The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

If there's one thing about the golden age of Internet, it's that it's always been gone.

i did that for a couple years. six "articles" a day, five days a week. my politics changed.

i wrote a really good one once explaining what a computer file was. that was my happiest moment. i still think of it.

The golden age of *everything* has always been gone.

http://bitterempire.com/on-social-media-culture-and-the-hellscape-of-writing-in-the-era-of-new-media/

the hardest part was finding writable articles in their giant dump of seo-bomb topics, most of which were garbage (based on searches that had had no successful results, or had been misconstrued by the wretched peons who converted them to topic sentences) and many of the rest of which required actual research and care and couldn't be written quickly enough to be worth it. sometimes i would write the same article again and again, changing the words each time. eventually the topics slowed to a drip and then dried up completely, sending the forums that had until then mostly just been where people posted the depressingly awful premises of their uncompleted novels into horrifying lamentation.

The golden age of *everything* has always been gone.

Going back a bit:

i don't understand why people would want to nationalise a company that produces rigged results. obviously google has rigged search. so that page with no links/backlinks and no seo/optimization will never appear in your search, or, if it does, it'll be close to dead last. and even with all of that, if it's a popular keyword, you have to pay your way to the top. which is why search results are dominated by large companies/entities

search is one of the biggest things in tech that is prime for disruption, sorry to use garbage biz slang

Is there some objective idea of 'searchability' that you reckon should drive up a page with no links and no links to it? Google are fairly clear that "stuff you find via a lot of links" is one of the main ingredients of it's magic spice.

Beyond that there are a few things that you can do, which is why SEO is an industry. But SEO is like advertising in that you're paying for some, and some is visibly better than none, but beyond that it gets a little unclear. Obviously Google is never going to say "these guys here appear to have figured out our algorithm", not least because the algorithm's always changing.

Unless you are going full conspiracy, and you reckon there's a line of code that goes "if $seocheckhascleared", which would be suicide - it couldn't stay secret, and people would abandon Google - no-one would use a pay-to-play* search engine.

It would also be stupid suicide, because beyond "no-one has paid for this", all people really want is the most popular results, and nobody's that bothered that this is kind of a cyclical definition.

*I'm assuming you're not actually freaking out about people being able to buy denoted ads for certain keywords, right?

there is a human-social-behavior premise behind the use of the algorithm, too, which is that people will link to things that are of value to people. if there's something really that valuable that no one at all links to then… welp… maybe they need to be getting the word out themselves?

yeah... but... the value of a search engine is also to find things that people AREN'T linking to. like if i'm searching some obscure subject, i would be very happy to find the obsessive loner's deep but utterly overlooked site rich with information and old scanned documents or whatever, even though it is a musty, unloved site linked to by no one. like this was a lot of the promise of the "old internet" - whatever you search, someone out there is working hard on it! - and why it's always so delightful to find a 1998-era site of that type. i dunno. it's sorta like how these days, searching for a band and their lyrics will turn up a hundred bad auto-generated lyrics database sites and bury the site where someone has been analyzing their lyrics in response-poems for the last ten years or whatever. be nice to find the latter once in a while. i'm just an old crank though.

Maybe what Dr. Casino needs is a search engine that automatically filters out anything Google's algorithms would have boosted, on the presumption that anything Google boosts is either too obvious to bother with, or is probably being gamed/rigged. An ungoogle, an Elgoog.

The metaphor could be the way the Dead's old sound system worked (two microphones run out of phase; any signal common to both is removed by summing the equal and opposite waveforms).

http://www.theawl.com/2014/10/cash-and-anxiety-on-the-weird-new-internet

like this was a lot of the promise of the "old internet" - whatever you search, someone out there is working hard on it! - and why it's always so delightful to find a 1998-era site of that type.

finally clicked the about page a couple weeks ago on a website i've used daily for years and discovered an unexpected memoir of time spent on this web

Sure, and the old internet would have had a gopher site which would have these troves of information, and maybe just written down on a post-it note somewhere by People Who Know, but the web is based on links. If it's on the web, someone somewhere will have linked to it (if they don't, it is effectively not on the web, you dig?), you just need to figure out the correct collection of search terms - an interesting game in itself.

Enjoyed that unexpected memoir. Thanks, dlh.

the old internet still exists. on a whim i was trying to find out more information on commercial 8mm films, and i found a labor-of-love site. you could tell it was a "labor-of-love" site because in the middle of all of this extremely useful information on old film there was a lot of crap about how we should all immediately turn to jesus christ and how plurality is killing this country (by which i can only assume he means america, because really, who else would say that sort of shit?)

be careful what you wish for, people.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/19/ad-tech-online-experience-facebook-apple-news

the bandwidth argument against microtargeted ad bloat

that awl article and kaleb horton's thing are way more what i was talking about really...i'm not like a usenet luddite longing for the days of angelfire sites and shit (though that had its charms)

but in general all the cards seemed to be stacked against good writing, good thinking, good content....

there's great stuff on twitter and i think twitter is far better than facebook because it (supposedly) is a real FEED, not chosen for you from algorhithms. twitter can be toxic as fuck but it feels p authentic..that said it's not doing well financially AND there is a downside to twitter, in terms of i love the freeform convos that happen but it also by nature makes everyone be very "quippy" by nature and isn't great for extended thoughts obv (though that one guy's #howiquitspin thing is great right now)

One thing I do kind of wonder about *the future of the internet* is how much of it will still be text-based. One of my favorite things about ILX is that it's like 90% text in a clean, visually easy format. The internet has probably lead to me reading more total words per week than I ever did before, although they're in shorter bursts. Of course the whole internet-at-work thing limits how much video one can watch, so text still has its utility.

Bill Gates' "Content Is King", written in 1996: http://web.archive.org/web/20010126005200/http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/columns/1996essay/essay960103.asp

Pretty good characterisation of the Web now with a couple exceptions.

In the long run, advertising is promising. An advantage of interactive advertising is that an initial message needs only to attract attention rather than convey much information. A user can click on the ad to get additional information-and an advertiser can measure whether people are doing so.

god, if there's one thing i'm always searching for it's additional information about consumer products

http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2015/07/brief-book-reviews-internet-of-garbage.html

review of a book on the problem of online harassment that compares it to the problem of filtering/managing spam

http://textfiles.com/

Lots of old internet/pre-internet text files. Anarchist Cookbook, instructions for Blue Boxes, ASCII art, etc.

this one is gold

http://www.textfiles.com/apple/peeks.pokes.3.1

                                     SOUND
X=PEEK(-16336).TOGGLES the SPEAKER {1 click}
POKE -16336,0..TOGGLES the SPEAKER {1 click (longer then PEEK)}

brilliant site!

pertinent to the matter at hand:

http://textfiles.com/100/bbsdeath.pro

re: internet of garbage: i've developed a certain distrust of those who propose technological solutions for social problems, and i regard the "successful fight against spam" as almost as great a victory as the record industry's fight against commercial bootleg records.

  A user would not only answer his or HER mail, but also butt into other
people's conversations and throw in his/her two cents worth.

this file is brilliant the boy is a prophet

For me personally, the internet was at its most exciting between roughly 1996 and 2002, partly because it was a much simpler time. There used to be a wider variety of fansites - granted, some of them were lacking in content and seemed a bit thrown together for the sake of it, but at times you'd stumble across something where someone had made a real effort to build it up into a great information resource. I spent more time looking at fansites for specific bands/albums/movies etc. because I often found they were bigger and better in content than a lot of the official ones at that time. If I wanted to talk to people I knew, I had an instant messenger. If I wanted to talk about a specific band or whatever, I'd use a newsgroup or sign up for the message board. If I wanted to chew the fat with people I didn't know, I could either IRC or again, use a message board. Most of my time on the internet, though, was pretty much spent idly surfing and seeing what turned up. It also helped that in the pre-Google days, different search engines would yield different results, and Yahoo! even kept a directory for all fansites/official sites etc. It was easy to keep things separate, too: online was online, offline was offline, and the two didn't really meet unless you chose to make it so.

While there was a degree of trolling on the internet back in the '90s, I remember for the most part than anyone who was in a newsgroup or on a message board or on IRC was willing to talk and was there to communicate - and I remember, the occasional "character" aside, it being quite a pleasant experience. Nowadays, I can't help but feel that while there's more people online than ever, more people aren't as willing to communicate... but perversely, at the same time, they're willing to throw as much of themselves at their social media profiles as possible. Back in the '90s/early '00s, I distinctly remember everyone was (understandably, and obviously) much more guarded in that respect, but they were so much more talkative.

I have to admit, I'm not really into social media and prefer to use the internet in a far more old-skool way. While I do have a Facebook, I don't particularly enjoy using it and the majority of the time I tend to use it as an instant messenger, really. When I do browse my News Feed, it tends to be 90% of the time either full of crap that I'm either not interested in, or I just don't want to see. I only have so much patience for wading through pictures of people's dinner, "motivational" quotes, daft opinions, Jeremy Kyle Show-like nonsense, or people putting up cryptic statuses that allude to something catastrophic having happened and then when the gossipers come out out of the woodwork and go "OMG! U ok babes?" they're all like "yeh I'm fine lol". I don't have a Twitter and I definitely don't have an Instagram. I'm just not interested in using the internet to that level. I enjoy using Youtube, but definitely tend to avoid watching Vlogs or daft content, and I don't read blogs unless a search engine turns one up.

I enjoy ILX because, from the looks of it, it hasn't really changed and still has some of the old-skool internet spirit to it. I hope it never changes.

Also, Wikipedia has made searching for information so fucking boring.

aw man, i love wikipedia! it feels like a remnant from the golden age that's still relevant and useful and hasn't sold out

nah Wikipedia beneath the surface is a horrible nest of banally evil nerds playing status games with each other and doing the same old nerds-with-power shit. It's the thought-terminating cliche of the web.

If banally evil nerds decide that fact-checking and editing each other is fertile ground for playing status games, then who am I to object? I don't really care much what's under the surface, so long as the surface itself has some factual information on the subject I'm interested in, presented in an accessible format.

The argument is sometimes made that the result of those "games" is a verbal surface sanitized of opinions contrary to those of that particular nerdosphere. Plus that their criterion of "notoriety" privileges those things they think are notable while producing a loud silence on topics that they don't care about. As long as it retains its penumbra of relative objectivity, it will reinforce the hierarchies resident within the heads of those particular nerds.

Imagine a widely respected, frequently-cited source that had detailed plot summaries for every episode of HBO's "Rome," but only season-level plot arcs for "Charmed." Even if I agree with that editorial judgment (and I do), we should not pretend that there isn't power being wielded, groups of people being privileged, and voices being (however trivially) suppressed.

a verbal surface sanitized of opinions contrary to those of that particular nerdosphere

every encyclopedia has its own nerdosphere and includes some editorial power which suppresses perspectives down to that which it finds acceptable. it comes with the territory. I'm not sure that situation could be avoided without rendering the encyclopedia unusable by anyone.

xpost
i mean, yeah! it would be weird if there weren't power struggles contained within something that is open to editing by anyone and aims to provide information about virtually everything.

at the same time, it nearly always provides what you're looking for (assuming you understand what it is and use it with realistic expectations), there's no real substitute for it, and it's not sponsored by honda or rupert murdoch or john galt. so i for one am comfortable with my go wikipedia stance.

Aimless/Karl, I agree - I'm not saying there's an encyclopedia free of those concerns.

I'm arguing with the assertion that they aren't interesting concerns, or that those concerns don't matter as long as the content is useful and engaging.

To go further, imagine a widely respected, frequently-cited source having richly detailed biographical information about Nathan Bedford Forrest and almost nothing about Sojourner Truth. Reams on Alexander Pope and almost nothing about Aphra Behn. Reams on Cecil Rhodes and almost nothing about Ken Saro-Wiwa.* A rich trove of information on Jar-Jar Binks, accompanied by a loud silence on [insert something you like here].

And it's almost every ninth-grader's first stop before they start writing an essay.

These may all be defensible editorial choices, but they are choices, and it's not weird to be curious who's doing the choosing and how and why.

(* = hypothetical examples chosen off the top of my head - I am not claiming to have exhaustively read/critiqued those specific Wikipedia entries.)

FWIW I think Wikipedia almost always offers the perfect level of detail, neither too much nor too little.

I thought 2002-2006 or so was really exciting too, I loved how sites would crop up for every little niche and would kinda function like books instead of weekly-updated content farms. That was when you had a bunch of sites where people would write up reviews and grades for every single Genesis album, thought that was quite endearing. I don't know if anyone's doing that now.

i don't know if this was ever true, but i loved the era of feeling like if you just kept updating your blog (manually updated painstakingly with terrible HTML (some things never never change for me)) and somehow got the attention of the right person in an appropriate web ring, you could really make it

I think that spirit's def. still alive, with vine / youtube channel / instagram / tumblr instead of hand-coded blog.

"These may all be defensible editorial choices, but they are choices, and it's not weird to be curious who's doing the choosing and how and why."

Is wikipedia even edited in the usual sense? Does anyone co-ordinate contributions? Do editors try to keep down the length of certain articles irrespective of the quality of what's submitted?

the spirit of 20XX is alive in this absurdly deep fountain of alien material
https://alienseries.wordpress.com/

I think there was a slightly sad growing up experience for me as the internet expanded, like there was some point at which it still felt like you could tap into some special sensibility via awareness of a certain meme or video or blog, and by extension, because a blogger could be special merely for reviewing 70s jazz oddities, or for taking photos of x that look like y, or whatever, you felt like maybe you could be special too. Eventually the proliferation and multiplication of all this stuff, not to mention its institutionalization as "viral content" has a way of making you feel very unspecial, even that perhaps no human being is all that special, that we're predictable beings fitting patterns and falling into categories.

D:

http://www.victorianweb.org/philosophy/mill/crisis.html

I now began to find meaning in the things, which I had read or heard about the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture. But it was some time longer before I began to know this by personal experience. The only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from childhood taken great pleasure, was music; the best effect of which (and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art) consists in exciting enthusiasm; in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an elevated kind which are already in the character, but to which this excitement gives a glow and a fervour, which, though transitory at its utmost height, is precious for sustaining them at other times. This effect of music I had often experienced; but, like all my pleasurable susceptibilities, it was suspended during the gloomy period. I had sought relief again and again from this quarter, but found none. After the tide had turned, and I was in process of recovery, I had been helped forward by music, but in a much less elevated manner. I at this time first became acquainted with Weber's Oberon, and the extreme pleasure which I drew from its delicious melodies did me good by showing me a source of pleasure to which I was as susceptible as ever. The good, however, was much impaired by the thought that the pleasure of music (as is quite true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere tune) fades with familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermittence, or fed by continual novelty. And it is very characteristic both of my then state, and of the general tone of my mind at this period of my life, that I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations. The octave consists only of five tones and two semi-tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out, as these had done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. This source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the philosophers of Laputa [Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels], who feared lest the sun should be burnt out. It was, however, connected with the best feature in my character, and the only good point to be found in my very unromantic and in no way honourable distress. For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own. I felt that the flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself; that the question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures. And I felt that unless I could see my way to some better hope than this for human happiness in general, my dejection must continue; but that if I could see such an outlet, I should then look on the world with pleasure; content, as far as I was myself concerned, with any fair share of the general lot.

man alive, it's not that "no human being is all that special".

i think there may be two things going on. either very few humans are special and it is difficult to find them, hence we start to believe no one is special; or we are special but it is difficult for us to figure out what makes us unique from the rest, and worst of all, we are taught to suppress our uniqueness because we are led to believe that we must conform to society's rules. so we feel ashamed at whatever makes us feel different from the rest. homogeneity is the name of the game.

so we see a popular blog and think, oh nice, i like to do that, as well. and johnny boy goes and sets up a blogspot on the very same subject because he sees other people really love it. but no one knows about johnny's interest in ancient or mediaeval concrete poetry.

xp, that is great!

I agree that 2002-2006 was the best time. I loved Diaryland and the Flock browser.

either very few humans are special and it is difficult to find them, hence we start to believe no one is special; or we are special but it is difficult for us to figure out what makes us unique from the rest

I'd say very few human beings are special in the sense that they clearly have gifts that are rarely matched when compared to all the other 7,500,000,000 human beings out there.

However, that global framework is highly artificial and not very reflective of our actual reality, which plays out in a much smaller setting, within which we may be seen as genuinely special. Our importance is better measured by those whom we meet, speak with and affect in our daily lives. Take us away and there is a hole in the fabric of our personal community which cannot be quickly or easily filled.

If you think you need to be a world famous genius to be special, I'd suggest you are belittling yourself needlessly.

Maybe the most special people are those who don't think they are so special. The world is full of special individualists who are really just selfish and insecure jerks.

see, i just don't believe in drawing a line between some notional past and the present, between me as a child twenty years ago and the children of today. because knowingly or not (in my case certainly not), the trolls of twenty years ago like me set the stage for the really obnoxious trollfaces of today.

i also don't believe in an inevitable narrative of decline, although for security reasons i suspect the internet has gone past the event horizon. things get worse, things get better, things get worse again. online discourse is generally pretty bad right now, but stuff we can't predict right now will come along and disrupt the current paradigms. always does.