Call Mr Fix IT
October 18, 2023 12:42 PM Subscribe
How to Fix The Internet "We’re in a very strange moment for the internet. We all know it’s broken. That’s not news. But there’s something in the air—a vibe shift, a sense that things are about to change. For the first time in years, it feels as though something truly new and different might be happening with the way we communicate online. The stranglehold that the big social platforms have had on us for the last decade is weakening. The question is: What do we want to come next?"
Featuring advice from Metafilter's own:
Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur and blogging pioneer who worked at SixApart, the company that developed the blog software Movable Type, remembers a backlash when his company started charging for its services in the mid-’00s. “People were like, ‘You’re charging money for something on the internet? That’s disgusting!’” he told MIT Technology Review. “The shift from that to, like, If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product … I think if we had come up with that phrase sooner, then the whole thing would have been different. The whole social media era would have been different.”
Featuring advice from Metafilter's own:
Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur and blogging pioneer who worked at SixApart, the company that developed the blog software Movable Type, remembers a backlash when his company started charging for its services in the mid-’00s. “People were like, ‘You’re charging money for something on the internet? That’s disgusting!’” he told MIT Technology Review. “The shift from that to, like, If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product … I think if we had come up with that phrase sooner, then the whole thing would have been different. The whole social media era would have been different.”
I can hate two things.
posted by box at 1:07 PM on October 18, 2023 [127 favorites]
posted by box at 1:07 PM on October 18, 2023 [127 favorites]
Sometimes I've hated as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:11 PM on October 18, 2023 [76 favorites]
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:11 PM on October 18, 2023 [76 favorites]
The idea that we could have avoided all of this if we had just paid for platforms rather than rely on ads is false: the corporations would have just added ads in anyway. They already do this with streaming services: you pay because you don't want ads, and then they put ads back in unless you pay more.
Why would capitalists leave money on the table?
As technology gets better at behavioral surveillance, they get a more and more granular idea of the level of pain they can bring and how fast they can increase the temperature of the pot without making users leave.
posted by AlSweigart at 1:11 PM on October 18, 2023 [98 favorites]
Why would capitalists leave money on the table?
As technology gets better at behavioral surveillance, they get a more and more granular idea of the level of pain they can bring and how fast they can increase the temperature of the pot without making users leave.
posted by AlSweigart at 1:11 PM on October 18, 2023 [98 favorites]
Al i was just coming here to say that lol, just so many clicks to get to what i might mildly care about
posted by Sebmojo at 1:14 PM on October 18, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Sebmojo at 1:14 PM on October 18, 2023 [4 favorites]
>The idea that we could have avoided all of this if we had just paid for platforms rather than rely on ads is false: the corporations would have just added ads in anyway.
See cable tv from the 80s to today
posted by Xoder at 1:15 PM on October 18, 2023 [22 favorites]
See cable tv from the 80s to today
posted by Xoder at 1:15 PM on October 18, 2023 [22 favorites]
The idea that we could have avoided all of this if we had just paid for platforms rather than rely on ads is false: the corporations would have just added ads in anyway.
On some level I wish we'd have never left the era of self-hosting ["self-hosting", as often you were paying an ISP for disk space] and web rings and stuff like that.
I mean, is it really wise to rely on an entirely profit-driven third party to serve as the location for the content that you want to share about your life and possibly as an archive thereof? If, at any point, that entity's bottom line comes into any kind of danger, the cure for which would be the sacrifice of your data, that data will be sacrificed to save the hosting entity, even if it is no longer hosting that. Just ask Batgirl, et al.
I don't have a good answer for how to solve these problems. Not everyone can afford to host themselves online forever. On some level, if you really want anything you create to last, you have to have it in book or physical media form of some sort. Even CDs and DVDs are questionable, due to their layered media short life-span.
If "freedom of the press" is to be taken literally in this digital day and age, then the only true freedom is owning your own internet node that you're feeding directly into the internet from your own house. And even then, you're relying on a power supply being available all across the lines upon which your data might travel.
I do own plans for a simple platen press that I keep on my bookshelf. That might valuable knowledge someday before I die.
posted by hippybear at 1:41 PM on October 18, 2023 [5 favorites]
On some level I wish we'd have never left the era of self-hosting ["self-hosting", as often you were paying an ISP for disk space] and web rings and stuff like that.
I mean, is it really wise to rely on an entirely profit-driven third party to serve as the location for the content that you want to share about your life and possibly as an archive thereof? If, at any point, that entity's bottom line comes into any kind of danger, the cure for which would be the sacrifice of your data, that data will be sacrificed to save the hosting entity, even if it is no longer hosting that. Just ask Batgirl, et al.
I don't have a good answer for how to solve these problems. Not everyone can afford to host themselves online forever. On some level, if you really want anything you create to last, you have to have it in book or physical media form of some sort. Even CDs and DVDs are questionable, due to their layered media short life-span.
If "freedom of the press" is to be taken literally in this digital day and age, then the only true freedom is owning your own internet node that you're feeding directly into the internet from your own house. And even then, you're relying on a power supply being available all across the lines upon which your data might travel.
I do own plans for a simple platen press that I keep on my bookshelf. That might valuable knowledge someday before I die.
posted by hippybear at 1:41 PM on October 18, 2023 [5 favorites]
The question is: What do we want to come next?
We are ahead of the curve!
posted by Meatbomb at 1:51 PM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]
We are ahead of the curve!
posted by Meatbomb at 1:51 PM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]
the corporations would have just added ads in anyway.
I am old enough to remember the early days of cable TV, when there were no ads because you were already paying for the programming. Bravo? Ad-free. Discovery? No ads. I know it sounds like weird utopian sci-fi to the kids nowadays, but it was so good, you guys.
Anyway, it happened to that, and now it's happened to this. What will it happen to next?
Do you know what Bravo used to show? Ballet. Sometime opera. I'm not even making this up! It actually happened!
posted by phooky at 2:32 PM on October 18, 2023 [34 favorites]
I am old enough to remember the early days of cable TV, when there were no ads because you were already paying for the programming. Bravo? Ad-free. Discovery? No ads. I know it sounds like weird utopian sci-fi to the kids nowadays, but it was so good, you guys.
Anyway, it happened to that, and now it's happened to this. What will it happen to next?
Do you know what Bravo used to show? Ballet. Sometime opera. I'm not even making this up! It actually happened!
posted by phooky at 2:32 PM on October 18, 2023 [34 favorites]
Thought this would be a link to Cory Doctorow's DEF CON 31 speech
"An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification"
Takes him a while (he explains enshittification) to get to a path to a solution but he does get there.
posted by shenkerism at 2:32 PM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]
"An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification"
Takes him a while (he explains enshittification) to get to a path to a solution but he does get there.
posted by shenkerism at 2:32 PM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]
AMC at one point was an ad-free classic movie channel that rivaled Turner Classic Movies. Chew on THAT!
posted by hippybear at 2:34 PM on October 18, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 2:34 PM on October 18, 2023 [7 favorites]
I'm a firm believer in the opposite of whatever Anil Dash says.
posted by dobbs at 2:35 PM on October 18, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by dobbs at 2:35 PM on October 18, 2023 [10 favorites]
Anil invented the professional white interface and non-fungible tokens so I'd say he's 0 for 2 so far.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:37 PM on October 18, 2023 [23 favorites]
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:37 PM on October 18, 2023 [23 favorites]
On some level I wish we'd have never left the era of self-hosting ["self-hosting", as often you were paying an ISP for disk space] and web rings and stuff like that.
I mean, that's what Mastodon is, right?
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:41 PM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]
I mean, that's what Mastodon is, right?
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:41 PM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]
“ AMC at one point was an ad-free classic movie channel that rivaled Turner Classic Movies. Chew on THAT!”
HBO was… yes there was a thing called HBO, it came into the house through this little tube you hooked up to the TV, they called it “coax” or something.
Ah the good old days
posted by cybrcamper at 2:48 PM on October 18, 2023
HBO was… yes there was a thing called HBO, it came into the house through this little tube you hooked up to the TV, they called it “coax” or something.
Ah the good old days
posted by cybrcamper at 2:48 PM on October 18, 2023
Mastodon isn't self-hosting unless you're the one running the instance. And even then it doesn't feel like self-hosting; I have a Wordpress site for my own stuff with a cobweb-strewn blog and it's a very different vibe from posting stuff on the Mastodon I run for myself and some of my friends.
It is somewhere between "on a corporate hellsite" and "on my own site"; it kinda feels at about the same point as "I run a BBS" though I never actually did that myself.
posted by egypturnash at 2:49 PM on October 18, 2023 [10 favorites]
It is somewhere between "on a corporate hellsite" and "on my own site"; it kinda feels at about the same point as "I run a BBS" though I never actually did that myself.
posted by egypturnash at 2:49 PM on October 18, 2023 [10 favorites]
We still have HBO! It's part of our DISH subscription.
I mean, it might be called MAX now? I haven't checked. But we're still paying for an ad-free movie channel, actually a family of channels, that we get through our television subscription service.
posted by hippybear at 2:50 PM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]
I mean, it might be called MAX now? I haven't checked. But we're still paying for an ad-free movie channel, actually a family of channels, that we get through our television subscription service.
posted by hippybear at 2:50 PM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]
it kinda feels at about the same point as "I run a BBS" though I never actually did that myself.
FidoNet is the new Fedi.
posted by hippybear at 2:51 PM on October 18, 2023 [10 favorites]
FidoNet is the new Fedi.
posted by hippybear at 2:51 PM on October 18, 2023 [10 favorites]
I turned 50 this year, and I find myself gradually withdrawing from the online and media worlds as much as possible because most of it feels like a expensive scam I don't even enjoy. Cable, long gone. Streaming services, down to three (Criterion, Kanopy and Tubi, the last two of which are free). Social media, down to one (Instagram, and it's hanging by a thread). Internet sites I comment on? This one, off and on. When I'm at home I mostly read paper books and magazines, listen to CDs and vinyl records or watch movies on DVD. Not because I'm a luddite or (I hope) an insufferable hipster, but because I can do most of these things without having to sign up for an account, juggle subscriptions, sit through/reject ads, worry about being spied on while doing these things, have the experience impacted by internet glitches or outages, etc.. It's just simpler and more relaxing.
posted by The Card Cheat at 2:52 PM on October 18, 2023 [44 favorites]
posted by The Card Cheat at 2:52 PM on October 18, 2023 [44 favorites]
Okay, The Card Cheat, that's fair and while those aren't my choices, I celebrate you doing those things for yourself.
But don't miss out of Olivia Rodrigo. She's great, and is one of the few young artists who seems to be resonating across generations right now.
posted by hippybear at 2:55 PM on October 18, 2023 [6 favorites]
But don't miss out of Olivia Rodrigo. She's great, and is one of the few young artists who seems to be resonating across generations right now.
posted by hippybear at 2:55 PM on October 18, 2023 [6 favorites]
I would like to add, in the wake of hippybear's comment, that by no means did I mean to imply that my way is the best or only way, it's just what seems to work best for me. To each their own, forever and ever!
posted by The Card Cheat at 3:01 PM on October 18, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by The Card Cheat at 3:01 PM on October 18, 2023 [5 favorites]
See, it's the kind of knives-out no-holds-barred hostility on the internet (as exemplified by the flame war between hippybear and The Card Cheat) that has me considering canceling my Internet subscription altogether.
(Just kidding, obviously, but MF is about the only place I actually engage with people any more.)
posted by Ickster at 3:09 PM on October 18, 2023 [18 favorites]
(Just kidding, obviously, but MF is about the only place I actually engage with people any more.)
posted by Ickster at 3:09 PM on October 18, 2023 [18 favorites]
I danced in web 1.0. And I left web programming and system admin work when someone pitched "smell on the internet". I was back at it by the time web 2.0 hit the marketing stream of flotsamless jetsam and worked just long enough to hear "we need to get smell on the internet" and yet again watched from a safe distance while that market SCRUMed itself to death.
I sit comfortably, unemployable in that market these days, awaiting the next clarion doom signal to digital nasality.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 3:09 PM on October 18, 2023 [9 favorites]
I sit comfortably, unemployable in that market these days, awaiting the next clarion doom signal to digital nasality.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 3:09 PM on October 18, 2023 [9 favorites]
I didn't know I was in a flame war, but all I know is I can't abide this and I need to get him back.
posted by hippybear at 3:13 PM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 3:13 PM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]
Headphone warning on hippys song. The volume escalated aggressively there and hurt my ears. Thanks, shitty Internet. (For real though, do lower your volume a bit)
posted by Jacen at 3:29 PM on October 18, 2023
posted by Jacen at 3:29 PM on October 18, 2023
Metafilter: Awaiting the next clarion doom signal to digital nasality.
Here is my usual obtrusive reminder that Metafilter has an unofficial Mastodon server at mefi.social, and if you want an account there send a MeMail about it to Pronoiac!
posted by JHarris at 3:43 PM on October 18, 2023 [13 favorites]
Here is my usual obtrusive reminder that Metafilter has an unofficial Mastodon server at mefi.social, and if you want an account there send a MeMail about it to Pronoiac!
posted by JHarris at 3:43 PM on October 18, 2023 [13 favorites]
Also, "clarion doom signal to digital nasality" would be a good username.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:51 PM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:51 PM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]
When we talk about fixing the internet, we’re not referring to the physical and digital network infrastructure: the protocols, the exchanges, the cables, and even the satellites themselves are mostly okay.
99% of internet protocols are maintained by very lowly paid entirely volunteer people who occasionally come together to issue RFCs and guidance that people only kinda follow and now with corporatized, intellectual propertied things like APIs becoming mainstream their at-least-pro-social influence is even less (the APIs and things themselves buoyed by freeish libraries that have also become increasingly corporatized and platform-theistic)
on a technical level, the internet will be and has been driven to cheap, easily accessible, integration-for-the-sake-of-data-collection focused 'innovations' which, like everything else capitalism touches, means a bunch of cool sounding superficial toys that drive revenue being strapped to half-century-old protocols that kind of work and kind of are really great arguments for government intervention and standardization
so people much smarter and more powerful than me should probably talk about that sometime and stop just taking it for granted but hey, we don't reach TechCrunch for boring technical stuff right
separately, I do think TC has an extremely good point that's hella buried:
But online advertising demands attention above all else, and it has ultimately enabled and nurtured all the worst of the worst kinds of stuff.
I don't think this is, of course, the fault of the internet. I think you could probably talk about how schools in the US are intended to train an uncritical, easily exploitable labor force and how this avers itself from any kind of systems thinking or analysis. you could also talk about media writ large, how yellow journalism is pretty much our new normal because it means eyes on ads and the internet and the just piss poor media literacy that's present on it is all but a reflection of those forces
but I do think it's worth thinking specifically about how engagement on the internet is so much more insidious - how like with the dings and notifications of phone games, there are UX decisions made specifically because they psychologically condition you to want to engage longer and more intensely - a red notification triggering measurable dopamine releases, likes and comments and favorites totaled and creeping up as concrete measures of social validation or not, algorithms trained on what holds your specific attention that then show ads based on this training. this manipulation for the purposes of $$ is actively harmful and I think it's led to antisocial traits and unhealthy behaviors on a population-wide level, behaviors we're all participant in and even sometimes have names for like doom-scrolling
and I don't think me dropping $10 monthly in a Patreon for my favorite content creators is going to fix, you know, all of the above. I think it will require regulation and standardization, as per above, because these fucking corpos really do not value the social good on anything but a superficial level and they're the ones that literally own all the servers and public forums
and now that we're like a decade and change deep into a post-Citizen's United reality this is just all very super unlikely to happen so all you can and should do is to make the community you want to see with the people you are close to and build and share shelter as well as you can in the face of, again, all of the above. bc wtf else can you do lol
posted by paimapi at 5:18 PM on October 18, 2023 [10 favorites]
99% of internet protocols are maintained by very lowly paid entirely volunteer people who occasionally come together to issue RFCs and guidance that people only kinda follow and now with corporatized, intellectual propertied things like APIs becoming mainstream their at-least-pro-social influence is even less (the APIs and things themselves buoyed by freeish libraries that have also become increasingly corporatized and platform-theistic)
on a technical level, the internet will be and has been driven to cheap, easily accessible, integration-for-the-sake-of-data-collection focused 'innovations' which, like everything else capitalism touches, means a bunch of cool sounding superficial toys that drive revenue being strapped to half-century-old protocols that kind of work and kind of are really great arguments for government intervention and standardization
so people much smarter and more powerful than me should probably talk about that sometime and stop just taking it for granted but hey, we don't reach TechCrunch for boring technical stuff right
separately, I do think TC has an extremely good point that's hella buried:
But online advertising demands attention above all else, and it has ultimately enabled and nurtured all the worst of the worst kinds of stuff.
I don't think this is, of course, the fault of the internet. I think you could probably talk about how schools in the US are intended to train an uncritical, easily exploitable labor force and how this avers itself from any kind of systems thinking or analysis. you could also talk about media writ large, how yellow journalism is pretty much our new normal because it means eyes on ads and the internet and the just piss poor media literacy that's present on it is all but a reflection of those forces
but I do think it's worth thinking specifically about how engagement on the internet is so much more insidious - how like with the dings and notifications of phone games, there are UX decisions made specifically because they psychologically condition you to want to engage longer and more intensely - a red notification triggering measurable dopamine releases, likes and comments and favorites totaled and creeping up as concrete measures of social validation or not, algorithms trained on what holds your specific attention that then show ads based on this training. this manipulation for the purposes of $$ is actively harmful and I think it's led to antisocial traits and unhealthy behaviors on a population-wide level, behaviors we're all participant in and even sometimes have names for like doom-scrolling
and I don't think me dropping $10 monthly in a Patreon for my favorite content creators is going to fix, you know, all of the above. I think it will require regulation and standardization, as per above, because these fucking corpos really do not value the social good on anything but a superficial level and they're the ones that literally own all the servers and public forums
and now that we're like a decade and change deep into a post-Citizen's United reality this is just all very super unlikely to happen so all you can and should do is to make the community you want to see with the people you are close to and build and share shelter as well as you can in the face of, again, all of the above. bc wtf else can you do lol
posted by paimapi at 5:18 PM on October 18, 2023 [10 favorites]
I've long been a proponent of "own your own content", and people have been shocked and amazed at how high my MeFi number is, because of how long I held out (I think it was the memorial thread for The Brad that got me to finally sign up). I've been blogging for over 25 years, at the same URL. I have, at times, taken advertising. I had to write code to include that in my blogging system, and it came in the form of a clearly marked link with
All this to say that I believed in the personal Internet. I've kept in touch with people I met online in the BBS era. I have two Slack things I keep open on my desktop, one for work, and one for a group of early weblog folks who've stayed in touch even as our blogs have waned. I think I'm the only one still publishing regularly at the original URL. I have people I've met through the blog that I only know how to reach through the blog.
And, regularly and increasingly, I think that the punkest thing I can think of right now is to ditch all of this shit and go back to in-person only.
Community comes from filtering. In the early days of blogging, it was those of us who saw promise in connection that we weren't finding locally, and either had the fortitude to hand-code those journal-ish sites (a surprising number of 'em did) or write our own systems to manage them. Which was great, met some really cool people, mostly white, a few Asian, surprising levels of gender diversity for a tech-filtered thing, but we found a community that we weren't finding in-person.
When Mastodon first started to look like a thing, I joined a friend's instance. I like keeping in touch with her, and I check it several times a day, but the community there isn't making me go "wow, interesting new people", it's more the folks who've mutually followed through several social media site switches, who no longer use an RSS reader to keep up with each others blogs, but...
I think the real disappointment there is that we're all painfully aware now that what we're doing, we're doing in public. When the 'net was newer, we had communities of kinksters journaling and cross-linking to hackers to theater managers, all baring our souls. But we brought the world into that space, and now we're not safe being vulnerable in that space. We've seen shit, man, we've been downrange of G*m*rg*t*, wondered if we were gonna get SWATted when we went home at night, had our blogs reported to our employers (mine have always not cared, but...), the net isn't a place we can be open.
Which, I mean, we're also all decades older now, so going through different stuff, can't swim in the same river twice, and all that, but these days I'm looking around and thinking that if I want to make connections with people where I'm actually making connections with people, the best filter for that I can find is geography.
And it sucks, 'cause I know that's a bad way to filter a community. I know there are perspectives I'm not going to find in my upper-middle-class white town that'll do anything to avoid building low income housing. And maybe I need to move to a city. But the sorts of shallow conversations we'll have in corporate mediated spaces, or in public, breed shallow relationships.
So, yeah, I'm not quite ready to wipe my blog off the web, and beyond the connection I find that my blog is also a fantastic adjunct to my memory, so even if I took it private I'd still keep it, but I'm ready to give up on new protocols and new social media sites and whatnot, and turn to more local and in-person stuff to build my community.
So though I've had some really rich connections on the net, and I keep in touch with so many of those
posted by straw at 5:25 PM on October 18, 2023 [19 favorites]
rel="nofollow" attached to it. People paid for it, but really it's more hassle than it's worth.All this to say that I believed in the personal Internet. I've kept in touch with people I met online in the BBS era. I have two Slack things I keep open on my desktop, one for work, and one for a group of early weblog folks who've stayed in touch even as our blogs have waned. I think I'm the only one still publishing regularly at the original URL. I have people I've met through the blog that I only know how to reach through the blog.
And, regularly and increasingly, I think that the punkest thing I can think of right now is to ditch all of this shit and go back to in-person only.
Community comes from filtering. In the early days of blogging, it was those of us who saw promise in connection that we weren't finding locally, and either had the fortitude to hand-code those journal-ish sites (a surprising number of 'em did) or write our own systems to manage them. Which was great, met some really cool people, mostly white, a few Asian, surprising levels of gender diversity for a tech-filtered thing, but we found a community that we weren't finding in-person.
When Mastodon first started to look like a thing, I joined a friend's instance. I like keeping in touch with her, and I check it several times a day, but the community there isn't making me go "wow, interesting new people", it's more the folks who've mutually followed through several social media site switches, who no longer use an RSS reader to keep up with each others blogs, but...
I think the real disappointment there is that we're all painfully aware now that what we're doing, we're doing in public. When the 'net was newer, we had communities of kinksters journaling and cross-linking to hackers to theater managers, all baring our souls. But we brought the world into that space, and now we're not safe being vulnerable in that space. We've seen shit, man, we've been downrange of G*m*rg*t*, wondered if we were gonna get SWATted when we went home at night, had our blogs reported to our employers (mine have always not cared, but...), the net isn't a place we can be open.
Which, I mean, we're also all decades older now, so going through different stuff, can't swim in the same river twice, and all that, but these days I'm looking around and thinking that if I want to make connections with people where I'm actually making connections with people, the best filter for that I can find is geography.
And it sucks, 'cause I know that's a bad way to filter a community. I know there are perspectives I'm not going to find in my upper-middle-class white town that'll do anything to avoid building low income housing. And maybe I need to move to a city. But the sorts of shallow conversations we'll have in corporate mediated spaces, or in public, breed shallow relationships.
So, yeah, I'm not quite ready to wipe my blog off the web, and beyond the connection I find that my blog is also a fantastic adjunct to my memory, so even if I took it private I'd still keep it, but I'm ready to give up on new protocols and new social media sites and whatnot, and turn to more local and in-person stuff to build my community.
So though I've had some really rich connections on the net, and I keep in touch with so many of those
posted by straw at 5:25 PM on October 18, 2023 [19 favorites]
Anil invented the professional white interface and non-fungible tokens so I'd say he's 0 for 2 so far.Is... there a different Anil Dash I'm not aware of?
posted by verb at 8:36 PM on October 18, 2023 [4 favorites]
Headphone warning on hippys song. The volume escalated aggressively there and hurt my ears.
The opening track on Pearl Jam's 1993 album Vs. had a fake out opening of much softer volume followed by a blast of much louder music for the rest of the album. As someone who doesn't listen through headphones, and really not as many people did back then, I don't really mind this kind of fake-out. I hadn't pegged it as being problematic or I would have put a warning on the track of some sort, much similar to a flashing light warning.
I do hope you found the song to be fun despite the problem with the volume levels at the beginning. I'm not an Olivia Rodrigo shill, but if her people want to pay me for what I'm already going to do in my life, I'd be happy to accept that.
But maybe liking her is a bad idea right?
posted by hippybear at 8:51 PM on October 18, 2023 [4 favorites]
The opening track on Pearl Jam's 1993 album Vs. had a fake out opening of much softer volume followed by a blast of much louder music for the rest of the album. As someone who doesn't listen through headphones, and really not as many people did back then, I don't really mind this kind of fake-out. I hadn't pegged it as being problematic or I would have put a warning on the track of some sort, much similar to a flashing light warning.
I do hope you found the song to be fun despite the problem with the volume levels at the beginning. I'm not an Olivia Rodrigo shill, but if her people want to pay me for what I'm already going to do in my life, I'd be happy to accept that.
But maybe liking her is a bad idea right?
posted by hippybear at 8:51 PM on October 18, 2023 [4 favorites]
client-side scripting was the mistake. right there. that’s what went wrong. like, javascript is a bad language, but the fundamental unchangeable problem with javascript is that it was invented for client-side scripting, and client-side scripting is a terrible idea
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:03 PM on October 18, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:03 PM on October 18, 2023 [6 favorites]
But there’s something in the air—a vibe shift, a sense that things are about to change.
Bah!
And furthermore, pfui.
The great thing about a subscription model is revenue stability. That is, for the owners of the thing-being-subscribed-to. And, as far as purely digital goods are concerned, they also get to keep that thing, in its entirety.
The market for this model exists and experiences saturation. But if you think everyone is gonna go that way, ehh. I'll sell you a subscription to my contrarianism journal, Shit That Is Never Going To Happen Quarterly.
posted by StarkRoads at 9:41 PM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]
Bah!
And furthermore, pfui.
The great thing about a subscription model is revenue stability. That is, for the owners of the thing-being-subscribed-to. And, as far as purely digital goods are concerned, they also get to keep that thing, in its entirety.
The market for this model exists and experiences saturation. But if you think everyone is gonna go that way, ehh. I'll sell you a subscription to my contrarianism journal, Shit That Is Never Going To Happen Quarterly.
posted by StarkRoads at 9:41 PM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]
client-side scripting was the mistake.
The corporate social media platforms mentioned in the article are, for most people, not-javascript apps installed on their phones: Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, twitter/X. Some of those platforms were built entirely in the era of smartphones, their web versions came later and are in no way comparable to their app versions.
Apps are most responsible for where the internet is today. It made the biggest advertising corporations like Google and Facebook and symbiotically Apple extremely powerful and rich. Want to build an application? You're stuck with their rules, period. You're transferring a huge part of your revenue to them just by building something on the internet. It made those companies extremely hard to dislodge with something better.
I don't think paid content will cure the internet. Doing something to weaken the stranglehold that the Google/Apple duopoly has on small devices and what you can do with them — that would be a start.
posted by UN at 10:34 PM on October 18, 2023 [6 favorites]
The corporate social media platforms mentioned in the article are, for most people, not-javascript apps installed on their phones: Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, twitter/X. Some of those platforms were built entirely in the era of smartphones, their web versions came later and are in no way comparable to their app versions.
Apps are most responsible for where the internet is today. It made the biggest advertising corporations like Google and Facebook and symbiotically Apple extremely powerful and rich. Want to build an application? You're stuck with their rules, period. You're transferring a huge part of your revenue to them just by building something on the internet. It made those companies extremely hard to dislodge with something better.
I don't think paid content will cure the internet. Doing something to weaken the stranglehold that the Google/Apple duopoly has on small devices and what you can do with them — that would be a start.
posted by UN at 10:34 PM on October 18, 2023 [6 favorites]
So long as the hunger and opportunity for using the internet to drive increased inequality exists, what we see happening will keep happening, no matter how much we we change the forms of our interactions.
The hunger for increased money, increased power, and the opportunity to feed that hunger will distort whatever replacements we construct for the problematic services and products we use today.
Better laws can help limit this, but at best in the amoral environment of capital accumulation, they simply reshape the game and change the details of working to circumvent any legal (or subvert/repeal) protections devised.
If we want to stop this, we have to take what we value most about the internet out of the private for-profit sphere. All other approaches will go through the same cycles as the previous ones, driven by the same forces.
posted by allium cepa at 11:00 PM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]
The hunger for increased money, increased power, and the opportunity to feed that hunger will distort whatever replacements we construct for the problematic services and products we use today.
Better laws can help limit this, but at best in the amoral environment of capital accumulation, they simply reshape the game and change the details of working to circumvent any legal (or subvert/repeal) protections devised.
If we want to stop this, we have to take what we value most about the internet out of the private for-profit sphere. All other approaches will go through the same cycles as the previous ones, driven by the same forces.
posted by allium cepa at 11:00 PM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]
Is... there a different Anil Dash I'm not aware of?
[professional white background]
[non-fungible tokens]
They're not all winners, but he does keep himself busy.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 12:02 AM on October 19, 2023 [4 favorites]
[professional white background]
[non-fungible tokens]
They're not all winners, but he does keep himself busy.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 12:02 AM on October 19, 2023 [4 favorites]
in the amoral environment of capital accumulation
It's increasingly difficult to deny that this game is not amoral, it is outright immoral.
posted by Dysk at 12:50 AM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]
It's increasingly difficult to deny that this game is not amoral, it is outright immoral.
posted by Dysk at 12:50 AM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]
Do you know what Bravo used to show? Ballet. Sometime opera. I'm not even making this up! It actually happened!
Bravo used to show works by Fellini, Buñuel and Fassbinder. I watched Fassbinder's "Querelle" on Bravo circa 1984 or so, ferchrissake.
I remember handwringing pieces in print publications (remember those?) about how Bravo and its lighter competitor at the time, A&E, could become a threat to PBS and public broadcasting generally in the U.S., by pulling away the rights to "quality" content. For-pay cable channels lost interest in highbrow content within a few years--that threat never panned out.
There's a potential separate discussion about how public broadcasting reflects its donor demographic, of course. But the "pure capitalism" approach turned to crap within a fairly short number of years.
posted by gimonca at 5:31 AM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]
Bravo used to show works by Fellini, Buñuel and Fassbinder. I watched Fassbinder's "Querelle" on Bravo circa 1984 or so, ferchrissake.
I remember handwringing pieces in print publications (remember those?) about how Bravo and its lighter competitor at the time, A&E, could become a threat to PBS and public broadcasting generally in the U.S., by pulling away the rights to "quality" content. For-pay cable channels lost interest in highbrow content within a few years--that threat never panned out.
There's a potential separate discussion about how public broadcasting reflects its donor demographic, of course. But the "pure capitalism" approach turned to crap within a fairly short number of years.
posted by gimonca at 5:31 AM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]
I know we're always lamenting the loss of RSS and webrings, but what I don't quite understand is why we don't go back to it. The tools are still there.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:28 AM on October 19, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:28 AM on October 19, 2023 [10 favorites]
I have not followed Anil Dash's career really closely, I think his biggest problem might be being too open-minded sometimes? Like, I once spotted him on Twitter expressing a "well maybe" kind of attitude towards sites paying for themselves with background, browser-based crypto-mining on their page.
But I don't think he's evil, at least on purpose? The premise of NFTs was okay, it was their everything-else, their basis*, flaws**, and adverse purposes***, that doomed them. I think some of the actually-smart people who still think NFTs can be made to work do so thinking those problems can be solved, and that if they are it can lead us into a golden age free of want, somehow. Really though, they're a clever piece of financial tech with horrendous adverse uses in an environment where billions of desperate people are invisibly scratching at the walls to free themselves from want. In such an environment, if you tell them all there's this One Weird Trick to making money, it's immediately going to be jumped upon and then taken to its logical extreme. A lot of things, if you take them to logical extremes, cause horrible problems, and the scale of the global want involved, normally shielded from our eyes, can become the hamster in a lot of infernal wheels.
In looking up Anil Dash's history, I found out that he won a Webby for creating NFTs in 2022. Geez, the Webbys have gone downhill haven't they?
* basis: being based on blockchain tech and the horrible resource and computing excesses that led to whole buildings being devoted to cryptomining and consuming the power of a Denmark
* flaws: ease of losing items in your account based on accidental action
* adverse purposes: irrational hype, lies that they'll let you use items bought in games in other games, claims that they'll let you make money by playing games, speculation, being used by shysters, vulnerability to pump-and-dumps, etc.
posted by JHarris at 6:42 AM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]
But I don't think he's evil, at least on purpose? The premise of NFTs was okay, it was their everything-else, their basis*, flaws**, and adverse purposes***, that doomed them. I think some of the actually-smart people who still think NFTs can be made to work do so thinking those problems can be solved, and that if they are it can lead us into a golden age free of want, somehow. Really though, they're a clever piece of financial tech with horrendous adverse uses in an environment where billions of desperate people are invisibly scratching at the walls to free themselves from want. In such an environment, if you tell them all there's this One Weird Trick to making money, it's immediately going to be jumped upon and then taken to its logical extreme. A lot of things, if you take them to logical extremes, cause horrible problems, and the scale of the global want involved, normally shielded from our eyes, can become the hamster in a lot of infernal wheels.
In looking up Anil Dash's history, I found out that he won a Webby for creating NFTs in 2022. Geez, the Webbys have gone downhill haven't they?
* basis: being based on blockchain tech and the horrible resource and computing excesses that led to whole buildings being devoted to cryptomining and consuming the power of a Denmark
* flaws: ease of losing items in your account based on accidental action
* adverse purposes: irrational hype, lies that they'll let you use items bought in games in other games, claims that they'll let you make money by playing games, speculation, being used by shysters, vulnerability to pump-and-dumps, etc.
posted by JHarris at 6:42 AM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]
I know we're always lamenting the loss of RSS and webrings, but what I don't quite understand is why we don't go back to it. The tools are still there.
With RSS, the secret is, it never left. Google Reader was killed (KILLED!!) a decade ago, and that created a media narrative that RSS was dead. But lots of sites still secretly support RSS! It's a default part of Wordpress. Even now, get yourself a good feed reader (I use Newsblur, thanks to Chrysostom for introducing me to it) and you can keep up with a lot of sites that way. I lament Reader's MURDERING daily, but in the end what it really did was send a signal to a bunch of people that Google was through with RSS, and so the rest of us should all be too. (And that signalling was to serve their purposes--remember, Google was desperately trying to get us all to use Plus back then. "What's Plus," you ask? Ah hah ha, no one remembers! It is a hollow voice floating in the air in the land of the hungry ghosts!)
Maybe this is just a personal bugaboo, but I've seen it as a case where whatever most people, or even just a lot, are doing, or even just what they're doing recently, is taken as what "everyone" is doing. Even that particular word, everyone, is telling, and its inverse phrase nobody. "RSS? Everyone moved on to social media! Nobody's doing that now!" Always be wary of when people say everyone and nobody: who are they leaving out? But even when those exact words aren't being used, their feeling still pervades.
It's the media narrative engine driven by tech supporting, it's always chasing/pushing the next new thing, whether it's NFTs or smartphones or widgets or ActiveX or Push Content. I think we could all stand to be a lot more critical of what tech writers are telling us, or trend writers in general, really. In the end though it's not just their fault, it's all of us for wanting to jump onto new trends to the heedless discarding of old services. I mean, Usenet still exists, for something other than piracy, and in fact people are trying to revive it.
Of webrings, it was the waning of the personal homepage. The passing of Geocities didn't help that either. Also I think (someone who remembers better, correct me!) the biggest webring services, that cataloged and listed member sites, went down. Nowadays it takes a pretty substantial movement to break through the surface of the media notability barrier: Mastodon, for instance, has millions of happy users but in their eyes it's nothing big, because there are other big things, and they have marketing budgets.
Whew. Am I threadsitting? I think I'm threadsitting. Sorry.
posted by JHarris at 7:07 AM on October 19, 2023 [15 favorites]
With RSS, the secret is, it never left. Google Reader was killed (KILLED!!) a decade ago, and that created a media narrative that RSS was dead. But lots of sites still secretly support RSS! It's a default part of Wordpress. Even now, get yourself a good feed reader (I use Newsblur, thanks to Chrysostom for introducing me to it) and you can keep up with a lot of sites that way. I lament Reader's MURDERING daily, but in the end what it really did was send a signal to a bunch of people that Google was through with RSS, and so the rest of us should all be too. (And that signalling was to serve their purposes--remember, Google was desperately trying to get us all to use Plus back then. "What's Plus," you ask? Ah hah ha, no one remembers! It is a hollow voice floating in the air in the land of the hungry ghosts!)
Maybe this is just a personal bugaboo, but I've seen it as a case where whatever most people, or even just a lot, are doing, or even just what they're doing recently, is taken as what "everyone" is doing. Even that particular word, everyone, is telling, and its inverse phrase nobody. "RSS? Everyone moved on to social media! Nobody's doing that now!" Always be wary of when people say everyone and nobody: who are they leaving out? But even when those exact words aren't being used, their feeling still pervades.
It's the media narrative engine driven by tech supporting, it's always chasing/pushing the next new thing, whether it's NFTs or smartphones or widgets or ActiveX or Push Content. I think we could all stand to be a lot more critical of what tech writers are telling us, or trend writers in general, really. In the end though it's not just their fault, it's all of us for wanting to jump onto new trends to the heedless discarding of old services. I mean, Usenet still exists, for something other than piracy, and in fact people are trying to revive it.
Of webrings, it was the waning of the personal homepage. The passing of Geocities didn't help that either. Also I think (someone who remembers better, correct me!) the biggest webring services, that cataloged and listed member sites, went down. Nowadays it takes a pretty substantial movement to break through the surface of the media notability barrier: Mastodon, for instance, has millions of happy users but in their eyes it's nothing big, because there are other big things, and they have marketing budgets.
Whew. Am I threadsitting? I think I'm threadsitting. Sorry.
posted by JHarris at 7:07 AM on October 19, 2023 [15 favorites]
Hey! One of those things "everyone's" moved on from that's still pretty great? Metafilter!
posted by JHarris at 7:14 AM on October 19, 2023 [12 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 7:14 AM on October 19, 2023 [12 favorites]
IMO what killed the old internet was viruses and lack of security, and the internet people at the time just saying "oohhh, it's your password - you suck" instead of putting any effort into stopping it. The big hacks of AT&T and Target and others finally shifted the experience, but by then it was too late.
In the old internet you had to take a risk that the non-walled garden, carefully curated site you were about to visit wasn't riddled with viruses that would take down your computer. Sure, some really internet savvy people were able to avoid that, but most people? Nah. They thought it straight up sucked, and the internet is better now.
Second thing was that people put tons of time into some website for guitar chords, or lyrics, or typing out all the scripts to some tv show or movie or their thoughts, and had no way to monetize all the work (or really to even make it public), which is fine because some people are fine with that, but then people grow up and can't put that much work into it anymore, and it withers on the vine.
The same type of people who copied those music lyrics (they weren't always included when you bought the album) then are the type of people making tic-toks today or youtube whatever, and might be getting some money for that work or are maybe still doing it for fun, the platform has just changed. The nature of the work might have changed (most artists provide lyrics now, thank god), but the effort is the same.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:15 AM on October 19, 2023 [6 favorites]
In the old internet you had to take a risk that the non-walled garden, carefully curated site you were about to visit wasn't riddled with viruses that would take down your computer. Sure, some really internet savvy people were able to avoid that, but most people? Nah. They thought it straight up sucked, and the internet is better now.
Second thing was that people put tons of time into some website for guitar chords, or lyrics, or typing out all the scripts to some tv show or movie or their thoughts, and had no way to monetize all the work (or really to even make it public), which is fine because some people are fine with that, but then people grow up and can't put that much work into it anymore, and it withers on the vine.
The same type of people who copied those music lyrics (they weren't always included when you bought the album) then are the type of people making tic-toks today or youtube whatever, and might be getting some money for that work or are maybe still doing it for fun, the platform has just changed. The nature of the work might have changed (most artists provide lyrics now, thank god), but the effort is the same.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:15 AM on October 19, 2023 [6 favorites]
Interesting post. But on the second mention of loving LiveJournal I had to scroll back to the top to check the date.
The most interesting aspects of the article were 1) Yoel Roth's suggestion for third party companies with established trust and safety policies policing the internet. Somehow this seems like a good idea that could go really bad but maybe no worse than the current situation 2) an internet where you could migrate your community from ServiceA to ServiceB if serviceA got gross. That seems like it would require a massive reconfiguring of the internet.
Finally, I've given up on Twitter, sadly, because I loved Twitter 1.0. In contrast, although I have a FB and Instagram I never ever use them and I follow only my family. Not being on FB in any connected way is a bit disorienting because all of the Boomers I know are on FB and conversations constantly make reference to FB. I just do my blank face.
posted by bluesky43 at 8:21 AM on October 19, 2023
The most interesting aspects of the article were 1) Yoel Roth's suggestion for third party companies with established trust and safety policies policing the internet. Somehow this seems like a good idea that could go really bad but maybe no worse than the current situation 2) an internet where you could migrate your community from ServiceA to ServiceB if serviceA got gross. That seems like it would require a massive reconfiguring of the internet.
Finally, I've given up on Twitter, sadly, because I loved Twitter 1.0. In contrast, although I have a FB and Instagram I never ever use them and I follow only my family. Not being on FB in any connected way is a bit disorienting because all of the Boomers I know are on FB and conversations constantly make reference to FB. I just do my blank face.
posted by bluesky43 at 8:21 AM on October 19, 2023
Do you know what Bravo used to show? Ballet. Sometime opera. I'm not even making this up! It actually happened!
Late night softcore porn with David Duchovny! (Red Shoe Diaries for those who have a Fox Mulder kink).
posted by srboisvert at 8:58 AM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]
Late night softcore porn with David Duchovny! (Red Shoe Diaries for those who have a Fox Mulder kink).
posted by srboisvert at 8:58 AM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]
1) Yoel Roth's suggestion for third party companies with established trust and safety policies policing the internet. Somehow this seems like a good idea that could go really bad but maybe no worse than the current situation
This is just regulatory capture, but without the need to buy off any pesky public officials.
Once enshrined, 'established trust and safety policies' will be shaped to enlarge quarterly dividends for the largest players, and the authority to police is de facto ability to squash competition.
posted by StarkRoads at 9:12 AM on October 19, 2023 [4 favorites]
This is just regulatory capture, but without the need to buy off any pesky public officials.
Once enshrined, 'established trust and safety policies' will be shaped to enlarge quarterly dividends for the largest players, and the authority to police is de facto ability to squash competition.
posted by StarkRoads at 9:12 AM on October 19, 2023 [4 favorites]
[professional white background]*blink*
[non-fungible tokens]
They're not all winners, but he does keep himself busy.
Well. There you go.
posted by verb at 10:40 AM on October 19, 2023
I paid annual money to Movable Type in 3 figures for the first 5 years until the UX began to suck so much and they "clouded" it and whatnot that it wasn't worth the money anymore and I just stuck a blogspot on my URL for a while.
Everyone who said extractive capitalism that cannot see beyond short term quarterly profits to thinking ahead about sustaining communities and socials over the years (see this site for ex.) is to blame for sucking the very life out of the interwebz (my first handle is 28 years old now and next spring 'infini' is 19) is correct.
But, looking around at the algorithms from this side of the GDPR and how things have been changing over the past year or so as we begin to lead up to 2024, I think there's another factor that's led to this point. It probably started impacting more than 7 years ago but didn't really become visible till Pumpkinhead's precedentsy - the interwebs are voices and they talk back.
The old era of one is to many comms permitted narrative campaigns and propaganda in a way that social media came very very close to completely destroying. Until Electric Truck Man killed the bird - that is the canary who held its breath too long, imo, and the coal mine is toxic.
See this cartoon from The Guardian today.
RIP
I don't know the future they will allow to exist. There might be hiatus of 3 to 5 years where everything will limp along until web 4.67 emerges or whatever the numbering is these days.
I'm getting old.
I'm glad y'all still here and the blue and grey and green are still here.
Maybe that is what we'll go through, accessing such pockets of sanity through the Crazy Years
posted by infini at 11:11 AM on October 19, 2023 [4 favorites]
Everyone who said extractive capitalism that cannot see beyond short term quarterly profits to thinking ahead about sustaining communities and socials over the years (see this site for ex.) is to blame for sucking the very life out of the interwebz (my first handle is 28 years old now and next spring 'infini' is 19) is correct.
But, looking around at the algorithms from this side of the GDPR and how things have been changing over the past year or so as we begin to lead up to 2024, I think there's another factor that's led to this point. It probably started impacting more than 7 years ago but didn't really become visible till Pumpkinhead's precedentsy - the interwebs are voices and they talk back.
The old era of one is to many comms permitted narrative campaigns and propaganda in a way that social media came very very close to completely destroying. Until Electric Truck Man killed the bird - that is the canary who held its breath too long, imo, and the coal mine is toxic.
See this cartoon from The Guardian today.
RIP
I don't know the future they will allow to exist. There might be hiatus of 3 to 5 years where everything will limp along until web 4.67 emerges or whatever the numbering is these days.
I'm getting old.
I'm glad y'all still here and the blue and grey and green are still here.
Maybe that is what we'll go through, accessing such pockets of sanity through the Crazy Years
posted by infini at 11:11 AM on October 19, 2023 [4 favorites]
*looks around*
There’s plenty of good internet; you just gotta get off the main highway to find it.
posted by notyou at 2:21 PM on October 19, 2023 [3 favorites]
There’s plenty of good internet; you just gotta get off the main highway to find it.
posted by notyou at 2:21 PM on October 19, 2023 [3 favorites]
IMO what killed the old internet was viruses and lack of security, and the internet people at the time just saying "oohhh, it's your password - you suck" instead of putting any effort into stopping it.
This characterization has bothered me, and I've tried writing a reply to it twice and erases what I had. It doesn't seem to me to be correct, but this thing The_Vegetables said has an element of truth to it.
What I remember though is lots of people putting effort into stopping it. Browser programmers have long suffered sleepless nights from suddenly-discovered vulnerabilities. Password habits on the part of users has long been a problem, and I still know multiple people who reuse passwords indiscriminately. And if things are better now than they were before, what we have now is because of those efforts, not the result of walled gardens at all. And the systems in place to enforce security now are, at times, terrible--a FOAF got an Occulus but couldn't use it, because its use was tied to her Facebook account, and someone had hacked it, and so the several-hundred-dollar piece of hardware she had bought was a paperweight until Facebook corrected the issue, and it took them months.
The reason many people use walled garden services is, they never used the old open internet in the first place. Back then people were all wondering which social media site would get critical mass and open "the internet" to the masses, no longer the domain of geeks. Well, it was Facebook, and it did, and for whatever reason, they never felt the need to leave it. Because there's so many of them that's what "the internet" became to some observers (see my rant above about "everyone" and "nobody").
posted by JHarris at 3:02 PM on October 19, 2023 [4 favorites]
This characterization has bothered me, and I've tried writing a reply to it twice and erases what I had. It doesn't seem to me to be correct, but this thing The_Vegetables said has an element of truth to it.
What I remember though is lots of people putting effort into stopping it. Browser programmers have long suffered sleepless nights from suddenly-discovered vulnerabilities. Password habits on the part of users has long been a problem, and I still know multiple people who reuse passwords indiscriminately. And if things are better now than they were before, what we have now is because of those efforts, not the result of walled gardens at all. And the systems in place to enforce security now are, at times, terrible--a FOAF got an Occulus but couldn't use it, because its use was tied to her Facebook account, and someone had hacked it, and so the several-hundred-dollar piece of hardware she had bought was a paperweight until Facebook corrected the issue, and it took them months.
The reason many people use walled garden services is, they never used the old open internet in the first place. Back then people were all wondering which social media site would get critical mass and open "the internet" to the masses, no longer the domain of geeks. Well, it was Facebook, and it did, and for whatever reason, they never felt the need to leave it. Because there's so many of them that's what "the internet" became to some observers (see my rant above about "everyone" and "nobody").
posted by JHarris at 3:02 PM on October 19, 2023 [4 favorites]
(I should add on... is that elitist of me to say? It may be in some eyes. I'd say that some people were never given a good reason to leave the gardens. The old internet, for its openness, was not always a welcome place to non-techies, or non-cis-white-males. Let's not forget this was after all the age of Something Awful, although when I think of the old internet my brain goes back even further.)
posted by JHarris at 3:09 PM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 3:09 PM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]
> I know we're always lamenting the loss of […] webrings, but what I don't quite understand is why we don't go back to it. The tools are still there.
the best Internet is the Internet that knows how to not be found unless it wants you to find it. sometimes when you find it you find a lot more of it by following the honest to god webrings that the honest to god zoomers have started putting on their honest to god javascript-free hand edited self hosted home pages.
and i absolutely positively will not tell you how to find any of this, because it’s not my place to invite you and because i’m pretty sure a few of these kids are doing crimes i don’t want you knowing about.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 3:09 PM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]
the best Internet is the Internet that knows how to not be found unless it wants you to find it. sometimes when you find it you find a lot more of it by following the honest to god webrings that the honest to god zoomers have started putting on their honest to god javascript-free hand edited self hosted home pages.
and i absolutely positively will not tell you how to find any of this, because it’s not my place to invite you and because i’m pretty sure a few of these kids are doing crimes i don’t want you knowing about.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 3:09 PM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]
just an observation JHarris that we used to say this about AOL in 1999
Facebook of course is the CD-Rom itself lying on the doormat
posted by infini at 3:30 PM on October 19, 2023 [7 favorites]
Facebook of course is the CD-Rom itself lying on the doormat
posted by infini at 3:30 PM on October 19, 2023 [7 favorites]
. “People were like, ‘You’re charging money for something on the internet? That’s disgusting!’”
anil says this was “mid 2000s?” I recall those complaints from like 1999. 2006 was the year FB went mainstream, I think.
posted by Miko at 5:49 PM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]
anil says this was “mid 2000s?” I recall those complaints from like 1999. 2006 was the year FB went mainstream, I think.
posted by Miko at 5:49 PM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]
With RSS, the secret is, it never left.
My use of RSS has increased dramatically recently. Mastodon supports it natively. Nitter can produce RSS feeds for Twitter accounts so you don't actually have to go to Twitter. There are several free Bluesky to RSS services. Tumblr and WordPress support it. Here's hoping more and more places support it. And there are sites that do some of the same aggregation that Reader did - I like https://miniflux.app
posted by Tehhund at 4:19 AM on October 20, 2023 [7 favorites]
My use of RSS has increased dramatically recently. Mastodon supports it natively. Nitter can produce RSS feeds for Twitter accounts so you don't actually have to go to Twitter. There are several free Bluesky to RSS services. Tumblr and WordPress support it. Here's hoping more and more places support it. And there are sites that do some of the same aggregation that Reader did - I like https://miniflux.app
posted by Tehhund at 4:19 AM on October 20, 2023 [7 favorites]
Want to build an application? You're stuck with their rules, period. You're transferring a huge part of your revenue to them just by building something on the internet. It made those companies extremely hard to dislodge with something better.
Absolutely this.
Back in the day, when the first dumb smartphones were appearing (e.g. the Nokia 7650), people started writing apps for them. If you wanted to find those apps, you had to hunt around the web. Then along came something called Handango, which provided a one-stop platform to find and install apps.
Trouble is, if you wanted your app on Handango, they took 30% - thirty percent - of your revenue. Apart from which, they were in complete control of placement and distribution. Once your app dropped below the page fold, you could forget about selling any more copies.
My reaction as a developer was 'Honestly, what developer in their right mind would want to fall in with this scheme?'
Well, we got our answer, didn't we?
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:40 AM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
Absolutely this.
Back in the day, when the first dumb smartphones were appearing (e.g. the Nokia 7650), people started writing apps for them. If you wanted to find those apps, you had to hunt around the web. Then along came something called Handango, which provided a one-stop platform to find and install apps.
Trouble is, if you wanted your app on Handango, they took 30% - thirty percent - of your revenue. Apart from which, they were in complete control of placement and distribution. Once your app dropped below the page fold, you could forget about selling any more copies.
My reaction as a developer was 'Honestly, what developer in their right mind would want to fall in with this scheme?'
Well, we got our answer, didn't we?
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:40 AM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
1) Yoel Roth's suggestion for third party companies with established trust and safety policies policing the internet. Somehow this seems like a good idea that could go really bad but maybe no worse than the current situation
Yes, it's a good idea, but it kind of misses the point. The biggest confidence trick the big private internet corporations managed to pull was the idea that their platforms were public space, and that therefore the responsibility of moderating them fell to governments and the community. They are not, and it doesn't.
2) an internet where you could migrate your community from ServiceA to ServiceB if serviceA got gross.
Mastodon already does this, though the process is still far clunkier than it might be.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:48 AM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
Yes, it's a good idea, but it kind of misses the point. The biggest confidence trick the big private internet corporations managed to pull was the idea that their platforms were public space, and that therefore the responsibility of moderating them fell to governments and the community. They are not, and it doesn't.
2) an internet where you could migrate your community from ServiceA to ServiceB if serviceA got gross.
Mastodon already does this, though the process is still far clunkier than it might be.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:48 AM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
just an observation JHarris that we used to say this about AOL in 1999
Ah yes, AOL disks - or AOL bisks, as they are correctly termed.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:56 AM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
Ah yes, AOL disks - or AOL bisks, as they are correctly termed.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:56 AM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
The reason many people use walled garden services is, they never used the old open internet in the first place.
BS. If 'nobody used the old open interenet', then how did Google become one of the largest companies in the US based initially on internet search? And yes, people were working on security in those days, but it was piecemeal, lackadaisical work.
And people were looking for a single social media to punch through because live journal/blogs/managing your own website, etc were far too much work for far too little return for most people.
And look at that - still blaming passwords. If someone can guess your password in less than 5 attempts, yeah your password probably sucks. But brute forcing is the most common way, and requires a lot more access and a lot of lackadaisical effort on the part of the company you are using that password for.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:41 AM on October 20, 2023
Do you know what Bravo used to show? Ballet. Sometime opera. I'm not even making this up! It actually happened!
And TLC (when it came along later) showed actual college courses, gory surgery, and other educational content. I mainly mention it because the way I found out about Mosaic was from one of those classes on TLC where it was being used to show some related web page up on the projector. Before that, the Internet to me was IRC and Usenet and some occasional Gopher, but I still spent more time on BBSes with good FIDONet connections.
There wasn't even a real ISP in my city yet (we had Tymnet and Telenet nodes, so AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc were available, but they still only had 2400bps modems! Torture when you're used to 28800 on the BBSes), so I had to call long distance to dial up to a shell account. Nonetheless, I managed to get my hands on a copy of Trumpet Winsock, build slirp on the shell account host so I could start SLIP sessions, download Mosaic for Windows, find out it wouldn't run without Windows for Workgroups, get a copy of that, and after two weeks of work finally had a fancy pants graphical web browser running on my 386.
I'm not really sure things were better then, even if I could set up a web page at http://somehost.org/~wierdo/ at no extra charge. Domains cost $50 a year, bandwidth was super fucking expensive, web pages were already screaming for your attention from the moment animated GIF and Java applet support came along, and what little you could call better was mainly founded on keeping the community small by gatekeeping on technical ability/sufficient time to fuck around until it worked.
And if we're going to have an argument about security, we can't afford to ignore the huge elephant in the room. Namely, Microsoft, who very much intentionally ignored code quality as a metric until they were a couple of service packs deep into Windows XP. For the most part it didn't fucking matter if somebody got your passwords or whatever because it was at most an inconvenience. If you had online banking, you couldn't transfer money or open new accounts. If you asked for anything serious over email, the recipient would raise an eyebrow and make an actual phone call to ask about it. The stakes were just a lot lower when it came to everything but your actual computer, and even then the stakes were still pretty fucking low compared to today.
posted by wierdo at 11:51 AM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
And TLC (when it came along later) showed actual college courses, gory surgery, and other educational content. I mainly mention it because the way I found out about Mosaic was from one of those classes on TLC where it was being used to show some related web page up on the projector. Before that, the Internet to me was IRC and Usenet and some occasional Gopher, but I still spent more time on BBSes with good FIDONet connections.
There wasn't even a real ISP in my city yet (we had Tymnet and Telenet nodes, so AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc were available, but they still only had 2400bps modems! Torture when you're used to 28800 on the BBSes), so I had to call long distance to dial up to a shell account. Nonetheless, I managed to get my hands on a copy of Trumpet Winsock, build slirp on the shell account host so I could start SLIP sessions, download Mosaic for Windows, find out it wouldn't run without Windows for Workgroups, get a copy of that, and after two weeks of work finally had a fancy pants graphical web browser running on my 386.
I'm not really sure things were better then, even if I could set up a web page at http://somehost.org/~wierdo/ at no extra charge. Domains cost $50 a year, bandwidth was super fucking expensive, web pages were already screaming for your attention from the moment animated GIF and Java applet support came along, and what little you could call better was mainly founded on keeping the community small by gatekeeping on technical ability/sufficient time to fuck around until it worked.
And if we're going to have an argument about security, we can't afford to ignore the huge elephant in the room. Namely, Microsoft, who very much intentionally ignored code quality as a metric until they were a couple of service packs deep into Windows XP. For the most part it didn't fucking matter if somebody got your passwords or whatever because it was at most an inconvenience. If you had online banking, you couldn't transfer money or open new accounts. If you asked for anything serious over email, the recipient would raise an eyebrow and make an actual phone call to ask about it. The stakes were just a lot lower when it came to everything but your actual computer, and even then the stakes were still pretty fucking low compared to today.
posted by wierdo at 11:51 AM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
BS. If 'nobody used the old open interenet', then how did Google become one of the largest companies in the US based initially on internet search? And yes, people were working on security in those days, but it was piecemeal, lackadaisical work.
I mean part of the problem here is vagueness of what period of the internet we're talking about. I already mentioned "everyone/nobody," now there's matters of scope, what time we're talking about, what constitutes use, and what security means.
For my part I'm talking about a specific time, probably around 2005-2007, where I specifically remember the buzz about social media opening the internet up to the masses. I might be conflating it with earlier times: this was already when Windows XP was big, but old internet rightfully should probably be up to 2005?
Google became huge when it became a conglomerate, with fingers to tons of pies (maybe it'd be better to say that's Alphabet now), but it got very large by being many people's gateway to the internet. There's "oh I can pay my bills online" use, and there's "I choose to use this because I find it enjoyable" use.
Social media finally accomplished the latter, it was what opened the internet up to parents, aunt and uncles, grandparents. And many of those still don't use the internet, if they can help it, outside of social media, streaming and Youtube. They might have an email address. They had no experience with the culture around personal homepages unless they were technically inclined. They're people like my Dad, who even now curses audibly when forced to do something on his cheap Walmart computer. These people are dying out now; my father just turned 80 earlier this month.
On security, it's all a matter of scale? There's a lot more people working in security now, but there's a lot more things to secure now. I'll happily admit it took a while to build up to this level, but I don't want to fail to acknowledge early efforts. You may well have a clearer picture overall than I do here.
posted by JHarris at 3:23 PM on October 20, 2023
I mean part of the problem here is vagueness of what period of the internet we're talking about. I already mentioned "everyone/nobody," now there's matters of scope, what time we're talking about, what constitutes use, and what security means.
For my part I'm talking about a specific time, probably around 2005-2007, where I specifically remember the buzz about social media opening the internet up to the masses. I might be conflating it with earlier times: this was already when Windows XP was big, but old internet rightfully should probably be up to 2005?
Google became huge when it became a conglomerate, with fingers to tons of pies (maybe it'd be better to say that's Alphabet now), but it got very large by being many people's gateway to the internet. There's "oh I can pay my bills online" use, and there's "I choose to use this because I find it enjoyable" use.
Social media finally accomplished the latter, it was what opened the internet up to parents, aunt and uncles, grandparents. And many of those still don't use the internet, if they can help it, outside of social media, streaming and Youtube. They might have an email address. They had no experience with the culture around personal homepages unless they were technically inclined. They're people like my Dad, who even now curses audibly when forced to do something on his cheap Walmart computer. These people are dying out now; my father just turned 80 earlier this month.
On security, it's all a matter of scale? There's a lot more people working in security now, but there's a lot more things to secure now. I'll happily admit it took a while to build up to this level, but I don't want to fail to acknowledge early efforts. You may well have a clearer picture overall than I do here.
posted by JHarris at 3:23 PM on October 20, 2023
therefore the responsibility of moderating them fell to governments and the community.
The responsibility of corporations is returning capital to shareholders. Laws that prohibit engaging in bribery and human rights violations are the only thing that can cause them to not always take the most fiscally productive action in those situations. What actual problem are they going to self-regulate their way out of?
The EU has the Digital Services Act, the GDPR and other regulations to protect people online it's not like it's some impossible pipe dream.
posted by StarkRoads at 3:29 PM on October 20, 2023 [4 favorites]
The responsibility of corporations is returning capital to shareholders. Laws that prohibit engaging in bribery and human rights violations are the only thing that can cause them to not always take the most fiscally productive action in those situations. What actual problem are they going to self-regulate their way out of?
The EU has the Digital Services Act, the GDPR and other regulations to protect people online it's not like it's some impossible pipe dream.
posted by StarkRoads at 3:29 PM on October 20, 2023 [4 favorites]
I lament Reader's MURDERING daily, but in the end what it really did was send a signal to a bunch of people that Google was through with RSS, and so the rest of us should all be too.
That's not how Reader's death killed off RSS as a practical concern, though - because Reader was the problem in the first place. The reality is that RSS would still be a commonly used technology if not for Google killing what was at the time a thriving ecosystem of reader tools by introducing a free option that fit ~90% of user needs, making it impossible for the makers of those tools to survive. And when Google pulled the plug, few were left to fill that void.
RSS, at least to me, is an object example of why we need to pay to have nice things, as well as yet another reason that Alphabet needs to be broken up, letter by letter.
Maybe this is just a personal bugaboo, but I've seen it as a case where whatever most people, or even just a lot, are doing, or even just what they're doing recently, is taken as what "everyone" is doing. Even that particular word, everyone, is telling, and its inverse phrase nobody. "RSS? Everyone moved on to social media! Nobody's doing that now!" Always be wary of when people say everyone and nobody: who are they leaving out? But even when those exact words aren't being used, their feeling still pervades.
The thing is, network effects are real, and they happen for reasons that you ignore at your peril. Are there people who are using RSS now? Sure. But the main body of users have moved on with the collapse of RSS infrastructure. Usenet may still be around, but given all the issues with moderation we have with platforms that allow it - I don't see a lot of people looking to move to a platform notorious for its issues with lack of such.
And honestly, JHarris, I think that you're falling into the trap a lot of techies do - forgetting that for a lot of people computers and the internet are simply a tool. Too often, I've seen the argument made by techies about how users should conform to the tool (this is ultimately what the "Eternal September" complaint is about), and thus wind up surprised when users gravitate towards those who listen to their needs.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:20 AM on October 24, 2023
That's not how Reader's death killed off RSS as a practical concern, though - because Reader was the problem in the first place. The reality is that RSS would still be a commonly used technology if not for Google killing what was at the time a thriving ecosystem of reader tools by introducing a free option that fit ~90% of user needs, making it impossible for the makers of those tools to survive. And when Google pulled the plug, few were left to fill that void.
RSS, at least to me, is an object example of why we need to pay to have nice things, as well as yet another reason that Alphabet needs to be broken up, letter by letter.
Maybe this is just a personal bugaboo, but I've seen it as a case where whatever most people, or even just a lot, are doing, or even just what they're doing recently, is taken as what "everyone" is doing. Even that particular word, everyone, is telling, and its inverse phrase nobody. "RSS? Everyone moved on to social media! Nobody's doing that now!" Always be wary of when people say everyone and nobody: who are they leaving out? But even when those exact words aren't being used, their feeling still pervades.
The thing is, network effects are real, and they happen for reasons that you ignore at your peril. Are there people who are using RSS now? Sure. But the main body of users have moved on with the collapse of RSS infrastructure. Usenet may still be around, but given all the issues with moderation we have with platforms that allow it - I don't see a lot of people looking to move to a platform notorious for its issues with lack of such.
And honestly, JHarris, I think that you're falling into the trap a lot of techies do - forgetting that for a lot of people computers and the internet are simply a tool. Too often, I've seen the argument made by techies about how users should conform to the tool (this is ultimately what the "Eternal September" complaint is about), and thus wind up surprised when users gravitate towards those who listen to their needs.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:20 AM on October 24, 2023
The responsibility of corporations is returning capital to shareholders. Laws that prohibit engaging in bribery and human rights violations are the only thing that can cause them to not always take the most fiscally productive action in those situations. What actual problem are they going to self-regulate their way out of?
The EU has the Digital Services Act, the GDPR and other regulations to protect people online it's not like it's some impossible pipe dream.
How Not To Regulate Digital Platforms. LPE Project. Published yesterday.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 12:58 AM on November 3, 2023
The EU has the Digital Services Act, the GDPR and other regulations to protect people online it's not like it's some impossible pipe dream.
How Not To Regulate Digital Platforms. LPE Project. Published yesterday.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 12:58 AM on November 3, 2023
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I had to make two clicks to reject the cookies, then closed a pop over, then closed a footer bar telling me this was my first complimentary story (and implying continuing to use the site would not be free.)
Then my mouse cursor went over another app's window, triggering a pop under ad that I had to close as well.
Anyway, the article is about how targeted ads has incentivized/enshittified all the things we hate about the internet.
You don't hate the internet. You hate capitalism.
posted by AlSweigart at 1:04 PM on October 18, 2023 [111 favorites]