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Comment by Stranger43 | Hacker News Reader

It feels like the web grew up into an bitter old fart who takes everything way to seriously.

What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name and people did not give that much care to their long term reputations and the fall from that more or less started with facebooks real name policy, or rather when facebook stopped being an glorified phonebook and started being an content platform.

That culture of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" gave rise to an atmosphere of fun that seems to be entirely missing today as everyone is too focused on the hustle of monetization and avoiding controversy to just do silly things.

Add to that that for some reason every large enterprise organization seems to have forgotten how to actually manage and use their own websites preferring instead to blast out using the new "everything for everyone" platforms.

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It's all fun until the parasites move in.

One of the magic bits of the earlier web(s) is that it was all new, participation involved an element of non-replicable self-selection, and the parasites hadn't had enough time to adapt and colonize it.

I'm not even sure if it's will be possible to have a community of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" in the future. It'll probably get swamped with AI generated garbage, like the crochet groups posted about a week or so ago. The human participants will get overwhelmed trying to figure out what's fake.

Honestly, like many kinds of forest, what the Web probably needs is a good burning, controlled or otherwise.

Yep -- early adopters saw it as just another way to communicate between humans, and didn't aggressively push the envelop on how much anonymity+reach could be abused. Gradually, that envelop got expanded and now we have well-capitalized influence operations (including advertisement) solely focused on exploiting the internet as much as possible for financial+political gain.

The same was true of Usenet, and of the internet in general before Eternal September. Usenet was absolutely glorious - until the spammers moved in. Then it became a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with killfiles, until the tide of spam turned it into a cesspool.

The basic problem: make it easy and cheap to participate, and the scam artists will inevitably gravitate to it, and eventually choke the life out of it. Add enough friction to discourage the spammers, and you drive away real users as well.

Older forums are still around, or the fediverse. If you're participating on them, you're part of the solution.

Not so sure it's all doom and gloom for "old internet". I still find plenty of spaces that feel like they're created purely for the love it it, there is just many orders of magnitude more crap you need to sift through. The people writing about interesting things compete with people who write as a form of personal branding, and these people aggressively measure engagement (You know the type).

I remember reading one of these blogs, and saw something like "You have an obligation to advertise your content to potential users", the very idea of which is genuinely insane. Imagine trying to run a banner ad linking to your blog. But, those are the people who will play the SEO game, and they're the people you'll find in the first 2 pages of search.

I agree with you but the fact that there is no good blog search engine out there shows you the state of the web that we are in right now. Nobody cares anymore for blogs and personal websites, everything is commercialized to the point that SEO is name of the game of the web today.

Kagi small web and Marginalia do a pretty good job. Even the regular Kagi search delivers smaller blogs in my results frequently that end up being very useful to resolve what I had searched for.

Perhaps there is some space for community projects that collect links to blogs and tag them and build a simple search for that. Does it perhaps exist?

Last time I searched on Google for some decent blog search engine I couldn't find one. People say Google Custom Search is good, you can also see Marginalia and Kagi getting mentioned a lot. I didn't try neither of them, well except Marginalia but I think Marginalia prefers text only search results but modern blogs are not text only. There was good HN blog search project[0] but it is dead now.

I think most probably blog search engine wouldn't be viable as a commercial product but some hobbyist can definitely pull it off. Good example is listennotes.com a hobbyist search engine for podcasts.

I had a decent idea for a blog search engine, I will try to pull it off if time and health serve me.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149

The web of today has evolved to a product placement platform. It's optimised for finding quick up-to-date reviews of the next laptop you're considering buying. Old content becomes irrelevant and flows to the sewage pipe into oblivion. Social media users are building their "personal brand" and value proposition to their next employer/business partner.

I've just finished reading Yanis Varoufakis' "Technofeudalism" and it was a much better read than I expected. I'm still unsure if his central thesis will materialise but he does make good points on how Big Tech basically transformed "Internet One" (the one we fondly remember from the 90s-early 2000s) into a internet of fiefdoms, where each Big Tech have tried to corner their own land to extract rent from.

It's the exact feeling I get from the internet today, we have lost the interesting content being put out in a decentralised manner, the quirky websites, the passionate community ones for product reviews (like DPReview), everything has become commercialised, lots of blogs are just fronts for some brand/company/individual trying to peddle their own brand through visibility.

It's just sad.

One of the last remaining remnants of this is the pirating community. Their work on cracking, emulation, system hacking and anonymity is such a wonderful place to make friends, push technology and just have fun. They still have that old school humour which made the internet so cool.

I'd say that video game modding and hacking communities have a similar vibe to them, as do fan created content sites and communities in general.

Probably in all causes because being unable to legally make money from your activities scares away folks that just want to cash in on the latest grift, and don't care a single damn about quality.

Video game mod sites are highly political. You can’t get away with anything that would have been fine in the year 2007.

There’s no debate any more, just banning and shadow banning. Forums used to be spicy! Now they are nothing but toxic positivity or bland nothingness.

There are still "spicy" fourms.

how do i get in there?

You don't. If you could, the FBI could. You would have to be introduced by a friend who's in it.

I think this is a consequence of elite takeover of the internet. The culture you describe still exists, but it's largely found in places considered unsavory and uncouth by mainstream organizations.

I‘ve always considered it to be exactly the other way round: in the old days of yore, the Internet was dominated by a certain kind of elite, and then the Endless September happened and commercialization followed.

It was dominated by an academic and intellectual elite somewhat detached from real world politics and economics, and was replaced by that political and economic elite.

I'd say there's been (at least) three overlapping generations: The academics (.edu email addresses), the geeky amateurs (dial-up internet), and the app users (the social media crowd).

Not trying to denigrate the third generation there, it's just that for them it's a mature product, like a TV or a car. They feel no need to tinker with what BigCorp is selling them.

Where do the aol users fit? Part of the early app crowd?

If I have to fit them to the model (which tbh I don't think bears close inspection) they're the vanguard of Generation 3. AOL was the first of the walled gardens. A proto-FaceGramTok.

> A proto-FaceGramTok

I love it. Though FaceTokGram rolls off the tongue easier.

Instead of overlapping generations, there's a gap of a whole generation of 'mainstream' internet users between the geeky amateurs/dial-up internet which arguably ceases being the dominant usecase already in mid-1990s before the dot.com boom starts due to this generation, and the app users which get seriously started only from around 2010.

Those users were large numbers of mainstream non-geeky people, but they used websites on desktop computers, not through the walled garden of facebook on a phone.

>> elite takeover of the internet.

Wasn't the internet solely the domain of the (techno) elite for a very long time? It's the masses that have wrecked what we had, the the "new" elite profiting off of them. Maybe the societal gains outweigh what we lost, but if you were part of the original elite 20+ years ago, you're now in a much worse place.

I wouldn’t consider academics and technologists to be the “elite” in a societal sense. I’m talking about the people that go to Ivy League schools and make up positions in top companies and government organizations.

For example: the New York Times ran an editorial in the 90s about how the internet would have a similar effect to fax machines. They are an elite organization and didn’t care about the internet much then. Now, twenty five years later, they do care a lot about what’s on the internet.

It’s like my options are go by an anonymous handle like CoolJeff9586 and be ignored or use my real name and risk cementing away any future prospects because I said Justin Bieber should die back in 2011…

Who would’ve thought using legal fucking names online would be bad

Smartphones ruined the web and are ruining life in general.

Smartphones are what you put into them. You don't have to spend every waking minute scrolling.

IMO, the unpleasantness of mobile web usage does a great job of discouraging me from walking around with my face buried in my phone. For me, the phone is more of a multi-purpose tool: camera, alarm clock, timer, calendar, weather radar, hotspot for my laptop, navigator, music player, etc. - and I don't care much to use it for random surfing. At most, I might look up something while I'm shopping.

Still, that single phone replaces a whole slew of single-purpose devices. Does it replace them perfectly? No, not at all, but my pockets only have so much room.

On the other hand, in Usenet days, a lot of people were coming in from fairly elite institutions (whether academia or companies) and they were absolutely using their True Names and institutional associations. There was a bifurcation between this and people who participated under handles that weren't obviously linked to discoverable account (which was more associated with BBSs early on).

> What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name

It seems that the society at large wants this. 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world. Reddit's reputation is improving hand in hand with the tightening of their content policies.

Their reputations are mediated by news sources, though. It's hard to know what's real and what's the result of 500 news articles gradually shading in emotional responses over these websites most people know little about.

> 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world.

That's because without any particular individuals to point the finger to, they just blame the monolith of "anonymous individuals".

People have always feared the unknown, and the obvious coping mechanism is to aggregate it into some tangible form, whether it's the Boogeyman, Baba Yaga, the Devil, Anonymous, or any other villain, to be used as a scapegoat.

Nah. 4chan's reputation is entirely deserved.

Nah. 4chan's reputation is entirely undeserved.

See? I can also make claims without any arguments whatsoever.

Yes, that's all you've been doing.

But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.) The Alfred E. Neuman shtick of disaffected bemusement was stale even when Mad was published on dead trees.

But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being neither clever nor insightful here.

> Yes, that's all you've been doing.

No, in the comment you've originally replied to I have clearly stated a possible explanation of why 4chan has a bad reputation. Please refrain from pointless "no u" comments, and attack my arguments instead.

> But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.)

4chan is not an entity onto itself - it is composed of many individuals, that was the whole point of my post. But because you don't know the identity of those individuals, you just consider them a monolith and put collective blame onto them.

Additionaly, the official rule 3. of 4chan states:

    You will not post any of the following outside /b/:
        [...]
        b. Racism
        [...]

> But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being neither clever nor insightful here.

Please refrain from personal insults. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

    When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

But you can still post racism inside /b/?

Yes.

On /b/, all legal (in the US) content is permitted. It serves as a sort of containment board for the degenerates to shitpost, leaving other boards alone. Nobody takes any content from /b/ seriously, and the nickname for /b/ users is "/b/tards".

In fact, /b/ is just a small part of 4chan, one that most users actually loathe, but which seems to be the most highlighted in public consciousness. Probably due to its complete lack of censorship, which seems to be frowned upon in this day and age.

> Nobody takes any content from /b/ seriously.

That's a bold claim. It requires a single counter-example to disprove. I take it seriously, so your statement is empirically wrong. Please retract it.

You are technically correct if we take the literal interpretation of my words, however, the literal interpretation is not the intended one. The intended interpretation is that no reasonable person takes /b/ seriously.

Perhaps you have some kind of impairment that prevents you from understanding subtleties of informal speech, but I think it's more likely you're just taking a piss.

> I take it seriously

Then you should check out the text under the title on /b/ :)

    The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
    Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.

Oh, you took me literally too! So weird!

What evidence would it take to change your mind?

I find your manner of discussion obnoxious, so I will refrain from replying to you anymore.

EDIT: you changed your reply to make it less obnoxious, but I won't come back to this discussion regardless.

That's funny. I'll be here still waiting on hearing which evidence will change your mind. :)

The other user is correct, your style of discussion is obnoxious, and is not contributing anything useful to the discussion.

What are you trying to achieve here, exactly? Did something trigger you to start behaving in this way?

The question, "What evidence would change your mind?" is perfectly reasonable.

It's a proxy for "Does your response to this topic involve trapped-priors?" Most people aren't willing to reveal or acknowledge they have trapped-priors and so it jumps to the end of the conversation where they simply leave. It's saves my time discussing topics by avoiding interactions with close-minded people.

Nobody intelligent. Where you fall on that spectrum is your problem.

> 4chan is not an entity onto itself - it is composed of many individuals

It, like every other community, has an aggregate identity built from the contributions of the individuals within the community.

> Additionaly, the official rule 3. of 4chan states [racism is only allowed in /b/]

If you honestly believe that /b/ is the only place on 4chan where you will find racist sentiment you need to have your head examined.

On the rest of 4chan outside of /b/, you'll find lots of racist comments. Particularly on /pol/, but there are plenty even ignoring that board. You can report particular posts for breaking the "racism outside of /b/" rule, but it's very hit-or-miss whether the rule is enforced.

Strictly speaking, “That is idiotic” does apply to the argument, as written in the quote. It’s not a personal insult, it’s a characterization of the quality of the argument.

I suppose the rules are trying to say that you should avoid such characterizations, but that’s a dubious rule.

Would it be ok to praise the quality of the argument? If so, it should be ok to criticize it as well. Not all arguments are as clear cut as 1+1=2, and there are other criteria by which arguments can be evaluated.

The purpose of the phrase "this is idiotic" isn't to inform, but to insult. It contains no useful information whatsoever.

> Would it be ok to praise the quality of the argument? If so, it should be ok to criticize it as well.

Why would the former imply the latter? It is ok to give gifts to people, but not to steal from them.

> It contains no useful information whatsoever.

It’s a claim about the nature of an argument. Do you believe it’s not possible for an argument to be idiotic?

> Why would the former imply the latter?

Because restricting speech that’s critical leads to a degradation of the quality of dialog.

Idiotic arguments exist. So do spurious arguments, disingenuous arguments, bad arguments, pointless arguments, dishonest arguments, and so on. Which of those adjectives would you like to ban when discussing the quality of an argument?

> It's a claim about the nature of an argument. Do you believe it's not possible for an argument to be idiotic?

No, I believe that an argument is either valid or invalid. Any other characteristic is meaningless in pursuit of truth.

Consider the meaning of the term "idiotic": something that only an idiot would say. Therefore, "that is idiotic" means "that is something that only an idiot would say", which in turn implies that the person saying it is an idiot.

> Idiotic arguments exist. So do spurious arguments, disingenuous arguments, bad arguments, pointless arguments, dishonest arguments, and so on. Which of those adjectives would you like to ban when discussing the quality of an argument?

The only one I'd like to ban is "idiotic", since it's the only one that insults the person. "Dishonest" is a little tricky, since it's hard to prove someone's intentions or honesty, but depending on the context it might be okay. All the other adjectives are only describing the quality of the argument, without insulting the person - and while meaningless by themselves (what does "bad argument" mean?), I'd consider them fine to be used, as long as further elaboration is included.

Some examples of other adjectives I'd ban are "retarded", "stupid", "foolish", "lazy", "malicious", since they all insult a person or imply bad motivations, without providing any information.

>user: krapp

>created: August 16, 2012

>karma: 16769

Dude, you need to take a hard look at yourself. Looking at your last comments, it seems that you've been drinking your own kool-aid and truly believe you have the objective truth about everything. It's either that or you're a keyboard warrior in desperate need for an ego boost.

If all you know about 4chan is /b/ and /pol/ then your opinion is valid, but there are lots of other boards there. In any case I find it useful to see at times what the most opinionated people are really thinking when there are no filters and rules to silence them. Like Isaac Asimov said: "Any book worth banning is a book worth reading." And at times "the worst kind of people" there are spot on in their obsessions. I 100% agree with them that child and human trafficking is a big issue in this world and some of the most powerful people are definitely involved.

> what the most opinionated people are really thinking when there are no filters and rules to silence them

I'm not sure what "most opinionated" would mean or how'd you determine relative levels, but I would bet whatever metric you chose wouldn't find the most opinionated people on 4chan. Also just because people say things online doesn't mean they actually hold that opinion.

> I 100% agree with them that child and human trafficking is a big issue in this world and some of the most powerful people are definitely involved

Oh, ok, you weren't actually responding to the parent comment at all.

The thing is, everyone already knew that child and human trafficking is a big issue in this world. No one needed to wade through the cesspool to find that out. But 4chan doesn't actually give a damn about the kids. They got obsessed with phantom sex cults under pizzerias and decoding gematria in emails because they wanted to undermine Hillary Clinton's election and because they got completely washed by actual non-ironic nazis who believe all "leftists" in power (IE the Democratic Party) are pedophiles because they equate LGBT with pedophilia and, by extension, Democratic support for the former with a likely predilection for the other.

And then they came up with QAnon, not out of any sincere concern for "the children," but just as a shitpost that took off because it was too on the nose, and now legitimate efforts to curb child abuse are being hamstrung by this insane obsession they've bred into the zeitgeist to see trans people as "groomers" and secret pedo conspiracies everywhere.

And yet, even though they'll gladly take credit for it, none of them saw Epstein coming. Sure, one anon posted about Epstein's death before it hit the news. That's about all they can legitimately take credit for, but overall they've done more harm than good.

> 4chan doesn't actually give a damn about the kids.

> they got

> they wanted

> they equate

> and then they

> they'll gladly take credit

4chan is not a person, or even a coherent population.

You want the world to be simple, but it's not, even if, apparently, you never had in your life to face the fact.

Which variety of wojak spam do you find most insightful?

> You're being neither clever nor insightful here.

If only you’d considered this yourself before posting.

I think communities attract types of folks unless they become uber popular (like reddit) to the point they can attract everyone. 4chan was interesting when I found it, but I quickly found it became mostly toilet humor at its best, and was often (i.e. every time I opened it) full of racism and sexism. It was a safe place for immature folks to shout whatever they wanted and not care who it affected -- though of course anyone affected likely ditched the cesspool anyways. Yet, as I watched one of my friends continue to use it, I don't think it was pure coincidence that their own verbiage became increasingly vulgar and desensitized. As some of my friends matured as they grew up, I found he went the opposite direction (at least in online messaging).

> It was a safe place for immature folks to shout whatever they wanted and not care who it affected

It is sad that the popularity of internet has reached such proportions that people are no longer responsible for what they read by their own choice, but rather people seem to be responsible for what they write, regardless of the fact that anyone can choose not to read it.

Internet posts are just text, yet people act as if we're forcing others to read what we write. Imagine if writing books that make other people feel bad was banned - what a culture would that be.

"Internet posts are just text, yet people act as if we're forcing others to read what we write. Imagine if writing books that make other people feel bad was banned - what a culture would that be."

Between death threats and insults directed at real people - and a fictionary book, there is usually a difference, even though books can be bad as well, if they are directed against certain people (e.g. Mein Kampf).

Arguably, there have been a good number of wars (ostensibly) over books (in particular religious texts seem to do the trick), whereas we are yet to declare war over any form of web content.

People tried the latter a number of times already. Then the activism at US unis happened; first, about a decade or a bit more ago, lefties not only stuffed books with trigger warnings, but fought (and in a few cases successfully) for books to be banned from universities because they made them feel "unwell". Then, as if copying them, right-wingers tried the same in recent years. It's a shit culture, that's what.

But those are platforms, for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds rather then people sharing spaces on a single platform.

There was always an underground of filth(even in the pre-internet days) but unless you sought it out you werent actually exposed to it back in the pre-platform days.

It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).

>It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).

This is so true; on every internet forum or community, there are different moderators, rules and values for the community and on the Facebook for example there is only Facebook and its TOS. You are in the mercy of the Facebook when it comes to the content moderation and setting rules and values for the community.

Facebook has user-run groups, so there are at least 3 levels of moderation/rules there:

  1. National law
  2. Facebook TOS  
  3. Group rules

But the legislative power, to to speak, at the group level is quite weak. They can further restrict according to some values, which is fine as it is. Freedom of association. They can't control the UI.

>for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds

Eh this kind of discounts how the entire world has changed between now and then.

At one point online was something disconnected from who you were as in IRL identity. Really very few people posted back then (think tens of millions verses billions across the world). When you hung your modem up, that the online world and the real world were disconnected.

That seperated world no longer exists for any number of reasons caused by any number of actors. The real world affects the internet and the internet affects the real world, these are no longer separate entities, but things that are intertwined by billions of connected devices and sensors almost everywhere.

Quite often in the past middle sized sites got blasted by DOS attacks, and if your own small forum got a DOS/DDOS you could suffer some problems. Now, you don't even need an attacker to DOS most small sites, it's pretty damned easy to get search engines trying to index your site to take it off line, or for just random bots to be 99% of your traffic. People moved to big sites to avoid having to be said system administrators from all the crap that moved into the net.

It's simply that platforms are more convenient. Most bloggers never got a comment that wasn't spam, but platforms make it easier to find an audience. Platforms (if they're big enough) make it easier to find content relevant to your interests than webrings or link aggregators ever did. Most people don't want to learn how to hand-code HTML and run a server just to express themselves or communicate on the web. Curation is also a plus, but framing that as "wanting censorship" is disingenuous. What people want is stability and predictability.

It also doesn't really lead to a blandification of content. The quality of content on the web now is higher than its ever been. The value gained by being able to publish nearly effortlessly to the web without being a tech nerd is outweighed by the value lost in not being able to put a skull playing a trumpet in a site header.

There were plenty of ways to have a website without writing any HTML and without running your own server even 20 years ago.

In my eyes, reddit is the same trash it's always been. Yes, you can find decent specialized subs here and there but, even then, you have to weed through the trash to get a decent response and keep a thick skin from those who are only there to put you down to make them feel better about themselves.

And that's never going away.

From 2006 when I joined until maybe just after Obama (2009 or 2010, not sure? maybe as late as 2011) it was the best ever. Like HN on roids. Better than Slashdot that came before it, which was already a junk site by that point, larger than K5. Then it ate every internet forum ever, and turned into this weird authoritarian pervert Myspace thing.

Now it's not even a website, but a phone app. I hesitate to click on reddit links unless they're old.* prefixed.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

If you have a Reddit account, you can opt out of the New Reddit design, so Old Reddit is displayed without the link needing to be prefixed with "old.*".

This is an issue of connectivity. Some cultures cannot survive exposure to the world-at-large, and 4chan was one of them.

I'm not sure I want to be part of "society at large", although I admit it doesn't seem optional. The establishment of the monoculture has gotten rid of a lot of good in the world (just try finding somewhere to visit without a mcdonalds).

the pseudo-anonymous amateur communties still exist. but they're private and invite-only, because a public community that allows anonymous posting becomes a cesspit of toxic behaviour, or else requires so much content moderation that the only feasible way to do it is automated recommendation algorithms. (invite-only phpbb forums of old still exist, but the modern equivalent invite-only community is the group chat)

without the threat of "we'll kick you out and you'll never be able to get back in", these sort of communities don't work. there's just too many assholes on the internet now.

X/Twitter still supports anonymous accounts right?

If you provide your phone number for security and your credit card number for verification of humanity, sure.

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