The old digg.com
Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them?
My ealiest memories were pre-net, on Prodigy and AOL, long before they were 'net connected and could email each other. I learned what connectivity was at 2400 baud. I didn't discover BBS's until much later, around 1993-4,and was at 14.4k at that point. I never really understood fidonet, but played some of the BBS games and downloaded some warez from a "31337" BBS with a backdoor whose login was "elite". At least the sysop didn't call himself "Crash Override".
...is something I still say out loud to myself occasionally. For example if I hear a good point made on the radio.
Like WTF? What were they thinking?
https://web.archive.org/web/20050326092609/http://slashdot.o...
You mean you don’t enjoy the current -
> With Joe Biden’s campaign in freefall amid concerns about his declining mental health and new sexual assault allegations, remember this: it’s a good time to note that Bernie’s on the ballot.
- front page news Reddit?
I do love HN, but it is still part of YC and allows some commercial activity and I feel at times goes overboard on flagging certain kind of discussions and comments (I'm not referring to obvious trolling and unsavory language).
They've done a really good job of rehabilitating their image. Having grown up at the time, it's hard for me to see Gates and them as different than that. It does make me somewhat sad that we've embraced a future where the bad guys won, that the schoolyard bully that tried to stifle progress is now succeeding by adopting that which they tried to strangle int he cradle.
Ubuntu 20.04 also looks to be an extremely usable desktop that just works.
I really dislike how political/personal everything gets around here, even the tech discussions, and the tech discussions themselves are full of breathless hype and hot takes that don't really make sense, too many people that learned something last week and then rave about how x and y changed their life. I don't know what early Slashdot was like, though, how it compared.
Instead, Clay Shirkys essay on a group being it's own worst enemy appears to be acting out in yet another online forum.
That is a reason I like HN. I am not a startup guy, so that crowd and the resulting discussions on HN are basically an R&D shop for the rest of us. They can go do the bleeding-edge, so we can sit back, see what works, and take that on as leading-edge.
> Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them?
They stopped having web pages and started having Xangas/Friendsters/Myspaces that had the networking feature built-in.
Dense layout with links to all the new reviews with grades, by section (music, film, etc), no infinite scroll. Quite a few other websites were like that, you could get the gist of all the new things at a glance, now they all feel dumbed down
Digg was cool for its time but it was way overly simplistic. The frontpage was dominated by a really narrow set of power users because of how the system worked and the comments were single threaded. It was kind of a hot mess.
It is both crazy that K Rose missed out on selling it for $250 million and that's all it was worth. Had he played his cards right, it could have been Twitter and valued at tens of billions of dollars.
If you want to get into great sites that I miss, I really miss Reddit from 2005-2010, maybe a little later. Do I get a prize for using Reddit when it had no comments? The programming related discussions were good. HN's too ideological and big for them now, and r/progamming is a clusterfuck of people being assholes to each other and talking about shit we were arguing about 15 years ago.
Those early sites had a feel that I can only imagine the pre-Eternal September net had for older people.
It's funny what you say about Digg because Reddit is that now, the same few powermods control almost everything. It feels more like reading a bunch of press releases than anything authentic nowadays, though there can be good content in smaller subs that have nothing to do with the front page.
Web Rings! That bought back some memories of adding webring code snippets to my website. I agree they are a fantastic idea and I'm sad they seem to have gone away. Wikipedia claims that they were (effectively) killed by Yahoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
Beyond webring sites, most of my early browsing time was spent on web forums (devoted to poetry and conlanging, my key interests). It's sad-interesting to see that of the various software packages used to run those sites, only phpBB seems to be under active development for its original purpose.
We don't talk about Usenet ...
And meta moderation. Some of the smartest discussion was at the +5 Troll level. Very liberal and self governing. When getting meta-mod rights, it felt like a civic duty to do my part.
Plus friend, friend-of-friend, foe, etc traffic lights. It was way ahead of it's time. Then got sold, many moved out including myself - never liked Digg, old or new - and now with potentially an order of magnitude of technology people (hardware, software, other stuff) compared to 2000, a shadow of it's former self.
Also, kuro5hin, which Reddit has captured in theme in niche subs.
