If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?
No wrong answers — I'm working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.
@molly0xfff I mostly miss two things: The pre-#EternalSeptember#Usenet where many people gave polite, well-considered long-form answers (Some of that still exists in some groups, but most are dead, which is at least better than riddled with shit, as they were until Google Groups defederated) and the trolls were easily plonked. The #Fediverse is as close to that as you can get nowadays, though it still feels very rushed. 1/3
I am, like many others here, a refugee from other social media sites. In my case, it all started way back in 1990 when I did the #OU DT200 information technology course. This gave me access to their CoSy based conferencing system. From there I explored various #BBSs before joining #CIX. From there I migrated to #Facebook and #Twitter via #Usenet.
It seems like the people responding to this poll (so far) skew towards those who experienced the Internet in the 1990s and earlier.
Which might suggest there are a lot of people on the #Fediverse that not only remember the #oldInternet , but might want to support, bring back, and re-create & restore the best parts of the "old Internet".
How do you keep small independent communities both small and interesting?
-- pixl97 @ HN
One inspiration I've had comes from thinking about intentional communities --- communes, utopian towns, and the like. The thought occurred some years back that amongst the most successful intentional communities are college towns. These are, hands down, some of the best places to live, and certainly on a per-population basis, in the US and Canada, based on a wide range of measures (though housing costs tend to be higher than surrounding areas).
There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite small towns to be found around the world, though the US might be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or college. Some public, some private (though virtually all benefit by public financing of research or student aid / loans).
These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns, even for relatively small schools.
As to what makes these tick ... I don't have any solid evidence, but I've a few theories:
There are a number of associated populations for the institutions, with widely varying residency periods. Students pass through in 2-8 years typically (net of transfers, drop outs, extended undergraduate programmes, a/k/a "five year" and "six year" plans, and graduate / professional programmes). Faculty tend to remain much longer, often much of their professional career (40+ years). Alumni may settle in the region (though most do not). And there is the "town" (vs. "gown") component, which may be sympathetic, adversarial, or a mix of both --- residents of the community who are not directly affiliated with the university. (Instances of town-gown conflict, including actual armed battle and shooting wars, date back to mediaeval times, e.g. the St. Scholastica Day riot of 10 Feb 1355.)
The school itself has a central organising principle and mission, which many other intentional communities lack.
The school has associations with other institutions, organisations, and agencies, some of higher learning, many not, and tends to form strong relationships with government, business, cultural, and religious sectors.
Since the 19th century, official government recognition of the significance of both higher education and research has resulted in an increasing degree of official sanction and financial support, initially the German Humboldtian model, technical schools (e.g., M.I.T., founded in 1861 in large part to support the U.S. Navy's newfound interest in steam propulsion), land grant universities (organised in the US under national acts of 1862 & 1890), and the modern research university (largely spawned by the Manhattan Project and Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) and formation of the US National Science Foundation, and widely emulated in other countries). In the UK there is a distinction made between the Ancient Universities (Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin), the Red Brick Universities, chartered in the 19th century, the Plate Glass Universities, chartered between 1963 & 1992, and ... whatever comes after. See: https://www.ukuni.net/articles/types-uk-universities.
Note that universities themselves don't necessarily make money directly (through tuition), though some are extraordinarily wealthy (e.g., Harvard ($50 billion), Yale ($40 billion), Stanford ($38 billion), Princeton ($35 billion), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment). Those funds tend to come from grants (both government and privately-funded research), alumni donations, and increasingly technology licensing. In the case of Stanford, real estate is a massive contributor. Schools often also benefit from tax breaks and other legislative relief and exemptions.
So, you say, that's really interesting, dred, but how do you translate that to online communities, especially those for which locality and location are not central elements, as they are for brick-and-mortar institutions.
I don't know, though ... I've been pondering just that for a decade or so.
The insight does suggest a few solution-shaped objects and/or characteristics, however:
A key failing of venerable fora is that the membership often becomes exceedingly stale. Not only do new members fail to arrive, but the more interesting and dynamic members of the old guard often leave as both the noise floor rises and the clue ceiling drops. Reward for participation simply decreases. Universities subvert this by pumping fresh students through. I suspect HN's YC affiliation and fresh founder classes in part aids HN in this regard.
A forum is almost certainly not a freestanding enterprise but an adjunct to another institution or set of institutions. Again, HN serves, but does not profit, YC.
Universities are mission rather than profit driven, and both teaching and research are a key element of that mission. This ... plays poorly with the notion of a VC-funded online community start-up. Ezra Klein in a podcast on media earlier this year noted that a key challenge in organising new ventures is that the profit motive and VC / investor interests tend to conflict strongly with journalism's prerogatives.[1]
Several of the most successful previous online communities formed either directly through or closely affiliated with educational institutions. The Internet itself, email, and Usenet directly, Facebook originated on the campus (and with the student body) of the most selective-admission university in the world, and I'd argue that Slashdot's early tech-centric membership was at least strongly academic-adjacent.
Universities are focused not only on the present moment, that is, streams, but on accumulated wisdom and knowledge. Here, HN is less a model than, say, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, in which something of a community forms through the editor community which creates (and fights over) the informational resources being created. Wikipedia doesn't quite have a social network, though various discussion pages and sections approach this.
On the "small" bit, there's both a selective-admissions and graduation element that academia shows. That is, you don't just let anybody in, and, after they've "completed the course", they're graduated and moved on, with the exception, again, of faculty and staff. Just how that translates to an online community I'm not entirely sure.
Another element of the "small" bit is that universities are organised: into colleges (that is, interest areas), departments (specific faculty), courses (specific topics of study or interest) and sections, that is, specific groups or meetings of students for lecture and/or discussion. Individual class size is a key dynamic, and much of the experience of the past 75 years or so shows the challenges of scaling lectures and the profoundly different characteristics of a small seminar (say, 5--15 students), a modest upper-division class (25--30), and moderate-to-large lectures (50 -- 1,000 or more students). Strong interactivity is sharply curtailed above about 15 students, and the options for interactivity above about 50--100 are near nil. Choosing how groups are organised, who's permitted in, and what size limits exist, as well as communications between various divisions (sections, courses, departments, colleges, universities) all come into play, as I see it.
And then there's politics. One of the notorious elements of universities is how various divisions rival amongst one another, gatekeep, define what is in (or out) of a specific discipline's remit, resist challenging new concepts, and form cliques and fads ... just like any human domain, only more so. I have a nagging suspicion that online communities might in fact have similar tendencies, and that these would also have to be subverted somewhat to avoid pathological development.
There are a whole slew of other factors --- techical capabilities, UI/UX, online abuse, legal issues, privacy and identity, spam, propaganda, surveillance, censorship, etc. So many dumb ways to die.
"How the $5500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-tim-hwang.html Which is to say: unless you're planning a pure-play advertising monetisation model, which is to say, the Sidam Touch (advertising turns everything to shit), you won't get funding.
⎧ User Experience matters. That's why Usenet lost. It was hard to set up, there was a ton of terminology to learn, sticky posts with group etiquette didn't exist, trolls and grieffers couldn't be moderated away, and the whole thing looked like a 1990s shareware accountancy package ⎭
My article on long-term perspectives of important information on the web gained additional momentum (and great reading rates) with the self-inflicted demise of #reddit:
I did it with #Facebook. I did it with #Twitter. I just did it with #Reddit. Tossed it into the bin and walked away.
Sad but not regretting it.
In my ideal world #Usenet would be revived (handwavy motion) as an #ActivityPub application. I like #Mastadon a lot but I'm missing long-form articles and topic-identified feeds.
Pour répondre à ces deux questions, je n’ai qu’à recopier le texte de présentation de mon profil. 😉
« J’ai vu de la lumière, alors je suis entré.
J’ai rencontré des gens sympas, alors je suis resté. »
Je suis arrivé ici en septembre 2020, et ma seule expérience de réseau-socialisation était #Usenet (où j’ai aussi rencontré des gens sympas, et où je suis aussi resté).
I wonder if I can just go ahead and make the book fullly available at this point. It earns O'Reilly next to nothing I'm sure, but may be helpful to some who are now building what was once called groupware.
It had its high time approx. 90s to mid 00s. I very much enjoyed it.
It ticks all the boxes when it comes to #federation and freedom of interface: a number of web-based services, CLI tools like #slrn (mine), #Thunderbird and other GUI-tools.
#This is my #introduction post, Sharkey edition (it's basically the same one as I posted when I joined mastodon.me.uk).
I am, like many others here, a refugee from other social media sites. In my case, it all started way back in 1990 when I did the #OU DT200 information technology course. This gave me access to their CoSy based conferencing system. From there I explored various #BBSs before joining #CIX. From there I migrated to #Facebook and #Twitter via #Usenet and alt newsgroups.
My posts are likely to cover a variety of areas such as: #Cats, #Photography, #Cooking and #Running. Now that I've got a few more characters to play with I may also post the occasional #rant.
3D illustration for a 2006 issue of the Dutch ComputerTotaal magazine, about the SABNZBD tool, which was (is?) much-used for concatenating multi-part downloads from Usenet newsgroups.
in a bit of the usual #usenet humor, the hottest topic to discuss on usenet right now seems to be toast. someone created a free.toast group just a few days ago, and now everyone is discussing that topic into the smallest details
Time to kill off one of my oldest subscriptions. Have been using a paid #Usenet provider for nearly 20 years. About 5-6 years ago I could upgrade to a yearly subscription for a big discount (compared to the prices they would introduce shortly after). But I haven't really used Usenet for anything at all in the last years.
Somehow cancelling the subscription gives me FOMO for some reason. Can never get it back for that price again. But then again, why would I want Usenet access again...
I knew that IMDb had been around a long time but TIL it predates the World Wide Web, as it was initially launched as Usenet group rec.arts.movies in 1990 and moved to the web in 1993. And it's been owned by Amazon since 1998, because of course it has 🙄
still working on the #uucp setup we were doing two weeks ago. I think I am getting to the point where my newsserver is peering with another server over uucp to bring #usenet into our private uucp network.