Hacker News Reader

Comment by madrox | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this rhetoric since Geocities. Discord is the latest scapegoat in a long lineage of successful products that are paradoxically ruining the internet and holding us back from the digital utopia we all dream of.

Thinking like this leaves out the most decentralized part of the system: people. People are the real repositories of lore, and they're the ones who bring the useful things from place to place. It's a mistake to ever think of the internet as a library. Libraries take the kind of work and time you can never expect at a massively distributed group of volunteers to do. The internet has been and will always be ephemeral.

View on HN

While you are on your soapbox, I'm down here googling for a way to unstick my van window and the diagram is no longer available but at least I can work out what they were probably doing from the text in the Internet Archive. Yeah try that with a defunct Discord.

Its good to remember that oral traditions have been (and still are) huge part of humanity; in many ways discord can be seen as internet iteration of that age old part of culture.

If we are going to supplant oral traditions with a massive disconnected worldwide web (sometimes of lies), and replace learned knowledge with 'googling' as a skill- whats the harm in trying to 1. make technologies that will protect the information, or 2. generate a culture of preservation to protect such information.

Because, as someone else on the Internet put it so eloquently, information wants to be wrong. Sure, you can build your technologies and make your culture and it'll even work for a while, but the average person doesn't really care about all that infrastructure and the rules for preserving content. It's (one of the reasons) why search engines are pushing LLMs so hard - few actually want to search for stuff, they just want to put words in a box and get an answer. They don't even necessarily care if the answer is (very) truthful, just if it's useful!

Geocities deserves the scorn and criticism. It died and took with it untold amounts of websites before archivists had a chance to save them.

It's funny to me; what halcyon days are people longing for? When was the Internet an organized, easy place to navigate?

There was a brief moment in 1999 when this tiny startup came on the scene and introduced a search engine that was so much better that all the rest of them functionally died off. Before SEO bots destroyed a lot of that particular search engine's results, it made the Internet feel much more organized, and just typing in what you wanted made it quite easy to navigate! It's now a quarter century later and Google Search has plenty of critics, but for one brief moment in history, the act of finding things on the Internet took a giant leap forwards.

I miss AltaVista, too.

Uh, Google Search was only as good as the as Internet was back then, and in 99 it was pretty bad…

2000-2010 or so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com