) Rest assured, we're planning to keep going. And probably with fewer Tila Tequilas, of either the MySpace or neo-nazi variety.
1) apps created niche proprietary software everywhere that used to be free and open media
2) the declarative, idempotent roots of the world wide web have been replaced by imperative, brittle Javascriptified spaghetti code
3) Javascript build systems have largely obfuscated any code that can be seen
4) Web 2.0 introduced private social networks in walled gardens that in many ways offer fewer privacy guarantees than before (due to the profit motive of exploiting user info)
5) Monopolies and duopolies now receive the lion's share of funding for research (which tends to aim for increasing profits and attracting eyeballs instead of fundamentally advancing the state of the art)
I'll stop there. It's hard to say how many of these are fundamental impasses to having an open internet again..
You can see a very different tone in YouTube video comments, for example, before they switched to using real names.
Now, people are afraid to risk damaging their own personal reputation by posting "weird" things (I don't mean extremely weird either -- people are extremely self-conscious in general of saying things that MIGHT be considered weird in front of others, so they don't be themselves as much as they did when they were anonymous). And often, "fun" is synonymous with "weird".
It's not ALL bad -- people also say FAR less offensive things to each other when their real names are attached (but it still happens), but if you're looking for reasons for the shift, user de-anonymization is definitely one of them.
"I'm going to get downvoted, but..." - proceeds to get upvoted
"Unpopular opinion: " - is actually a popular opinion
I like it. I'm going to start using this.
_Ars Rhetorica_, BTW is great read.
It’s a rhetorical device meant to captivate the audience by humility.
Someone uses cleuasms (I’m gonna create a word by inferring a translation) many times in a discussion. Pay attention: this unsolicited and reiterated form of humbleness can be too much. If you shouldn’t have right for a statement, apply suspension instead ;)
As the grownups came along and commercialised everything a lot of that went away and back then if you wanted to say something online you had to learn HTML and what FTP was as a minimum.
So things were weird because quite a few early adopters were not techies by nature.
It's different now.
It's one of the reasons I don't use facebook, instagram, snap etc, they just don't stick for me.
I do use twitter but that is because it's a nice way to follow projects and programmers I admire so it has some utility to me.
I was an early user of reddit but since the redesign (on the back of cleaning up the community) the trend towards just another social network (EDIT: speaking of which https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19039571) is pretty clear at this point, it's utility is going down as is the quality of the average posts in the subreddit's I cared about.
HN has been fairly consistent since I join over the last 5 years, a testament to the effectiveness of decent moderation.
It used to be I checked HN after reddit but that switched over the last year or two.
My first website was about about TNG and why DS9 sucked balls.
Ironic since I now consider DS9 the better series (but TNG still has the truly stand out episodes, I think young me was just oblivious to a lot of the subtler stuff but I digress), it was shockingly bad (and I'd been programming since the 80's, HTML was just weird).
I spent about five years hating the crap out of it and never even considered web development as a career, if you'd have asked me back then I'd have said you'd claw the compiler out of my cold dead hands.
20 odd-years later and I do enterprise web dev (and C#/WPF and Java)
Also, tt-rss is an excellent reader.
If you do check out the forums for it you will very quickly see that the developer is a massive asshole.
I wouldn't trust any code that a person like that writes to run on my machine.
It's the underlying protocol that connects the various federated services in the "Fediverse", (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse) like Mastodon, PeerTube, NextCloud, etc. At root it's just a standardized way for nodes in a network to send messages to each other, though, so you could use it to get those "connections of a social network" you're looking for. And then Mastodon users, say, could get updates/notifications from your site/service/whatever right in their feed.
Here's an example of some weird shit in the dessert. https://find.xyz/map/toto-forever
Also one on the death of RSS since someone mentioned that https://find.xyz/map/what-happened-to-rss
You've got a typo on https://find.xyz/about : s/beatuful/beautiful/g
Trying to shoehorn social media profile integration into this system will eventually end up influencing the content, and once more it'll be a race to the bottom, with everyone posting stuff only for other people's validation. It shouldn't work that way for the 'weird web'.
I agree with your basic observation but I have a slightly different response:
Most people aren't all that fun or weird, at least not in a way which translates to text or graphical arts or music or anything else you can transmit over the Internet. Most people are the majority, and you'll never find the majority you're currently steeped in to be especially fun or weird. (Example: A great way to make a living as a comedian is to rephrase normality to make people see it as fun and weird. Observational comedy takes a keen eye for the obvious.)
It took me way too many runs around the sun to finally get that :(.
None of my friends had a computer at home and didn't understand anything about them beyond those things we use in school for an hour once a week I was literally the only kid in my year who programmed them as a hobby.
We were not rich or anything but my father (for his faults) was fascinated with them and so I had access years before they became a thing.
They just were not embedded into the fabric of a working class northern town in England the way that they are now.
It's strange been under 40 and remembering three distinct phases in my life, pre-computers in homes, 1 computer in a home (maybe) and now everyone is wandering around with the kind of hardware 15 year old me would have dreamed of in their pocket.
I've been on the leading edge of computer adoption since a child and I still get future shock when I walk through a bus station and literally everyone is starting at a little glass rectangle streaming video wirelessly.
The other thing that still makes me smile is that my mum has three computers in her house, all of them running a linux kernel (Kindle Fire, Chromebook and a desktop running Mint) meaning as a percentage of devices owned she out 'Linuxs' me (I have an Xbox and dual boot for gaming), in 1998 when I was faffing about with RH and getting in trouble for breaking the family PC I wouldn't have seen that coming either.
Things are more weird. Where there was one weird place, there are now thousands. Even if only 1% of today’s sites are “weird” that’s bigger than all of the internet of 1995 combined. Rising tide lifts all ships.
Want to talk on a BBS? Head on over to SDF. They got you covered. IRC is still alive and kicking, though now with far greater capabilities. GitHub. Think about what people used to have before GitHub. I uploaded things to SourceForge back when it was one of the few choices. Oof. Think about the kind of weird shit you can find on GitHub/GitLab/etc. today.
The thing is that the apparent problem is that non-nerds are now allowed online. The horror. I have found plenty of strange, weird, niche, 1337, whatever communities now and they are made better by the fact that you don’t always have to have a magnetized needle and a steady hand to use them. All you gotta do to find them is to look just beyond Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Hell, some subreddits are microcosms onto themselves.
But this nostalgia for the “good old days” when you couldn’t have a web page in Russian and Korean at the same time is just that, nostalgia. What has actually been lost that we used to have but don’t today?
Wikipedia alone would make that choice easy.
Throw in that I can get an answer to some obscure error code in some library to talk to an old piece of hardware in <30s and I'm completely sold.
I was just describing my experience between then and now.
> The thing is that the apparent problem is that non-nerds are now allowed online.
Now you are just projecting, I never said modern internet was worse and I definitely didn't say anything about non-nerds been a problem, the internet is a larger part of my mums life (nearly house bound due to arthritis) than it is mine and that's a good thing.
My comment about the non-nerds being the apparent problem is not that I actually think that. It’s that this sentiment often comes up. But reality is that we have way more nerds online now than before.
And overall the whole article is basically an advert for a new blogging system. Which may or may not be fun to use, but pining for the days when XSS was a desired feature.
Yes, this is the counterpoint to TFA. Sure, it's a lot harder to find "weird" stuff now. Especially because it tends to get pushed down in search results. But once you find something that's "weird" in your preferred way, there are often links to lots more of it.
Also, you'll find lots more "weird" on Tor onion sites, I2P and Freenet. There are a few reasons for that, I think. One is relative lack of censorship. Also, a lot of content is more or less standalone, generated by users using simple tools, on VPS or shared hosting. And there are constraints imposed by high latency and limited bandwidth. All of that is like the old Web.
So anyway, TFA is correct, if we're talking about the Web ("internet") as a whole. But not if we're talking about the absolute amount of “weird” content.
Eternal September is forever.
When in doubt, use the same mechanisms to accomplish things that everybody else uses.
That sort of peer pressure is intended to reduce the variability between web sites. I think for better or worse we are seeing the dividends of that effort.
More on-topic, you're totally right. I keep a copy of "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines" on my desk and show it to designers sometimes when they want to suggest interaction patterns that are unnecessarily novel. Very handy! haha :)
HN is a PR project for an accelerator/venture capital firm. Since its purpose is to make ycombinator look awesome and generate leads for them (providing indirect monetary value), we all get a fun place to hang out and discuss stuff so they can project that image, but I have no doubt that without that fairly unique situation it would quickly devolve into some variation of what we commonly see with social networks that have to find a way to pay for the services they provide.
I could build a HN, I could maybe moderate it (though probably not as well as dang and co, they are rather more even handed than me) but getting people to come and use it without attaching it to a VC fund not so much.
If I wanted to make a profit though then things are different.
Good community projects can self fund, lichess is a good example, hundreds of thousands of users, millions of games a day and zero advertisings, scheezy tactics.
Completely funded on donations, even pays the lead developer a liveable salary (though certainly not what he'd earn on the open market working for said scheezy social networks sadly).
I also agree it's not impossible, as you point our with lichess, it's just that with the current level of consumer awareness of privacy, I think most people (still) don't realize what they are paying for some competitors that appear free, but are really just monetized through selling personal information, and for some services network effects trump almost all others. A free chess matching service, where being linked with random people of appropriate skill level is a selling point is a lot different than a social network that's built around connecting with friends and family.
AS to being funded on donations, while I think it's wonderful that a project can be funded on donations, I wouldn't want any project I care about to be in this situation unless the donations exceed all operating/staffing costs by a very comfortable margin. There's just not enough leeway for unforeseen problems in a situation like that. Server failure? Severe illness in key personnel? Massive influx of new users that haven't matured in the user lifecycle to consider donating yet? That's such a stressful situation that I can't imagine wanting to live it for more than a few years. Unfortunately, if you can't get enough donations to get past that point (or keep increasing scope until you are at that point no matter the incoming funds), I'm not sure a solution besides monetization in some manner, and the problems and perverse incentives that come along with it. :/
Bingo.
There are still weird sites now. But back then, that's all there were.
I don't personally agree, as far as I know, with any of the communities that were banned, apart from the communities for buying and selling stuff, which no one should really have a problem with. And some of the communities that were banned, I vehemently disagree with, and would probably strongly oppose if they formed a political platform. The "involuntary porn" subreddits were probably breaking the law and in some cases causing great emotional distress. This latter case I think clearly crosses the line, but there were plenty that were in a gray area at worst.
There's something to having free speech readily available for criticism and scrutiny that feels very valuable. These people are around whether you want them to or not, and there's value in being able to scrutinize their views. Also, I feel there's a chilling effect when you've seen examples that saying certain things leads to explulsion.
What was illegal should already have been banned but the removal of non illegal but objectionable (to many) content stuck at the heart of what Reddit was, of course it's their platform and they can do as they please but I often enjoyed debating with people holding diametrically opposite views.
I mean I entirely get why they would do it from a business point of view but it was a stark sea change from what they'd done up to that point.
Throw in all the other odds and ends and Reddit just feels different.
The constant nagging to install their app, the hilariously bad redesign and handling of the redesign etc it just adds up.
But then it was decided that there was no semantic purpose to the <b> tag, <span style="font-weight:bold">so it became this</span>.
Now, with the ubiquity of js, it's more like <span id="bold-text">this</span> (along with something like getElementById("bold-text").setAttribute("style", "font-weight:bold") in the background).
It should be pointed out that things come full-circle: frameworks like Bootstrap define the <strong> tag which, via similar JS to above, all-but-duplicate the functionality of the original <b> tag. I think the OP's point though is that you have to add a JS framework to do this.
Semantic markup is nice, but 'div/span soup' is still very popular and isn't technically incorrect.
<span style=...> vs <b> vs <strong> have different semantic meaning, and all have valid uses in modern HTML.
<span class="bold-text">this</span> and .bold-text {font-weight: 600;}
import Ghost from "../components/Ghost";
<Ghost size={80}>Thanks for reading!</Ghost>http://latentflip.com/imperative-vs-declarative
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45016234/what-is-idempot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_effect_(computer_science)
The early goal of the web was to create a longterm available, reliable, discoverable network of media over an inherently unreliable transport.
I keep trying to write a concise explanation of these but I can't fit it in a comment. Let's do it DECLARATIVELY haha:
imperative->functional->declarative
for()->foreach()->map()->executables+pipes->spreadsheet
C/BBS->perl/cgi-bin->Apache->HTML/CSS
manual network config->DNS
state machine/brittle long running process/fear of manual retry->idempotent request/response
Always, always, always work towards the rightmost side if you want the least side effects and highest reliability (critical for a distributed system built on unreliable parts!)
I'd like to say that declarative idempotency was an immediately obvious thing to the architects of the www, but what really happened is more like Darwinian evolution where each solution's fitness was measured by reliability. Declarative idempotency was also cheaper because requests/responses could be cached and scaled.
If we flip it around for a moment, imagine a web without these things. Every site would have a complex tangle of brittle code to do even the most trivial operations, and it wouldn't be able to pass data on to other sites (it would be an app). Without idempotency, users would have to be really careful to only click the send button once when they were transferring money (thankfully this hasn't happened much).
The one thing that I wish the web had though was a layer to make unreliable communication reliable. It would look something like a promise or future with no exceptional logic. That way we could think in terms of wiring up the inputs and outputs of many websites and then "load" it to execute the logic. Kind of like Ansible, where internally the logic is imperative but on the surface is declarative.
I'd also like to see declarative idempotence replace imperative code (especially object-oriented programming) at the developer level.
I think there are still a ton of "fun and weird" sites out there, they're just not on highly promoted, corporate backed platforms. And they're now a much smaller percentage of the entire web.
Marketing people like boring and predictable.
I think this has made a huge difference, not so much if it is open source our not but how much things have become locked down. Before if you made a cool program you could hand it out to your friends on a usb stick and run it. These days you have to pay $100 to apple and go through a long approval process before you get listed on the app store. Its the same with all the platforms people use now. They have become more and more locked down pushing the regular user in to simply consuming content and only the corporations with large dev teams are able to make anything.
Sure you can still do things but we are constantly raising the bar for creating and making consuming easier.
In my mind, weird/interesting internet died with the phrase "link in bio."
Even show me a declarative, idempotent API that can generate an arbitrarily long scroll of user-generated content.
If your answer is that users shouldn't expect to be able to do these things, then you have aliased the word "web" to mean something that 99% of web users will not recognize.
Since functional programming (FP) and declarative programming (DP) have many similarities, the same issue of hardness (for lack of a better term) exists in languages like Elixer/Clojure/Julia/Haskell/Scala/F# etc etc.
This all comes down to one of the most poorly understood concepts in FP, the monad:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming)...
Honestly, I'm still not sure I understand internally how monads work, or if there are related terms for how I think of them. But monads (and related devices) are a way to deal with imperative logic and side effects when pure FP can't.
Imagine you're writing Tetris in a spreadsheet. It's easy to visualize how you might enter a piece's (x,y) coordinate in 2 cells and then pipe that through a series of cells containing logic that examines the blocks and outputs the next (x,y) coordinate for the following main loop.
But the actual main loop (that grabs input events) is very hard to visualize as a spreadsheet. This "glue" with the imperative stuff is where the monad comes in. Another way to think of it is, how to represent exceptions in a spreadsheet or a pure functional implementation of a promise chain (you can't without monads).
To write Tetris in HTML/CSS with no Javascript, we'd probably have to write a ton of CSS rules to show/hide/move DOM elements based on the state. That's an intractable problem for humans, so we'd probably compile the CSS from another language, which defeats the whole purpose. Maybe someone has tried it, I can't tell:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6709466
https://codepen.io/alexdevp/pen/pgdKf
But if we had something like a CSS monad, then we could write rules that are based on dynamic state from other rules. Writing this all out now, something like this might be useful, if anyone knows of such a thing.
Anyway, from what I understand, languages like Clojurescript get around this by suspending execution via a monad and then entering again with new input. Here is an almost purely functional Tetris clone written in Clojurescript:
https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris
Piece definitions, with code to offset/rotate the matrices and check for collisions by counting the number of cells to see if any have overlapped:
https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris...
https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris...
What I assume to be a thread sleep and JS setTimeout monads:
https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris...
https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris...
https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris...
I know that code looks a little strange. But conceptually it's orders of magnitude simpler than that equivalent imperative code. Note that this is different from easy:
https://medium.com/@kiksdium/simple-vs-easy-bfd897ab293c
TL;DR; you bring up a really good point. FP and DP probably shouldn't be considered proven techniques until they can be used in the same problem domains as IP.
Of the languages you mentioned just Haskell, and Scala to some extent, has any deep concept of monads (and even in haskell they’re not part of the language, just a common idiom and ”easily” implemented)
Also, I’m using FP for the exact problems I used to use IP for, not sure what needs ti be proven..?
What I was trying to get at is that (IMHO) somehow the FP and DP paradigm has a huge blind spot when it comes to tackling the problems that IP solves handily. These are the problems that mostly involve integrating with the outside world - things like mutating state, exceptional situations, side effects etc.
Sure FP can largely avoid them via strong type handling and categories etc, but I've rarely seen good explanations of how to REALLY do something that programmers like to do, like write video games and social media feeds (things which the parent poster alluded to).
It's easy to visualize FP as a spreadsheet where the inputs generate a certain output. It's even straightforward to visualize how FP and IP are equivalent:
https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/44305/why-are-functio...
https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/625/relationshi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church–Turing_thesis
But I'm not convinced that pure functional programming can handle the simplest thing like new input without suspending execution or via a device like a monad. I also wonder if using those things makes functional programming impure. Which would make pure functional programming a fantasy..
This is maybe just a misunderstanding on my part since I haven't actually written much FP since learning Scheme back in the 90s. I'm all ears if you or anyone else knows of any articles exploring these issues.
Purity (and lazyness) is primarily there to help you reason about your code with referential transparency (purity ensures no side effects, and lazyness makes dealing with (certain parts of) bottom (think undefined) easier).
Of course any program needs to communicate with the outside world, and monads are a very general way of dealing with this. It’s worth noting that the first releases of haskell did not handle IO with monads.
At the same time, haskell contains functions to subvert lazyness (the function seq, which forces strict evaluation), and purity (the Debug.trace function which prints values in the middle of evaluating a pure function).
There’s also some fairly well-founded arguments that the State-monad violates the monad laws, which causes problems for referential transparency.
And you can still write a divergent function, in which case all your referential transparency goes out the window (kinda)..
Does this make haskell less pure? Probably, but since these are generally considered escape hatches or debug functions, the main paradigm of the language allows you (imho) to reason about your code in a way that’s (again imho) more amenable to separating your problem logically into discrete parts.
At the same time these escape hatches allow us to use haskell in the situations you describe. And you can often wrap them in a monad, in a way that allows you to reason about that boundary of the more purely logical parts of your code.
(There is obviously a tradeoff to using a type system like haskell’s. I’m a big fan of elm, precisely because it makes typed functional progamming easier to explain, and doesn’t distract people with all the fancy type theory stuff you can find in haskell (which I also love of course, and don’t get me started on agda))
A monad is analogous to the imaginary number i.
So in FP, a monad gets passed along as a placeholder until it can be computed. Here is a pretty good description of how they work:
https://medium.com/@newhouseb/motivating-monads-f93c9ddf7014
I agree with his analysis except that in his "MAGIC TRICK" example, I would have used something that is UNDEFINED in the interim but can be computed to a real value at the end (just like how we use i as a placeholder device in math). His example:
f(x) = x^2 + x + 1
g(x) = 2x
h(x) = sqrt(x)
m(x, f) = UNDEFINED, if x is UNDEFINED f(x), if it isn’t
m(m(h(-1), g), f) ~= (2(sqrt(-1)))^2 + 2(sqrt(-1)) + 1 ~= -3 + 2i ~= UNDEFINED
In this case, the 2(sqrt(x)) is still undefined for -1, so can't be simplified further, so the answer is UNDEFINED.
But I probably would have used an example like:
f(x) = x^2 + 1 # <- note that his was x^2 + x + 1
g(x) = 2x
h(x) = sqrt(x)
m(x, f) = UNDEFINED, if x is UNDEFINED f(x), if it isn’t
m(m(h(-1), g), f) ~= (2(sqrt(-1)))^2 + 1 ~= (2(i))^2 + 1 = -3
See, using i or a monad as a placeholder allows us to compute a real answer.
In FP, all computable parts of the stack could be collapsed (optimized). Then if anything is left uncomputed, the runtime could block on any involved monad. Then when the monad is set to a real value from the input stream, it could be collapsed completely and return the final answer.
I haven't succeeded in learning Haskell yet, but when I tried, I got stuck on its mutability implementation, which seems to use monads:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Mutable_objects
Honestly today, I would prefer to use pure FP. I think that allowing mutability anywhere in the language is a huge cost, because we can no longer visualize the whole thing as a spreadsheet.
I'd really like to know if another FP language solved the mutating state problem by doing something more like ClojureScript (CS), where it stops execution until the monad gets set from the runtime. Unfortunately, it looks like CS has mutable variables via reset!:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/36847124/539149
So it's not pure either :-/
Anyway, I'm still learning. Hope this helps someone.
Monads doesn’t represent uncomputable values like sqrt(-1), it’s more like they represent a context, where computations take place.
So you can separate all computations involving IO into the parameterized function type ’Monad a’, where a is your result type
RSS. With a good reader software.
When Marissa Mayer was in control of Yahoo (which included Tumblr) she used to brag about how she was using a "data driven" approach to maximize the revenue from Yahoo. This seems to have been abysmal for the actual users. Engagement on Tumblr stagnated, then declined. The great business guru Peter Drucker has pointed out that entrepreneurs often ruin their own products because they are uncomfortable with the type of success they end up with. Marissa Mayer would be an example of this. She had one of the great gems of the Internet, but she was uncomfortable with how weird it was. And it is difficult for leadership to really lead when the leadership is uncomfortable with the product they have.
I tried to capture how destructive her rhetoric about "data driven decision making" can be when I wrote the essay "When companies make a fetish of being data driven they reward a passive aggressive style":
"I’m especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on “data”. I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say that every company I’ve worked at that supposedly valued “data” in meetings actually valued something darker. The use of “data” in meetings tends to be a passive aggressive negotiating tactic for a group of people who for cultural or emotional reasons don’t think it is reasonable to express strong disagreement or actual anger. Instead of expressing strong emotion, people are taught to quote data — they then cherry pick whatever statistics back up their beliefs."
As far as I know, there has never been a company that said “We want the worst informed people to make the decisions” so in a sense all companies have always valued data. But they didn’t make a fetish out of it. They simply expected people to be well informed, and to make intelligent arguments, based on what they know. That would have been true at General Motors in 1950. That much has probably been true at most companies for centuries. When management says that the company is going to be “data driven” they are implicitly asking for a particular type of interaction to happen in meetings, an elaborate dance where people hide their emotions and quote statistics.
Trust your instincts. Over the years, we often condense many years of learning to a few simple rules. If you asked me from what peer-reviewed study I learned to value minimalist design, I would not be able to answer you — it comes from dozens of books, hundreds of articles, thousands of conversations, and countless observations, and if the accumulated wisdom of my years of experience is of no value to you, then why did you hire me?
Obviously I am not advocating that meetings should be abusive. No one should be allowed to talk over another person, as that would be disrespectful, but when one has a chance to speak, often the most effective kind of communication is one where people show how strongly they feel about an issue. If you are an experienced professional, then presumably you’ve been hired because the company wants to know the lessons you’ve learned over the years. If your instincts tell you that a given policy will be a disaster, don’t let anyone silence you with their demands for “data.” Speak the truth that you know."
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/when-companies-make-a-f...
The problem is our wants have become too complex. A blog site that used to be simple self-hosted markup, now requires commenting, moderation, voting, recommendations, authentication, backup, performance, media, analytics, seo, and more. How much coding skill can we expect from people? And even if they had it, should everyone use their time re-implementing or deploying and maintaining tens of individual platforms to participate on the web? There doesn't seem to be a feasible way but to centralize. And now you need to monetize and people have shown they are not willing to pay money, leaving the only other possibility we know: monetizing the data - which, of course, only encourages even more centralization and data capture.
None of this is new, but these are the fundamental natural forces that need to be addressed.
The first is Google. Google was such a phenomenally good search engine that you rarely needed to “surf” the web to accomplish a task. You could search “order a hand powered woodworking drill” and likely be taken to a page that let you do just that. Much of the discoverability of “fun, weird” stuff came from the “surfing” aspect of the web, Google vastly reduced that.
The second is Wikipedia (and the Wikia networks). Much of the wonderful weirdness of the early web was passionate amateurs compiling information, wrapped in their own design aesthetic (or lack thirst of.). Wikipedia as amazing and wonderful as it is, gets rid of the need to find these sites to answer a question about the world (again, reducing surfing behavior, at least outside of Wikipedia.)
The last is Facebook. So much of geo cities and the early web was the “personal website”- a Sort of combination of Facebook profile, blog, and experiment in web art. These sometimes grew into impressive little gems of content, but mostly they were terrible quips and “under construction” banners. Then came the Friendster->MySpace-> Facebook and LinkedIn transition, and the need for these personal sites dropped away. They still exist, but the interaction patterns for using fbook and LinkedIn are so much easier.
I feel like YouTube still has the early web experience to it. Much of the content remains the domain of passionate amateurs and the “up next” algorithm regularly takes me in serendipitous locations (and sometimes down some darker paths).
The fun and weird communities now seem like “islands in the net” if you will, they are there and probably larger than ever, but much harder to get to (or at least stumble upon), due to tooling that allows use to accomplish tasks without detours.
One must not forget that Google is actively optimising search results away from the "weird stuff" and blocking users that try to dig deeper into the results to find it, insulting them with the accusation that they're a bot (a bit ironic, considering that if you behave "like the billion other mindless drones" you don't get singled out...) and presenting them with endless CAPTCHAs.
On the other hand, Bing still feels a bit like the "old school" search engines, and I've had better success finding the rare and niche "weird stuff" with it; apparently you can even find stuff horribly beyond legality, which is not surprising given how "dumb" it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18876361
I'd say the "fun and weird" Internet is definitely still alive; but the efforts of search engines to "clean up" their results have basically resulted in censorship and hiding of the less popular parts.
The iPhone came out. Before the iPhone DSL was a thing, making big-ish pages was a thing.
Suddenly your pages had to be downloaded on a 2g connection. Eventually 3g, and 3g today is seen as insanity, but back then was the best we can get and still only few could get that.
We started to minify the hell out of our code. Every byte was critical. CDNs were used to speed every bit of our site up. Google came out with their research that you have ~150ms to serve content before it stops feeling instantaneous.
Boom.
Eventually tools came out to make all this so easy, why wouldn't you do it.
And thus here we are today.
I was using the internet when AltaVista was a thing. Searching was SLOW! If you wanted to find something online, grab a cup of tea, because its gonna be a while.
This for me is especially soul-crushing. Some of the biggest minds of our time are working, devoting their talents and their ful attention, to the noble goal of... making us click more ads.
These people could be trying to research diseases, to come up with solutions for the big problems that affect us -- in short, working to to improve our lives. Instead, we reward those that make our lives even more miserable/erode democracy/help concentrate power even more. In our economic system, those are the ones that get rewarded.
Sigh.
Allowing arbitrary HTML allows hackers to use your site to impersonate login pages, using your trusted SSL certificate to make the page appear authorized in the browser header.
Allowing arbitrary content allowed hackers to exploit browsers to run arbitrary code and go wild from there with user permissions.
Allowing arbitrary HTML mixes poorly with having more than one user doing it on a page.
Allowing arbitrary content to be uploaded and served out means that if you're lucky, you'll go bankrupt serving people pirated movies, and if you're not lucky, you'll go bankrupt and to prison for serving child porn.
This is just a sample of the problems.
You have to sandbox this stuff, and the crazier the line you try to draw with the sandbox around what is safe to do, the harder it is to secure.
For its many sins, Flash was actually a pretty great sandbox for people to play with that way (as long as it didn't have one of its many security issues at the time)
How many security updates did Flash have over the course of its life? Back in the heyday I remember it having to update multiple times a week.
One. When they finally killed it.
All other updates were more or less security sidegrades.
But by the time you've solved them all, you're pretty much back to where Reddit, HN, Facebook, etc. are. I assume the author does not consider those "fun and weird".
I mean, I remember when Slashdot was having trouble with user abuse of <pre> tags. A simple <pre> tag of all things! When you scale up, you have to close all the little holes, and what's left is not "fun and weird".
You can have fun and weird. It's out there, if you look, and worst case, you can always deploy your own site and do anything you want. But you can't have fun and weird at scale.
There were also all sorts of ways to sneak JavaScript back in. I remember embedding a javascript: protocol link inside a Flash applet would do it (flash eventually blocked that though).
Alternatively, you don't need a form tag. Just show a login set of text inputs and an image that looks like a submit button. That button links you to a phishing site that says "oops! try again" and then you put your password in a second time and this time it's a real form. So you'd have to get rid of text inputs entirely.
EDIT: I brainfarted and totally forgot about inline event handlers. Go easy on the downvotes please.
<div onclick="alert(0)">whoops</div>
That document is scary! There are 70 different ways to encode an opening angle bracket, what is just a tiny side note...
Content-Security-Policy: sandbox allow-same-origin allow-top-navigation allow-forms;
>Allowing arbitrary HTML allows hackers to use your site to impersonate login pages, using your trusted SSL certificate to make the page appear authorized in the browser header.
Make each user have their own custom virtual host (yourname.example.com).
>Allowing arbitrary content allowed hackers to exploit browsers to run arbitrary code and go wild from there with user permissions.
Arbitrary does not mean you can't sanitize it. You can specifically restrict javascript for example.
>Allowing arbitrary HTML mixes poorly with having more than one user doing it on a page.
You don't necessarily need more than one person doing it on a page. Each person can have their own page.
>Allowing arbitrary content to be uploaded and served out means that if you're lucky, you'll go bankrupt serving people pirated movies, and if you're not lucky, you'll go bankrupt and to prison for serving child porn.
You could say the same thing about Facebook. We have the safe harbor act and we have the ability to monitor these systems for misuse.
As I said in a cousin reply, of course all the problems are solvable. But you end up back at not "fun and weird" by the author's definition.
That's only half the answer. The real answer is that no one wants to spend the time to offer those features securely.
It's perfectly cromulent to allow users to upload CSS and html and even javascript. You just have to put a lot of effort into making it safe.
Look what we did on reddit -- we allowed users to make almost any CSS they want, and look at the beautiful creations that have come from that (like all the sports reddits). It was a lot of work figuring out how to make it safe, but we did it.
And now they're putting in a ton of effort to make it work on mobile too. Because reddit still values user creativity.
It's totally possible to allow all that creativity, it just takes time and consideration to make it safe.
>It's perfectly cromulent to allow users to upload CSS and html and even javascript. You just have to put a lot of effort into making it safe.
I work in an online payment company. Custom CSS is one of the features we hate the most implementing. It is very difficult to get it right and the cost of maintenance is quite high.
And locking down gets really hard, unfortunately,
The main reason I have a reddit account is so I can turn off custom CSS for subreddits because otherwise it's almost as garish as MySpace. When they finally eliminate the "old" reddit, I'm gone (unless they hire a competent UX person before then).
I do disagree that "coding is now a privilege" or at least that it's more a privilege because of the demise of MySpace. It's easier than ever to learn how to program; it just takes time and motivation. The only thing that's harder is figuring out which technologies you actually need to learn to realize your vision (because there are so many more ways of doing things than there were in 2006); however, people are also generally nicer now than in 2006 (when I would ask people for help, they often would expect me to have read certain textbooks or know C before they would send me the link on standing up a LAMP stack). The toxic bits of StackOverflow culture were just normal--if you didn't already know the answer, you didn't deserve to know it.
Anyway, that's my 5 minute stream of recollection.
My other favorite response was when you would google a question, then you find a forum where someone says to google the question
I think the initial observation is interesting.
Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Reddit likes are good value from a marketing perspective.
It's the circle of life.
I've been a regular net user since 1995 and there's every bit (in fact more) weird unusual content than there's ever been.
You want creativity, look at today's meme culture. Sure there's a lot of "hit or miss" content out there, but there's no shortage of weird.
Deviantart, tumblr, LNI on imgur, a huge section of subreddits and that's just the easily accessible stuff. If you like video content, tiktok and similar have no shortage of fairly odd stuff.
You can head off into far weirder territory than that with a little effort (*chans, or ToR based content)
Is it MySpace, I guess not, but there's nothing stopping anyone putting up flashy HTML content easily, Netlify or GH pages aren't that difficult to get started with.
but world new york /memepool/ suck/ are all memories. Its hard to keep up the content creation.
One “simply” needs to look for communities where this happens now. But of course, these days it's a pure game of chance and/or years-long riding on the edge to find oneself in such a community. Just like in any other saturated creative field.
Creating a tightly circumscribed environment in which "glitter" is one of your built-in affordances is hardly the same thing. It's the difference between discovering rocket jumping in Doom and having rocket jumping become an intentional mechanic in Quake. The latter might still be fun, but it's no longer weird (and certainly not fun because it is weird).
Maybe the slick presentations put people in a headspace, but that on its own is the start of the slippery slope of not being original because then everything has to be streamlined to those expectations, and productions aren't recognized unless they have these features.
It will probably take another leap before the internet moves past this, where presentations aren't videos with one view and one soundtrack focused on particular personality types, where text and charts aren't pictures but rather mixable data used to render arbitrary views. I guess ironically if Flash had taken over the Web in the early days we might be closer to that vision now since it was more the focus to create an interactive work rather than using a desktop application to generate a video, or the generally harder slog to create interactives in Web technologies.
After some brief discussion on the topic a hand, the author gets to the point and introduces their new product, Codeblog: https://codeblog.app/
It's like Medium and MySpace and Markdown and React had a baby. I don't know what I think about it but I am sad nobody here is discussing it.
I think the more interesting discussion isn't about the product itself anyway. More interesting discussions would be about why have such a product and why such a product doesn't exist in high amounts like it used to.
Without the ability to receive connections on your home computer, the list of "fun" things you can build is hugely reduced.
https://blog.mindorks.com/how-to-convert-your-laptop-desktop...
Ok - it isn't something for the faint of heart - but it can be done. If your public IP changes often - you'll have to use a service like this:
Many if not most home router/firewalls have some provision to allow you to resolve thru NAT to a server at home.
Please note that this -may- violate TOS with your ISP; most officially don't allow servers, but some turn a blind eye to it as long as you aren't hosting something nefarious or popular (and if you are hosting something popular, it's better to just bite the bullet and get actual server hosting somewhere, given how cheap and easy it is today).
https://asmb.itch.io/dmcas-sky
[NSFW] https://radiatoryang.itch.io/the-tearoom [NSFW]
https://captaingames.itch.io/enviro-bear-2000
For a sampling of the fun and weird
Many parts of the internet are weird and fun, but you gotta look for them. You need to decide to get past the over-designed mall, which is meant to capture your time to sell ads, and support your run of the mill mom-and-pop shops.
Having been on BBSes and the internet since the mid 80s I’m as sad and nostalgic about it as anyone but you can’t turn back the clock. Instead we need to fight today’s battle—big tech company hegemony.
We — the programmers, designers, product people — collectively decided that users don't deserve the right to code in everyday products. Users are too stupid. They'd break stuff. Coding is too complicated for ordinary people. Besides, we can just do the coding...so why does it matter?
As a programmer, let me say that when I've switched over to the role of user: As for our bedside manner, we programmers xxxxcould stand to improve a bit! (Not all. But on average.) Remember to treat users as people you're supposed to serve, not as an underclass that needs to be kept in line.
With the money came the scammers and other malicious actors, and so now, everything that used to be fun is also a security vulnerability. Everything even remotely interesting has to be sandboxed and sanitized, to contain the damage when someone inevitably figures out how to weaponize a toy and upload the resulting bomb to your site.
And the moneymaking parts also had to be simplified, so that users without a lot of technical knowledge could still figure out how to enter their payment information. All clicks; no command lines.
I suspect fun and weird is still out there, but their signal is drowned by the noise. You have to already know where it is to get to it. An army of fun-finders could constantly troll through the dark waters of the out-of-mainstream net, looking for new and interesting, and then recommend whatever they may find to their social networks. Otherwise, the best site you will never see might be on page 200 for the nearest search term you will ever enter that matches it--ranked well behind all the disturbing rule 34 interpretations of it.
The niche-dwellers just can't find each other easily any more. The crowd standing between them is too vast and noisy. And if you don't have a strong community already, your tentative steps into forming one can easily be annihilated by spammers advertising boner pills and 419 scams, sometimes in a language you can't understand, or someone renting a DDoS botnet just to kill your server, or any of a dozen other ways to pave over your paradise.
It’s definitely too early / the projects I’ve played with have a lot of progress to go on.
Things that need to be improved for a real Dapp to exist:
1. Storage layer with encryption / p2p / access control. Allows “back-end” logic to be distributed amongst peers.
2. UX tooling that makes it extremely easy to sign in with identities and manage encryption.
3. Developer tooling to easily package app code and deploy to users.
4. Absolutely no 3rd party dependencies outside of the app itself. It must be self sustaining.
5. Open source for a true Dapp. If value is being provided at a cost of a company/dev team then monetize it by selling access to a client or data within the app. This can be done easier with wallet integrations and crypto.
I do really mean that - in fact, it's more accessible than ever.
For example, personally for me, it means that I can go online and access vast resources of knowledge to make myself better at my job, my business etc. It provides me with hours of entertainment - both free and paid. It also has enabled be to in touch with friends and family across the world.
For my mom, it means she gets to see videos and tv shows she had given up on decades ago (Indian tv drama - 1 ep / day, it adds up quite quickly). It also means, I can send her stuff that I know she'll find funny. She can keep in touch with her family, friends etc.
For my dad, it means he can see places online that he's never been to. He loves maps and the internet has enabled him to see detailed maps he'd never even dream of.
For others, it could a dark place of business - a place to sell drugs, or organs or others. For some it's a glimmer of hope that their stories / struggles could be put out there for the world to see and empathize.
The internet is what you make of it. For those looking for what the author mentioned - those still exist - you have to know where to look. But for the "normies" - Those that are not concerned about programming, internet etc. - it's something totally different and they've moulded what internet is for them.
This pure feeling of "let me show you what I did", with no business involved, not trying to get a job, just happy with this thing he made. Reminds me of _why as well, which I miss for some reason.
One could argue that this is simply nostalgia of a time when I would do things just for fun... I might agree.
For anyone who hadn't read: it's a marketing piece for a React-based blogging platform that posits that the reason the "old" internet was fun was because websites didn't sanitize inputs, and that we can somehow bring that back by using a platform with a limited set of sanitized "fun" components...
Most of the "big websites" are now serving mainstream customers. As a result, they're not fun or weird. When the internet was younger, it was mostly early adopters creating their own culture, so it was weirder.
The great thing about the internet is that there's a bunch of stuff on it that is not in the main stream.
It's harder to FIND that stuff now because, as a percentage, it is not as prevalent, but it's definitely out there and it can be located.
If the internet were a city then yes, we'd be struggling to "Keep it weird" but since it's an ever-expanding universe there will always be weird corners and cultures, just like here on earth.
Stay weird, internet.
For ex. in Switzerland, almost almost all citys did forbid cheap (plastic) chairs in street restaurants.
We used to have very old cars, when we started to drive a car. Today they start with a new leased car. We could do funny things and if the car broke it was an easy fix (one door has a different color, who cares). Today if you do just a little bit something forbidden,10 people make a picture with a cellphone and send it to a newspaper.
Also just on the street, people dress much nicer than a couple of years ago, allways ready for a selfie ..
Jokes are not allowed about anything, because somebody could get a bad feeling, etc...
Most of the main entry points for the internet have been intercepted and squatted by "big internet". Google is where you go, and the top searches are all squatted throughout the front page and the ranking algorithm biases the bigger companies.
Even the "long tail" went through a period of ad revenue extraction/industrialization. So even those corners are wrapped by crappy aggregators and SEO spammers/interceptors. If there was a dime to be made, someone has tried it.
Actually, I'm wrong about my first statement. After the big companies/adwords spenders comes all the SEO spammers.
Google stopped caring about how SEO spammers drown out small corners of the internet since all their revenue is first page results/adwords.
Your best shot for kooky stuff is finding a kooky site that is pretty good, and doing a manual walkback of the google algorithm: find other pages that link/reference that kooky page and see what non-spam links are on those pages.
Hopefully you'll find some subreddits or discussion boards or other stuff that also centers around that kookiness.
I almost think that the old categories/directory/yellowpages style that is manually maintained used to hold good results for kooky subjects. But those all got closed off.
Remember that weird stuff is only weird when you have something boring to compare it with. Did we even think of the old stuff as weird back then? I don't really remember, but I don't think so.
Today you can go to Mastodon to find funny and weird stuff. I'm having fun on there, and I really like weird stuff.
One toaster... you can adjust all the dials, but as a result you get burnt toast. One toaster... it's locked in, but makes near-perfect toast every time (assuming you like toast that way). Which do you use?
A lot of people nowadays just want a streamlined experience or doesnt bother to look/experience.
My 2c.
Let's face it: computers are boring (for most people).
Once we face it, we can do something about it.
That said, social platforms not allowing users to express themselves through canvas and styles could be a matter of consistency and usability, while the myspace pages were a form of expression; they were certainly a pain to use and navigate through.
Between the sanitized Facebook and the siloing of people into apps, there's fewer obvious social on-ramps to coding on the internet, especially now that so much is mediated by apps.
I miss the days where people who wanted to have an online presence could create a website, and it was actually a comparatively good experience.
Facebook is the defacto standard now, and you have to do things their way. Yes it is by far the easiest way for most people to share their photos and thoughts if they want their friends to see them. Unless they are twitterers or whatever.
But I really wish the internet had continued to progress as....it could have.
And today that means they have to use Instagram or Twitter. Or maybe Medium. Or something else very highly constrained.
So you see a fucktonne of creativity within the very narrow bounds of those formats: Our level of innovation when it comes to the 280-character format is through the goddamn roof.
Otherwise, the perceived effort required to create something innovating and fun/weird simply isn't worth the result. Unless you're doing it for a client.
So in the early days of the web, each page was unique and crafted with minimum standards and lots of opportunity to innovate. Today, much of those early layers of innovation have become templated, and the majority of what you get are just that and less quirky. But there will be exceptions, just less of them than the pioneering days, proportionally.
Not saying standards are bad, and indeed without them, we end up stuck at one point in advancement and there is that point when a line in the sand has to be drawn. Hence a focus shift from hardware towards software.
But then, anybody today looking at yesteryears solutions will call them weird, amongst other things. That's progress for you and for that, lots of small lines in the sand moving forwards tend to happen over big leaps. Though they do happen, mostly in new advancements of technology, the early days when the foundation standards are written, which we still have.
Though I'm sure in a decade or two when people have phototic processors with optical memory coils or whatever the future holds for computing. They will look back upon today's computers as...fun and weird.
MySpace gave people headaches. Pulling all the stops on CSS manipulation without any associated training on design, color, or style gave us precisely what we got: an often-unreadable mess that bordered on the physiologically unpleasant.
I think we have seen few recapitulations of that style of system today (in spite of the fact that the tools to allow it never vanished) because most people don't want it, end of story.
What I find funny you might find horrible.
Everything boils down to the most agreeable format in the end
Also just as a vignette, a classmate of mine in high school in the late 90s had a personal web site (which was very well done at the time) with a GIF of an aerial shot of our high school with a targeting crosshairs superimposed on it, and flickering red. Naturally he did not fit in, but that sort of early web freedom would get you a visit by a police officer nowadays. There are many, many more restrictions on content than there used to be.
JavaScript and its potential for nasty security issues also played a major role.
I don’t think specialised markdown languages really changes anything though.
At the same time, I understand the sentiment. But who is going to bother maintaining this functionality which if done wrong exposes you to Bobby'); DROP TABLE STUDENTS
Stop just a minute there. Who says that random people copy pasting CSS and HTML they don't understand is even a good thing? Let's be clear, 99% of people don't understand that stuff, it's just copy pasting.
If you want a glitter blog, then launch a blog with that option. But letting people do it themselves just adds risk to themselves they'll never understand.
Edit: to be clear, if you said pasting <script>alert(911)</script> can be used to call the cops from your computer, then 99% of people would assume that's what it did until they tried it. 99% of people are not coders and it might as well be a foreign language they are pasting into a Google Translate to see what it means. If it happened to contain JS, well, too late. See the warnings in the FB JS console for a reminder that people are gullible and will copy paste anything they are told to.
I think you are remembering. In the blog screenshot of myspace, when it says "Javascript is not allowed", it was acting as "a sign, not a cop" [0]. Most websites were riddled with security flaws, to the point that you'll find there wasn't really any comprehensive listing of major vulnerabilities in websites because people didn't really understand that an XSS was a problem until someone actually used it in an attack. This example from 2005 shows that their security to prevent JS was sorely lacking.
Or, at least there's been far fewer incidents of that blind trust spectacularly blowing up than the pitchfork mobs about to come after this comment might lead you to expect. Perhaps you might say that npm users at least understand the risks we take on when we do it, but I still don't think most npm users give it all that much thought...
A few years ago I attended a 60th birthday, and I was seated next to a retired biologist. He was a wonderful man, full gray unkept beard, and, the only man attending who wasn't wearing a suit. Instead he wore a striped shirt, some green work pants, suspenders and a green hat that he only reluctantly took off as his wife shot him a look. A real character, and a great conversationalist. When he found out that I worked with EDB he enthusiastically told me about his blog about the fauna of Bornholm (one of our islands). I looked it up when I got home, and it was exactly what I had expected. He obviously build it himself, without the use of any form of blogging engine or framework, and it was this really nerdy thing full of stories and pictures of the fauna of Bornholm along with his journals of discovery. Sadly I didn't keep the link, and I haven't been able to find it since.
I have another great gem though, it's the webpage of my psychologist: http://psykoweb.dk (please don't crash it). I think it certainly lives up to what the article is about, but it's actually also full of useful information and science done, found and tested in a long life of psychology. Most of the other places I follow aren't like this. They look more akin to https://www.valdemarsro.dk , but unlike the article, I don't think the uglyness was really the true value, I think it was the content, and you can certainly have that in a nice package.
I personally hope a lot more people start taking ownership, and start building their own little places on the internet and I wish it wasn't so hard to find these days. I don't think they need to look like Geocites, I really don't. But I do miss the bravery in the openness and honesty of the early internet, because that stuff was just more interesting. As I write that, I know I'm a bit of a hypocrite, because I'm completely guilty of being uninteresting myself. My main socialmedia is linkedin, and it's where I put most of my musings, and as such they're marketed to represent exactly the sort of message you'd expect to find on linkedin. They're informative, but they're also selling either myself or my points. Which is fine for linkedin, but it's also a lot less interesting than the authentic interent where things were actually fun, weird and entirely geninue.
One of my favorite fun and weird website is The Useless Web: https://theuselessweb.com/
there are tons of niche communities doing crazy stuff
http://reddit.com/r/reptiliandude http://reddit.com/r/sorceryofthespectacle http://reddit.com/r/sarahai http://reddit.com/r/echerdex http://reddit.com/r/tao_of_calculus
I've not doubt that in 15 years we will look back at the current internet as tame or simplistic - like I look back at the computers I used in the early 80s. We might still be carrying "smartphones" but I doubt it.
Lastly, I am more concerned about us users controlling the internet than I am about it being fun or weird.
Just one example: 'Tumbler' isn't mentioned a lot anymore. But fun abides.
It's not hard to get caught up in the big names, all echo'd by all the wannabees. It's a lot like the rest of mainstream culture. Fun's in the subcultures. As true now as all thru the rock era.
EDIT: Wanna try a fun experiment? Limit all profitable enterprises (including advertising) to one or two domains, say .com or .biz . Watch what happens to those over time.
It targeted a community of musicians in a moment when indie music on the web was blowing up. It also allowed those naturally creative people to style their profiles. And then it brought the fans and everyone else.
It would not be a stretch to say that, had myspace not existed, I wouldn't have played in 2 music bands in my teens. And I also started programming there! Even though I didn't know I was programming.
I just wish I knew about archive.org back then to keep my profile somewhere with my cool hair and horrible design xD
I used to use Geocities and yeah the internet and HTML were sort of synonymous. As users my friends and I all had pages we'd do things on and show each other.
I suspect the issue is that long term that doesn't bring in users who DO NOT want to do that and thus your user base is limited, and once you make a place that does appeal to the folks who don't want to dip their toes in code.... you just stick everyone there.
If you're talking about security issues, I get that, valid concern. I've got no good answer for it.
I do think there is a loss, that there isn't that personality.
[1] - https://neocities.org/
...and no, it all wasn't able to be saved - but a massive amount was managed to be preserved (it used to be available as a torrent - assuming it is still being seeded, you might be able to download a copy if you really want it - but it ain't small).
I think there just isn't much of a desire among most people to be "creative" with their layouts. Most people use social media like an appliance, they care about the networking and communication and are satisfied as long as that works.
It is though a good example of "fun and weird" and a little sad it was left out as social media grew. I get why, but still feels like that character missing is a loss of some kind.
Essentially with mass adoption it got increasingly lowest common denominator.
Still sad that the two couldn't live side by side, a standard experience with a customization one.
I get why it wouldn't just if you were making a product now with two different experiences and one would take a lot more maintenance.
Still.... everyone's facebook or twitter account or whatever looks the same. Feels to me like we lost a lot of personality.
I will do a more formal submission once I'm done.
If anyone has an idea how I can make it more fun and weird, please let me know!
[1] https://mettamage.github.io/Interactive-Neural-Networks/
Its him just listing off upto date technologies you need to learn to call your self full stack in 2019 for 45 minute.
It's really ridiculous, how complicated web development is. The technology is broken. No one wants to admit it. They just keep building on top of a rotten core.
The internet is great. The absolute best. It is or can be the superset of everything else. All of everything is just a post, one upload away from being part of internet.
I'm sure the top 1 or 80% is cheap but that is always the case. Pop stuff is lowest comm denominator. The interest, the unique, the original is in tiny niches. And that is where internet shines. Niches are cheap to publish and have frictionless audience of the world.
After a while, they attract more serious types and evolve to be more... well dressed. When people start to put Stack Overflow and Facebook branding on their resume, they start to take it real seriously.
Shameless plug but for an example you can check out how it's used in one of the tutorials about VuePress I'm writing. This link will take you to a Vue component used inside a markdown file:
https://willwillems.com/posts/building-a-website-with-vuepre...
And naturally the source[1] is available online.
[0] https://http://vuepress.vuejs.org/
[1] https://github.com/NickolasBoyer/willwillems/blob/master/pos...
It was a surreal feeling to know that not only was I not alone I wasn’t the weirdest person anymore. Some were much more into it and much weirder than I was.
You just need to know where to look.
Dig into https://neocities.org/ to recapture the feel of those home-spun web playgrounds of old.
Look at the amazing things the https://glitch.com/ and https://repl.it and https://codepen.io/ communities create.
Check out the buzz and creativity in the communities gathered around YouTube creators like Daniel Shiffman on The Coding Train: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvjgXvBlbQiydffZU7m1_aw
Discover amazing indie game creators doing wacky things at https://itch.io/.
Visit the front pages of http://giphy.com and https://imgur.com/ for a dose of silliness and creativity.
Hack around on a hundred different coding challenge sites like https://www.codewars.com/ and https://www.codingame.com/ and https://exercism.io/.
Get free education and meet other learners on https://www.freecodecamp.org/ or https://www.khanacademy.org/.
Browse new and interesting projects to contribute to at https://github.com/explore.
And these are just fun nerdy tech sites — there is something fun or weird for every walk of life.
It's easy to get nostalgic about the internet of old (and I appreciate the OP is writing to promote their own neat creative coding/blogging playground), but the premise that the Internet is no longer as fun somehow because you can't inject crazy JavaScript into your Facebook pages seems misguided.
Outside of those strictly controlled communities, it has never been easier to join a group of people who like to make and break weird shit online.
Do you remember Wired magazine in the 90's? It was wayyyy weirder... How about Mondo 2000?
I'm getting:
"This webpage is using significant energy. Closing it may improve the responsiveness of your Mac."
That's Safari on my 15" mbp 17 2018.
edit: formatting
1. the widget has a secret toggling hotspot that is only discovered when the user clicks the circle and observes that the action failed to toggle the widget.
2. widget looks like it should behave like a mobile widget (where touching any part of the widget will trigger a toggle) but behaves differently
3. dragging the little circle to the other side of the widget generates a dragging animation, but does not update the toggle. Instead, upon releasing the pointer the little circle will animate back to its original position, defeating the user's expectations.
4. attempting to drag the circle past its own widget boundaries will fail to drag the circle to that distance. However, it will succeed in toggling the widget! So the obvious analogic behavior in #3 fails to trigger the desired widget behavior, where this fantasy-world interaction does (e.g., like sliding a penny with one's finger past the edge of a borderless table to get the penny to stop right at the edge, yet moving the penny right to the edge will cause it to travel back to its original position).
5. the cursor icon changes from the "move" icon to some other icon when attempting to drag outside the widget bounds. But remember that #4 requires a drag to the outside of the bounds to trigger the toggle. This means that the user is likely to see the wrong cursor icon the moment before a successful toggle event occurs. I.e., "cursor change to reflect a concern other than this widget" likely means "this widget is about to do its thing!"
I'd like to suggest the following additional feature to the Dark Mode Toggle:
* when user drags the toggle with the pointer outside the bounds of the widget and then releases, immediately show a dialog that reads: "Ok to Cancel Toggle? [Ok] [Cancel]"
Edit: clarification
There are also small pockets of gopherspace if you dare to look for 'em.
For more "mainstream", you can also still find old-school style ANSI BBS systems (I know, redundancy) on certain IP addresses; most are simple hobby projects, or focused on certain niche things (retro computing, for instance).
Why isn't there a new social networking site using the old myspace layout as their template where you can just choose your theme song, your top friends, post weird stuff and have it just be fun?
http://platelets.fun (You're supposed to click)
Much of the internet's creativity is encoded in audio, video, and photography.
there's still funny/weird shit out there, but you have to dig pretty deep, sift through the ads, copypasta, and general crap content to find it... eventually it'll all be banned/deleted for some reason or another.
Everything becomes less fun and weird when taken over by large corporations.
We'll begin with a spin, trav'ling in the world of my creation
What we'll see will defy explanation
If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it.
Want to change the world, there's nothing to it
There is no life I know, to compare with pure imagination
Living there, you'll be free, if you truly wish to be.
Sanitized is also appropriate.
As one of the women who was online back then, I didn't perceive it as "masculine", fwiw.
HTML, Javascript and CSS is free and openly available in any browser on open source OSes as well as Windows & OSX these days. You can still make some weird stuff on the web platform if you want to, although I would agree that there are not nice WYSIWYG editors (that I am aware of anyway) that makes this easy.
I think that's the wrong assumption to make - we figured out the language of the internet, and developed a design methodology that worked, though it continues to evolve.
It's just that back in the days 1% of the Internet population would use them and today 0,0001%.
With Smartphones the non-outcasts found the Internet finally interesting and filled it with boring stuff like Instagram and Tinder.
Got a facebook page? Same format for everyone. Just another brick in the wall
Got a MySpace page back then? You have a playground to express yourself, you are a human being.
It brought on the neoliberal trolls on 4Chan and Reddit. In some areas anyway.
The Internet is like working a job now, all fun is blocked by management.
- Always yours, your Cap.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/ImGoingToHellForThis/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/
P.S.: there's also 4chan, if you so dare!
A good place to start is a smaller subreddit. Here, I'll link two of my favorites just for the hell of it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/bruhmoment
https://www.reddit.com/r/arabfunny
Side note: I think the article meant weird as in "obscure".
Personally, I'd describe weird internet content as something you wouldn't show to your friends (except if you're close, of course.)
/sad
Then corporations, journalists and politics happened. Now those with the megaphones complain day and night about anything and everything they disagree with and demand everything be censored. Every day there is a new list of words you can't stay, sites you can't visit or content that is going to be filtered.
Somehow, the most annoying and prudish people were given the role of internet hall monitor and we are suffering for it.
I had an idea for social site. You can only belong to a single group of traditional common evolutionary size, say 30-50 people. All these groups self organize and people can leave or be voted in/out. The groups form goals and plans to get stuff done, like testing recipes or anything they have fun doing. Groups could communicate if they wanted, and based on the abilities of each group you'd form these abstract chains of interdisciplinary volunteerism. Inter group communication would be more meaningful as each communication could represent the knowledge of the entire group.
Our brains are pretty much designed for a close knit group of that size. Our current way of living is kind of nuts. By keeping the group to a size that the mind can actually grasp and form relationships within I think is the powerful part. A lot of people are living lives now where that might add serious long term value with meaningful relationships, as well as crazy efficiency on hobbies.
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[1] Via the submit button at the top.
But yeah, a lot of custom MySpace pages were just terrible. A friend of mine set the background to his to a snowy forest and set the foreground text to white, making it basically unreadable. He tried to defend it by pointing out that if you highlight the text, it becomes readable. I tried to show him that if he really wanted that image as a background, he should spend two seconds in Photoshop to lighten the image so he can put black text over it and keep it readable, but he just went off about how much he prefers white text.
A typical case of retroactive romantecism. picking one aspect, romantecising it, ignoring everything else.
I mean, if we want to take off the rose tinted glasses and look at it honestly, disregarding the homogeneity of modern frameworked layouts versus a Geocities page with a fire background and crimson Morpheus text, the quality and variety of content is much better on the modern web than the old, as is the availability of media and depth of interaction that social media, for all its negatives, provides.
I feel like what the modern web may lack in style, it gains (and surpasses the old web) in substance. And I think that's a fair trade.