> Oh yes, the 90's was so much better...
Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience.
I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall. You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting offers, it was up to you.
Now you have the illusion of autonomy in a carefully crafted walled garden of ads. Or rather: freedom is more easily found offline.
The only countervailing events were Google's book scanning project, the founding of archive.org, and the growth of Wikipedia. Google Books is a shadow what it was, was under attack, and was largely an AI project. Archive.org is in danger, and had to limit access to 95% of its content; I can't download a book from the 40s that has been out of print since then, and where everybody who was involved with it is dead. Wikipedia is falling apart under the influence of paid editors and people attacking other people through edits to their biographies.
It's getting to the point where it might be better not to be on the web. I don't like it. Even this web 2.0 commenting on everything seems like a pointless outlet for frustrations. And all it does is make various files on you, in dozens or hundreds of hands, grow slowly.
edit: I don't want to diminish how awesome it is to have a good proportion of 17th-19th century nonfiction online. It's nuts.
What? Do you remember webrings? How absolutely riddled with shit-tier spam they were? Geocities drove those.
Here's how it worked ~12 years ago: At some point you almost certainly have used the same home internet connection. A cookie associated with some account(s) of hers gets associated with that IP. Same for some account(s) of yours. Find IPs that over small time frames only have a handful of distinct users to filter out coffeeshops and such. Bam, likely family or roommate connection. Some sticky "supercookie" stuff or similar gets set so this can be both resurrected even when cookies expire (through like Etag cache headers or whatever) and then there's a lot of behind-the-scenes ad network offline-cookie-syncing.
One of the companies in that web partners offers ads on FB, another runs ads on Google, she searches and click something on your wife's phone (at this point regardless of network), it gets tied to you too.
It could be more innocuous but tracking same-household, cross-device for retargeting... all that is really old hat at this point.
I intentionally moved my career pretty far from ad-tech in the past decade, but from what I've heard in adjacent convos and such is that the newer developments include some of the newer platforms like smart TVs into all that old cross-device fun, too. Both as data source and ad display destination. A lot of TVs phone home about what you watch, even - like https://clinch.co/clinch-partners-with-samsung-ads/ There's a million ad-tech companies out there, they aren't all just writing real-time-bidding algorithms for traditional display ads.
If that tablet company had very recently begun an internet marketing campaign, across multiple ad networks, target approximately your demographic, then it's wholly reasonable that you and your wife would independently see ads for it.
1. Out of the 1000s of ads you see every day, at least one of them might coincidentally relate to something you talked about. You don't notice all the ads that are wildly irrelevant.
2. Even if you personally didn't have a hyper-relevant ad experience, out of the 1000s of HN readers that might comment a reply, one of them surely did. You just might be the one lucky guy that got your hyper-relevant ad of the day.
The ads were sleazy and brazen and right in your face trying to dragnet as many people as possible into buying something 99.999% had no interest in. Not like now, where massive dossiers are built on you automatically and you're tracked all over the internet by ad companies regardless of the steps you take as an individual to convince yourself you have privacy (like VPN/Private Relay/Incognito/Tor).
No but altavista and metacrawler did.
Then there came google, heavily subsidised by vc money. Deep pockets. Then that turned out to be unsustainable and so they began controlling search results and showing excessive ads.
If we want an ad free internet we need to pay for services or have government provided alternatives.
There’s no in between i am afraid. Servers and engineers cost money.
I wouldnt mind spending 10£ a month for a proper search engine service with a means to stay connected with friends. That would also reduce bot generated content.
The Internet was better but the technology was worse.
Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai via goodreads
However, isn’t it possible that they were on a downward trajectory, and we are too? And that at other points in time, not referenced, old(er) people may have felt differently?
EDIT because I forgot to add:
This missing the mark is rarely because there's something intrinsic about old people and other people's haircuts. Its more that we are generally raised to respect (as authorities) our elders, and sort of subconsciously expect that people younger than us will in turn grant us the same respect. So the criticism basically comes down "they're not giving me what's due to me".
Meanwhile, if the criticism leveled against Caesar came down to "he's waaaaay too ambitious, and has already shown a propensity for ignoring social mores to get what he wants", then Cicero's criticism might feel more prescient, and less like an old man shouting at a cloud.
All of that said, its actually really hard in the moment to identify what will be dangerous to society before it comes up. So maybe Cicero had a feeling in his gut, but all he could come up with is "he's kind of sloppy with his toga"
'08 or '09 is when they seemed to surrender that fight, and just give up on indexing the entire Web. Major sites got a huge boost, and a great deal of the Web seemed to just drop off the index entirely. Google's never been really good since.
[EDIT] They might also have switched from their text-only ads to being a more ordinary, crappy web advertiser not long after, which started to partially align their interests with webspammers, which may explain why they didn't mind yielding the whole middle (if that makes sense) of the search-result space to them.
Linking a 4chan archive on here is a uuhh bold move, I think its a fun snapshot of the time but still
Orange, text based, almost anonymous.
There are still a few holdouts from corporatism. On radio, there's KKUP (online at https://kkup.org/) which has no ads and does all kinds of weird shit.
We need the equivalent of the 88 MHz - 92 MHz band on FM that's reserved for non-profit stations, and you know that in a strange city you can dial around and find something there. Equivalent things do exist on the Web, but it needs to be easier to find them.
Yes, you do get religious stations and NPR, but there are also college radio stations and oddballs like KKUP.
Consider that one of the top links on HN is the OpenMW project. What a great project. If I want to go deep on that, there's a forum with a wiki, a discord and an IRC and a public gitlab.
I don't want to go deep on that. But there are literally hundreds of thousands of communities into which I could dive deep, some of which I do. I've been involved in home hydroponics groups, poker forums, online chess study groups, an Everquest emulation community, community-run RTS and fighting game tournaments.
I've dug into sites hosting side-by-side translations of the Tao Te Ching, Soto Zen communities, forums for recovering from addiction.
I've found music and books and events that I never otherwise would have found.
I've learned to read rudimentary Japanese using web apps. I've vastly improved my classical guitar form using YouTube channels.
... and on and on and on. I'm on this wonderful internet every day for much of my day, co-creating communities with other people.
There are deep, rich, giving communities everywhere on the internet today, not gated behind walled gardens. I wouldn't describe these as "shit" (or the homophobic slur the author seems think constitutes peak internet diction).
I'm glad these communities also existed in the 90's. Personally I grew up into things like the Quake 2 modding community and MUDs. Great stuff. I'm glad the internet has continued to grow and thrive and has evolved into what it is today.
edit: correction, by "more accessible" I meant "discoverable." I genuinely don't know whether or not the internet is more or less supportive of visually impaired users, for example (I can imagine it being far worse).
I will cite a quote [that I think is] from William Gibson: "The absolute most important skill to master in those days is to find the correct words to type in Google". I will add: "don't let anyone choose them for you !!!"
You'd think that'd be a job for search engines, but they don't seem to care about the product.
...that still utterly fail to provide relevant ads. This is my pet peeve - I periodically disable adblocker and - suprise, no surprise - 100% of ads I see are irrelevant to me. I can even see how they're trying to target me, but they're totally missing what I really want or interested in. "Personalized" news feeds are sensationalist click-bait crapfests with accidentally useful local news (just by the virtue of local news being more relevant, in general). Book recommendations only work in "more from the same author I've read and liked" category. Summing it up, those massive dossiers aren't seem to be worth shit.
Either the industry needs to drastically ramp up their models' complexity (and maybe something will start to happen - although I wonder about the economy of this) or maybe someday they will have to admit all those profile data hoards were the new tulips.
The Internets of old at least hadn't pretended that ads were "useful" or "relevant". There typically was no positive quality to them, except for honest "this shit brings site owner (or host) some money".
Techmeme.com hand selects either the first or best source for each headline. Something community maintained like that, where any duplicate story redirects to the primary, unless it’s a follow up or editorialized comment that has actual substance.
to reiterate:
- I had just moved halfway across the country
- this was the first Red Bull I had purchased in at least a year
- I made the purchase using a credit card other than my own, which was in no way connected to any bank account that was connected to me
- there should have been nothing connecting me to my purchase
I uninstalled the app immediately after that. sure, maybe it was some strange coincidence, but there's been far too many strange coincidences like that to make me anywhere near comfortable with this shit.
another time, years ago, I was talking to someone about how I needed to get a new pair of cheap earbuds, and within a couple hours an Amazon ad for this specific thing appeared in my Twitter timeline.
additionally, I just got married a couple weeks ago, and my wife and I immediately started seeing ads for sexual stamina tablets in our social media feeds—thanks, evil advertising apparatus, I thought I was doing okay :/
There's many other ways devices can be linked, addresses of bills for instance.
All the conspiracy theories out of the window...
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
This could show that older people always think these things about younger people. Or, it is possible that the respective cultures were in a period of decadence both then and now, and that the views of older people are at least somewhat accurate or meaningful.
Given that it is, at best, paraphrasing what Plato claims infamous scold and gadfly Socrates said, I'm inclined to reject the quote in its entirety. Anything Socrates is quoted as saying has to be viewed through the lens of "what does Plato want the reader to get out of this?". The answer, invariably, is whatever it takes for the reader to abandon Athenian democracy and take up Plato's weird mandatory warrior-athlete-philosopher society.
I think the thing that most people would really find tragic and scary is that we're all far more predictable and homogenous than we'd like to believe.
It's a low key way of chatting about huge datasets and the pattern matching they can provide to computers that we as individuals simply can't keep mental track of due to scale.
We are not as unpredictable as we all believe our tiny flower selves to be.
But every time I read something like this, I am puzzled how they can have so much information and yet be so dumb. One example (but I could give you many): I like cycling and I subscribe to some cycling-related YouTube channels (Lanterne Rouge, Dylan Johnson - normal stuff, informative, bits of light humor now and then). YouTube keeps recommending me one cycling channel I absolutely hate - it is as if it was designed to piss me off. Sensationalist, negative, clickbaity titles, made up doping allegations every other post, throwing up emoticons in titles, creepy thumbnails with syringes and distorted faces. I never watch those videos, I clicked "do not recommend this channel" multiple times, now I just leave YouTube immediately every time this appears. And somehow, with all the data they have on me and all that sophisticated AI, they still have not figured it out. How? Any explanation?
Everything is is by aggregate. So they can put you in a bucket with a bunch of other people with a similar footprint, and if 75% of people in that bucket convert when being shown that one you hate, you get to see it too.
Low-level optimization beyond that was rare at the places I worked.
"Sneaky but obvious" was way more common. And the browsers and platform vendors kept making it harder to do certain things, so it was a constant rat race to maintain the same level of browser tracking.
But the serendipity it can create is truly wild.
Tracking is easy, intelligent personalization is hard. But tracking alone takes a lot of constant investment with tech development and arms race and all.