As much as I really liked using IRC back in the day, I still think I spent way too much time on it. I mean you got to know the people there, and after a couple of years most discussions were like office conversations. Plus the takeovers, the trolls, the noobs, the never ending screwing around with the bots, etc.
I've never done much newsgroups because I didn't like public speaking without anonymity.
ICQ and others were like today's WhatsApp and hangout. I didn't use a single interface for them at the time, and still don't today, I don't see a big difference.
Today, I'm off Facebook, I barely follow twitter at all. I'm fine with reading hacker news, and other tech news aggregators.
I think you can lament on the disappearance of RSS, but to me, that's just about the main issue.
I guess the big difference between then and now is that we used to control better what we opted in. Now we're more force fed.
I think a lot of the nostalgia is a result of being uncomfortable dealing with people now being the "insiders" rather than the users. It's much easier to call out the new generation of users or large companies and praise old things than actually creating something relevant for today.
I've played around with creating a relevant version of things like usenet, but at the end of the day it wasn't something I wanted to work on. A large part of the work is correcting for flaws of the Internet that most "hackers" won't recognize. And while you could certainly overcome those problems, I don't think the end result would be worth it. Much of the "hacker crowd" these days aren't, in my opinion, motivated by naive curiosity and shallow idealism (like it used to be), but forced nativity to further their own interests and a opinionated demeanor. That's why many of these alternative services don't work out. Because they aren't motivated by creating something that is nice to use, but to satisfy the convoluted criteria of the creators.
Good points, especially the last point. I approach "internet" differently these days.
I have twitter for high freq thin data, reddit for a bit more dense information~. For deeper information I could read serious journals, books. But I rarely need that, or am not capable of digesting it.
The force fed thing is inherent to the change of importance and structure of the web.. Remember when Google was an entry point to the mess and not the conductor ?
> ICQ and others were like today's WhatsApp and hangout.
That's why they were awful. When they died or stopped being popular you lost all your contacts and had to start from scratch somewhere else. With open protocols you don't have that issue at all.
> As much as I really liked using IRC back in the day
You don't have to speak in channels to make use of IRC. I use it for private chats (I know it's not "private", but that's better for me than using any proprietary client and IRC has clients on every platform).
Great point about Twitter and FB not having the "I've seen this" flag (although they probably have this info for their "engagement metrics"), it keeps people addicted and returning. I remember being glued to Twitter during the Mumbai terror attack, but the way it was designed, it was an endless stream of the same info, repeated. And spam, since bots add trending hashtags to their junk messages. I guess it's like cable news' rolling coverage, but instead of the same info repeated every hour, we can now read the same thing every second...
I just don't get Facebook anymore, and I've never enjoyed Twitter. I understand they can still be useful tools for finding out some news quick, or sharing pictures of your kids with grandma. But is there anything online that is even close to what Myspace and early facebook were like? People seem to have forgotten what it was like when these were tools to augment your actual social life.
How about implementing an RSS interface on top of the likes of Twitter and Facebook by screen scraping? Would have to take authentication of course. Then we could consume it via RSS readers just like the good ol' days. Does that already exist? I would pay for that.
With Facebook I scroll down until I see something I've seen before, then I stop. Doesn't seem very hard, and I imagine its what most people do. If I want to revisit older things then I keep scrolling, but that's almost never the case.
My own theory about why our ability to focus on what we want to on the internet is Attention Capitalism. Our attention is the latest resource to be exploited by capitalism, and each company is attempting to control what we focus on for their profit. I've noticed this trend; very little software let's me control what information I see anymore. It's almost all controlled by some algorithm making me see what they claim I want to see.
> It's almost all controlled by some algorithm making me see what they claim I want to see.
The algorithm is known as "doing what users want". Very popular with companies and even open source projects nowadays. It works like this: you do some "analytics" of your product, or look what sells for others, assume it reflects what users want (and the things that are missing are obviously not wanted by users), and do those.
This algorithm ignores the fact that a lot of the time, users don't get any way to express preferences. Users buy/use what's available and what's popular. Through this algorithm, producers make choices for the consumers, and then use statistics to justify them.
With all due respect, what changed since the 56k days (which I remember fondly as well) is that people showed up. Before that, the only users on the internet were early adopters. It's unreasonable to expect 'those people' to go away.
I don't think that's all of it. The Internet used to be these networks that we could, through tools, arrange to be around us. We'd have our e-mail network and our Usenet network and our IRC network, and we have ways to view all those things that aggregated among different e-mail servers and different USENET groups and different IRC channels, and gave us a view around How We We Engaging With The Content (e-mail for one-to-one or one-to-many longform discussion, USENET for many-to-many longform discussion, IRC for short-form discussion, both one-to-one and many-to-many). Now, instead of forming the center of our own Internet experience, there's these silos -- Twitter, Facebook, Slack -- and we form a network around the silo instead of our networks having us at the center.
Now, having large number of people makes many of the features of these silos more desirable, they're not unrelated. But if you could find a way to scale up the "me-centric" view of the web to modern needs, then everyone -- early adopters and the mass audience -- would both benefit, I think.
Go read old IRC logs, it's pretty "meh". You can join mailing lists where there mostly "old schoolers", which is also pretty "meh". The people or the conversations where never that exciting. It was all about the context of being exposed to something emerging. You were chatting with people from the other side of the world while most people had barely read a foreign newspaper. I'm sure one could have similar experiences today, but it's unlikely to be in a text interface among adults with $3000 laptops.
The Internet is decentralized. It doesn't matter that all the 13 year olds are congregating on Club Penguin or whatever; we can set up our own communities. That's why HN is great (and other small communities). It's intrinsically hostile to the wider internet simply by virtue of the subject and the format of its content.
No, but we can advocate for tech world equivalent of user/dev apartheid. Equal people, seperated, segregated internets, so we can milk the cow, while still enjoying salad.
If only it where not for those meddling open devs, distributing all the nice things among the clueless.
Elon Musk said that as time passes, technology continuously degrades, not improves, if people don't make a hard effort to keep improving it. The Egyptians knew how to build giant pyramids, and forgot how. The Romans built fantastic aqueducts, and forgot how. We built vehicles that landed on the moon in the 60s, and the next vehicle we built could only go into earth orbit, and then we no longer even had a vehicle that could do that.
Today, for some reason, everyone thinks that writing software for a platform on a platform on a platform with no interconnecting standards or protocols is a great idea. Instead of trying to improve people's lives, we're just making things needlessly complex, buggy, and bloaty. You need 8 gigs of ram minimum just to browse the web, and god forbid you want to do something like back up your data. I was just in a meeting where nobody could get Google's video conferencing to work.
Instead of building internet technology, we build web technology. The web is harder to write software for. It's an ephemeral, inconsistent, difficult thing. But if we try really hard, we can turn the tide on the unnecessarily complex box we've forced ourselves into.
The proposed fixes are good ideas, but they're bandaids on axe wounds. There are much deeper problems going on that won't be fixed by a feature add or a pivot. We need a re-evaluation of all internet-based technology, how we develop it, how we incorporate it into our lives, and what we want as a society from it.
I'm skeptical the Egyptians simply "forgot" how to build giant pyramids (especially as pyramid construction seems to be well-documented today). It seems more likely that the age of pharoahs ended and giant pyramid construction was no longer an important skill. Technology hadn't "degraded", it had adapted.
Just like we didn't forget how to build lunar vehicles, we just decided that it wasn't worth it in its current state. It's still very possible to do another moon landing, it will just cost a ton of money that corporations won't risk and governments won't spend without a clear political goal like the old space race.
Space technology isn't degrading, it's becoming more cost-oriented. A SpaceX rocket only reached orbit but it was relatively very cheap. Cost efficiency helps space technology reach more people and create greater impact, ultimately making the technology more valuable to society.
It's the same with the web. You say that the web is bloated "instead of trying to improve people's lives" but the reason the web platform is so heavy is because the platform is rapidly adding features and APIs and tools that make it easier for developers of all skill levels to make complicated applications. Letting more developers make stuff in less time improves people's lives. Maintaining backward compatibility at the cost of bloat also improves people's lives.
Society has been constantly evaluating the web and it has consistently reached the same conclusions: RAM is cheaper than developers, a slower platform with a bigger audience is worth dealing with over multiple native platforms, and weird legacy stuff is fine if it means we can run 15 year old websites.
This is partly what weboob (http://weboob.org) wants to solve, or at least work around. Its goal is to pull the web out of browsers (hence the name):
- each website is handled by a module that does all the scraping, or uses the api if needed
- each module provides one or more capabilities, such as "list an account transactions" (typically for your bank or your mobile provider) or "receive and send messages" (such as HN or reddit or tinder)
- applications plug into those capabilities and give the user functionalities, regardless of the website. You can list the schedule for your bus just as well as the schedule for carpoolings.
One of the applications is actually a daemon with the capability to send and receive messages (with threading and all) and sends messages to the email adress of your choice; you can also configure it as an smtp mta, which means you can use any mail client and interact with all your discussion websites without ever opening the browser.
Obviously this is not a perfect solution for OP's problems, but it seems to me it's going in the right direction. Oh and it doesn't stop at websites; I use it for sending RSS feeds to my email in the background.
The technology and concept are interesting, but the branding is a non-starter. Even if you forgive the overall project name, the individual applications are worse. They include:
- QFlatBoob
- QHandjoob
- Boobcoming
- Boobsize
- Flatboob
- Wetboobs
This naming convention undermines the project's potential. I can't take this to my boss & colleagues. I don't want it on my github profile or my resume. I don't want to talk about it at my meetups.
I suspect that you are surprised and disappointed to find that naming objections are the dominant response to your project. I assume you want the project to find a broad audience and didn't name the project badly on purpose. So let me try to explain why you're getting this reaction.
1. Boob jokes are juvenile.
They remind me of school buses full of sweaty pubescent boys, drenched in Axe body spray and crudely trying to discuss sex. I already lived that once and I really don't want to go back. Leave it on r/blunderyears/
2. Boob jokes sexualize needlessly.
Sex is a wonderful, healthy part of life. People's bodies are beautiful. But sex is also distracting. You don't want to be thinking about sex when you're trying to focus on building software. It's just counterproductive.
3. Boob jokes undermine community.
THIS is the biggest problem. By naming all your software after bad boob jokes, you make it very uncomfortable for women to participate in your project. Imagine a woman with great Python skills and a desire to improve the web finds your project. Do you want her thinking about how 14 year old boys talked about her adolescent body, or do you want her thinking about what cool applications she can build with you?
======
I hope you take this feedback in good faith and rebrand the project. I'd love to see it succeed.
PS. I'm writing this from the USA. It appears that weboob is developed out of France. Cultures are different, maybe this is more ok in France. But in the US, we're really trying to avoid this kind of thing.
Interesting. I've thought basically the opposite for years. At one point it seems that the web was standardizing, more applications were able to run in the browser, things like XUL were developing; but then along came mobile devices and things split apart into Apple and Google siloes, and every company started to need to hire (extra) mobile developers to develop special apps. I've been waiting for the equivalent of a standard mobile "browser" to re-unify all the apps. We had mouse click and drag events, etc., already; is it not possible to add other user interactions -- such as finger swipes or device rotations -- as a standard across "devices", as browsers were doing for (desktop/laptop) computers?
Perhaps some form of decentralized hosting to offload the costly aspect of hosting an online community to its members? The percentage of people with access to ample broadband connections at home is increasing constantly, and bittorrent proved that distributing large amounts of data amongst peers can be done without centralized hosting.
It would be pretty neat if everyone could simply buy or configure some low-power hardware (like a router in both size, cost, and energy consumption) and have that become their internet 'home'. When participating in a community that supports the protocol used, that device simply allocates an amount of bandwidth and does its share of distributing content to the swarm. All a community would need is a central place to host the data needed to get started. Anyone could set up a new community with a minimum of means.
If technique used is standardized (and open) and gained popularity, service providers could even create hosting packages that do the hosting of your internet 'home' for you for a small monthly fee, so you don't have to bother with setting up your own device (although you could, and should always be able to).
This kind of concept probably exists of course. The challenge lies in getting it both technologically feasible for mass-scale adoption, and simple enough for anyone to participate. Still, doesn't this make sense for a future were we won't be as depended on a handful of commercial silos?
Did we get to this point of fragmentation due to smart phones and their walled garden philosophy? People stopped making applications for the sake of interoperability. ... if RealAudio™ was founded today it'd be king.
Or is facebook to blame? John Gilmore famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- he was wrong, censorship just has to wait for the right monopoly to appear. And with the success of monopoly interoperability becomes its casualty
I'm not saying we should get back to IRC or to NNTP.
I am. Not in the sense of go back to using them for everyting (they're still there if you want to), but int eh sense of building some new protocols on those existing foundations. NNTP was really good given its technical limitations. TBH I think part of the secret of Facebook's success is that it hews to the same ethos of standardization and simplicity, as opposed to myspace which quickly feel victim to its own customizability and ended up being as chaotic and hard to navigate as the web itself.
"Nowadays we have people instead of topics. I have nothing against people, but maybe, if I follow a great software architect, I'd like to hear what he's got to say about software, not about other shits."
That's so true. I want to follow some people on Twitter because sometimes they tweet very useful things, but the amount of "noise"/tweets I don't care about is too high. Tons of people put very good info on Twitter because is quick and easy compared to writing a blog post.
Yeah, I'm old as well. Things change. Not for the better maybe, but you can't turn back the clock.. the only way forward is to make something new and better.
"There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilivy, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
Anonymous publisher, as quoted by Hamilton Holt, Commercialism and Journalism, 1909.
Maybe what people want is a centralised web, not a "good practice" web ? This is not what I want but as a matter of fact, that may be what majority wants.
I wonder how devs/techies people think they know the truth for other people.
What changed a lot of things are modern apps and their new features : push notifications, infinite scrolls (attention killer) or adding a f... emoji (I miss smileys personnaly).
The rest is just filling empty boxes about what people want/need : a chat for friend, a chat for work, a single feed and not 10's of website to search to have a single information. All I think is missing is local web, all is considered as world and then maybe local, people don't talk to each other in the bars, they prefer now to use Tinder and Facebook to insult themselves.
I think this is related to monetization, since the web gets "louder" to attract advertising consumers. Most companies are actually advertising companies and the users are just part of the product (sold to advertisers). Maybe we need more paid services - and the will to pay.
I'm thinking about creating a hierarchical forum like the usenet, but I'm sceptical whether this would earn enough money to work in the long run.
I'm very much for this. I have five messaging apps, two email clients, three file storage apps and a news reader all on my iPhone - just to stay in touch. It's hard to stay organised when businesses use different technologies across different platforms and there's no single place just for "Messages".
I don't care how the message is sent, I just want to make sure it gets to the right person.
The solution was in front of us all this time. It's the semantic web. What was missing is an accessible client, and it will be available soon.
Imagine one giant unified semantic decentralized database of everything. Add smart contracts, quantified self, intent inferring, and binary input (à la Tinder or Akinator). Organize this on a timeline, so that your OS becomes a task management system. That's it.
Unfortunately, my strategy is to target kids that haven't yet be corrupted by current communication paradigms. I think 5 to 12 year old is the sweet spot. Older people will be able to use it, but I don't know if they'll be able to grasp the full potential. Only time will tell.
Whenever I come across a new Twitter handle I think of following I first run it through http://www.tweetstats.com. I check one simple data there:
Number of tweets per day (tpd); and also maybe tweets per month (tpm)
If the handle is churning out more than ~10 tweets per day I tend to stay away. Because if even a couple of hanldes I follow crosses 30 tpd or so my feed will pretty much become pointless unless I am glued to my feed all the time and I would miss a lot of good content.
Another big problem is repeated content as the article suggests - I follow a quite some literary Twitter handles and longform handles. Everyday I come across just too many tweets that link to the same article. What is worse sometimes the same handles tweet about the same articles repeatedly (to get more views I reckon) with different texts. I usually end up unfollowing many of those handles and that means I actually going to miss a lot of content that I would have otherwise liked but in a moderate dose, at a slower pace.
I request my friends/family members to remove me form there WhatsApp broadcast lists and after sometime I simply tell them if they don't stop with that daily "Good Morning/Evening" forwards and all that crap I am simple gonna block them. I wish WhatsApp let me remove myself from all the broadcast lists I am added to or let me choose that I don't want to receive broadcast messagegs at all (if they can't/won't make it granular).
I've completed given up on Facebook. Sometimes it shows me posts that I've marked hide like five times. It never keeps my friends photos, self written text posts on top but all those video and silly article shares, those annoying and mostly unfunny memes. In fact they have a limit I guess (haven't really used them in a while) and the personal posts get drowned in the mass market noise.
Maybe the problem is we talk of Internet being decentralised but we are all try to find that decentralized Internet at any one place or vert few places - be it Twitter, or Facebook, Google. We are adopting the social networks, content sources wrong... maybe.
The internet is definitely getting noisier but I don't get his "solutions", especially about "blogging". What does it ever mean "I think most of us won't discuss about so many totally unrelated different fields. It's a change of mentality - we shouldn't write something just because we can."? He makes it sound as if there are tons of irrelevant blogs out there spewing nonsense and polluting people's experiences, while in fact the people who blog are still the absolute minority. I particularly agree with the idea of "blog small things", since no matter how "small" your experience might seem to be, there could well be somebody else facing a similar situation who can be helped by your article. Also I don't understand his "blog with focus" thing. Many of us are not writing blogs as commercial projects. We are just blogging whatever we find might be helpful to others and in this sense there's absolutely no point in overthinking it. Just blog whatever you want. I get that he might be unsatisfied with the rambling comments in many websites and forums. But come on, what does that have the least bit to do with blogging and "write just because we can"?
[+] [-] d--b|8 years ago|reply
I've never done much newsgroups because I didn't like public speaking without anonymity.
ICQ and others were like today's WhatsApp and hangout. I didn't use a single interface for them at the time, and still don't today, I don't see a big difference.
Today, I'm off Facebook, I barely follow twitter at all. I'm fine with reading hacker news, and other tech news aggregators.
I think you can lament on the disappearance of RSS, but to me, that's just about the main issue.
I guess the big difference between then and now is that we used to control better what we opted in. Now we're more force fed.
[+] [-] ueroc|8 years ago|reply
I've played around with creating a relevant version of things like usenet, but at the end of the day it wasn't something I wanted to work on. A large part of the work is correcting for flaws of the Internet that most "hackers" won't recognize. And while you could certainly overcome those problems, I don't think the end result would be worth it. Much of the "hacker crowd" these days aren't, in my opinion, motivated by naive curiosity and shallow idealism (like it used to be), but forced nativity to further their own interests and a opinionated demeanor. That's why many of these alternative services don't work out. Because they aren't motivated by creating something that is nice to use, but to satisfy the convoluted criteria of the creators.
[+] [-] agumonkey|8 years ago|reply
I have twitter for high freq thin data, reddit for a bit more dense information~. For deeper information I could read serious journals, books. But I rarely need that, or am not capable of digesting it.
The force fed thing is inherent to the change of importance and structure of the web.. Remember when Google was an entry point to the mess and not the conductor ?
[+] [-] ekianjo|8 years ago|reply
That's why they were awful. When they died or stopped being popular you lost all your contacts and had to start from scratch somewhere else. With open protocols you don't have that issue at all.
> As much as I really liked using IRC back in the day
You don't have to speak in channels to make use of IRC. I use it for private chats (I know it's not "private", but that's better for me than using any proprietary client and IRC has clients on every platform).
[+] [-] mirimir|8 years ago|reply
Back in the day, I posted to newsgroups via Mixmaster remailers :) Now one can use VPNs and Tor.
[+] [-] lyra_comms|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netsharc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pigo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foreigner|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partycoder|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vosper|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yosito|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
The algorithm is known as "doing what users want". Very popular with companies and even open source projects nowadays. It works like this: you do some "analytics" of your product, or look what sells for others, assume it reflects what users want (and the things that are missing are obviously not wanted by users), and do those.
This algorithm ignores the fact that a lot of the time, users don't get any way to express preferences. Users buy/use what's available and what's popular. Through this algorithm, producers make choices for the consumers, and then use statistics to justify them.
[+] [-] chongli|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwyers|8 years ago|reply
Now, having large number of people makes many of the features of these silos more desirable, they're not unrelated. But if you could find a way to scale up the "me-centric" view of the web to modern needs, then everyone -- early adopters and the mass audience -- would both benefit, I think.
[+] [-] ueroc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plaguuuuuu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vosper|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigiain|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pica_soO|8 years ago|reply
If only it where not for those meddling open devs, distributing all the nice things among the clueless.
[+] [-] peterwwillis|8 years ago|reply
Today, for some reason, everyone thinks that writing software for a platform on a platform on a platform with no interconnecting standards or protocols is a great idea. Instead of trying to improve people's lives, we're just making things needlessly complex, buggy, and bloaty. You need 8 gigs of ram minimum just to browse the web, and god forbid you want to do something like back up your data. I was just in a meeting where nobody could get Google's video conferencing to work.
Instead of building internet technology, we build web technology. The web is harder to write software for. It's an ephemeral, inconsistent, difficult thing. But if we try really hard, we can turn the tide on the unnecessarily complex box we've forced ourselves into.
The proposed fixes are good ideas, but they're bandaids on axe wounds. There are much deeper problems going on that won't be fixed by a feature add or a pivot. We need a re-evaluation of all internet-based technology, how we develop it, how we incorporate it into our lives, and what we want as a society from it.
[+] [-] themacguffinman|8 years ago|reply
Just like we didn't forget how to build lunar vehicles, we just decided that it wasn't worth it in its current state. It's still very possible to do another moon landing, it will just cost a ton of money that corporations won't risk and governments won't spend without a clear political goal like the old space race.
Space technology isn't degrading, it's becoming more cost-oriented. A SpaceX rocket only reached orbit but it was relatively very cheap. Cost efficiency helps space technology reach more people and create greater impact, ultimately making the technology more valuable to society.
It's the same with the web. You say that the web is bloated "instead of trying to improve people's lives" but the reason the web platform is so heavy is because the platform is rapidly adding features and APIs and tools that make it easier for developers of all skill levels to make complicated applications. Letting more developers make stuff in less time improves people's lives. Maintaining backward compatibility at the cost of bloat also improves people's lives.
Society has been constantly evaluating the web and it has consistently reached the same conclusions: RAM is cheaper than developers, a slower platform with a bigger audience is worth dealing with over multiple native platforms, and weird legacy stuff is fine if it means we can run 15 year old websites.
[+] [-] ukyrgf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] txmx2000|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rakoo|8 years ago|reply
- each website is handled by a module that does all the scraping, or uses the api if needed
- each module provides one or more capabilities, such as "list an account transactions" (typically for your bank or your mobile provider) or "receive and send messages" (such as HN or reddit or tinder)
- applications plug into those capabilities and give the user functionalities, regardless of the website. You can list the schedule for your bus just as well as the schedule for carpoolings.
One of the applications is actually a daemon with the capability to send and receive messages (with threading and all) and sends messages to the email adress of your choice; you can also configure it as an smtp mta, which means you can use any mail client and interact with all your discussion websites without ever opening the browser.
Obviously this is not a perfect solution for OP's problems, but it seems to me it's going in the right direction. Oh and it doesn't stop at websites; I use it for sending RSS feeds to my email in the background.
[+] [-] edraferi|8 years ago|reply
- QFlatBoob
- QHandjoob
- Boobcoming
- Boobsize
- Flatboob
- Wetboobs
This naming convention undermines the project's potential. I can't take this to my boss & colleagues. I don't want it on my github profile or my resume. I don't want to talk about it at my meetups.
I suspect that you are surprised and disappointed to find that naming objections are the dominant response to your project. I assume you want the project to find a broad audience and didn't name the project badly on purpose. So let me try to explain why you're getting this reaction.
1. Boob jokes are juvenile.
They remind me of school buses full of sweaty pubescent boys, drenched in Axe body spray and crudely trying to discuss sex. I already lived that once and I really don't want to go back. Leave it on r/blunderyears/
2. Boob jokes sexualize needlessly.
Sex is a wonderful, healthy part of life. People's bodies are beautiful. But sex is also distracting. You don't want to be thinking about sex when you're trying to focus on building software. It's just counterproductive.
3. Boob jokes undermine community.
THIS is the biggest problem. By naming all your software after bad boob jokes, you make it very uncomfortable for women to participate in your project. Imagine a woman with great Python skills and a desire to improve the web finds your project. Do you want her thinking about how 14 year old boys talked about her adolescent body, or do you want her thinking about what cool applications she can build with you?
======
I hope you take this feedback in good faith and rebrand the project. I'd love to see it succeed.
PS. I'm writing this from the USA. It appears that weboob is developed out of France. Cultures are different, maybe this is more ok in France. But in the US, we're really trying to avoid this kind of thing.
[+] [-] xerophyte12932|8 years ago|reply
I think the service would reach a greater audience with a simpler name.
(Btw I still don't get how the creator wants me to read the name and what it means)
[+] [-] kwoff|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irq|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicky0|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cronjobber|8 years ago|reply
Yup, that's exactly what made the internet great in the good old days.
But how do you monetize users who get to use their favoirite tools instead of yours?
[+] [-] Freak_NL|8 years ago|reply
It would be pretty neat if everyone could simply buy or configure some low-power hardware (like a router in both size, cost, and energy consumption) and have that become their internet 'home'. When participating in a community that supports the protocol used, that device simply allocates an amount of bandwidth and does its share of distributing content to the swarm. All a community would need is a central place to host the data needed to get started. Anyone could set up a new community with a minimum of means.
If technique used is standardized (and open) and gained popularity, service providers could even create hosting packages that do the hosting of your internet 'home' for you for a small monthly fee, so you don't have to bother with setting up your own device (although you could, and should always be able to).
This kind of concept probably exists of course. The challenge lies in getting it both technologically feasible for mass-scale adoption, and simple enough for anyone to participate. Still, doesn't this make sense for a future were we won't be as depended on a handful of commercial silos?
[+] [-] brad0|8 years ago|reply
People adopted schema.org so their search ranking improved. Adding markup for machine consumption doesn't make sense otherwise.
We need to build systems that benefit both parties.
[+] [-] alanfranzoni|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jalfresi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kraftman|8 years ago|reply
Just as it has everything MSN used to have ill have it shut down, rename itself and its website and start all over again.
[+] [-] cyphunk|8 years ago|reply
Or is facebook to blame? John Gilmore famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- he was wrong, censorship just has to wait for the right monopoly to appear. And with the success of monopoly interoperability becomes its casualty
[+] [-] anigbrowl|8 years ago|reply
I am. Not in the sense of go back to using them for everyting (they're still there if you want to), but int eh sense of building some new protocols on those existing foundations. NNTP was really good given its technical limitations. TBH I think part of the secret of Facebook's success is that it hews to the same ethos of standardization and simplicity, as opposed to myspace which quickly feel victim to its own customizability and ended up being as chaotic and hard to navigate as the web itself.
[+] [-] tovkal|8 years ago|reply
That's so true. I want to follow some people on Twitter because sometimes they tweet very useful things, but the amount of "noise"/tweets I don't care about is too high. Tons of people put very good info on Twitter because is quick and easy compared to writing a blog post.
[+] [-] stuartd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|8 years ago|reply
Anonymous publisher, as quoted by Hamilton Holt, Commercialism and Journalism, 1909.
https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...
[+] [-] Mooty|8 years ago|reply
What changed a lot of things are modern apps and their new features : push notifications, infinite scrolls (attention killer) or adding a f... emoji (I miss smileys personnaly). The rest is just filling empty boxes about what people want/need : a chat for friend, a chat for work, a single feed and not 10's of website to search to have a single information. All I think is missing is local web, all is considered as world and then maybe local, people don't talk to each other in the bars, they prefer now to use Tinder and Facebook to insult themselves.
[+] [-] cryptos|8 years ago|reply
I'm thinking about creating a hierarchical forum like the usenet, but I'm sceptical whether this would earn enough money to work in the long run.
[+] [-] willhackett|8 years ago|reply
I don't care how the message is sent, I just want to make sure it gets to the right person.
[+] [-] miguelrochefort|8 years ago|reply
The solution was in front of us all this time. It's the semantic web. What was missing is an accessible client, and it will be available soon.
Imagine one giant unified semantic decentralized database of everything. Add smart contracts, quantified self, intent inferring, and binary input (à la Tinder or Akinator). Organize this on a timeline, so that your OS becomes a task management system. That's it.
Unfortunately, my strategy is to target kids that haven't yet be corrupted by current communication paradigms. I think 5 to 12 year old is the sweet spot. Older people will be able to use it, but I don't know if they'll be able to grasp the full potential. Only time will tell.
[+] [-] balladeer|8 years ago|reply
Another big problem is repeated content as the article suggests - I follow a quite some literary Twitter handles and longform handles. Everyday I come across just too many tweets that link to the same article. What is worse sometimes the same handles tweet about the same articles repeatedly (to get more views I reckon) with different texts. I usually end up unfollowing many of those handles and that means I actually going to miss a lot of content that I would have otherwise liked but in a moderate dose, at a slower pace.
I request my friends/family members to remove me form there WhatsApp broadcast lists and after sometime I simply tell them if they don't stop with that daily "Good Morning/Evening" forwards and all that crap I am simple gonna block them. I wish WhatsApp let me remove myself from all the broadcast lists I am added to or let me choose that I don't want to receive broadcast messagegs at all (if they can't/won't make it granular).
I've completed given up on Facebook. Sometimes it shows me posts that I've marked hide like five times. It never keeps my friends photos, self written text posts on top but all those video and silly article shares, those annoying and mostly unfunny memes. In fact they have a limit I guess (haven't really used them in a while) and the personal posts get drowned in the mass market noise.
Maybe the problem is we talk of Internet being decentralised but we are all try to find that decentralized Internet at any one place or vert few places - be it Twitter, or Facebook, Google. We are adopting the social networks, content sources wrong... maybe.
[+] [-] narrator|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SZJX|8 years ago|reply