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The internet in 1990 -- holy smokes!
iphigenie:
I still thing the internet from today, especially social media, has a lot to learn of the ecosystem of these old days - especially usenet. Features we had in newsreaders to find, save, organise posts - filters, killfiles, saving, collate into collections - are sorely missing from . And some of the idioms of the days could do with a revival (standard format for collections, finger, plan files, geek codes) perhaps as microformats :)
We have more problems with noise, trolls, fame-seekers, topic hijacking, fakeries etc. now than we had then, and the way communities had evolved to handle it could be useful patterns even now :)
nudone:
If you're a professional economist I'd suspect it's starting to get a bit embarrassing...
-40hz (May 04, 2011, 07:07 AM)
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Well said. The highest paid practitioners of pseudo science on the planet. No better at predicting the economic future than staring at sheep's entrails.
Maybe I just mean bankers - but I'm sure they follow all the latest trends in economic theory.
zridling:
I still think the internet from today, especially social media, has a lot to learn of the ecosystem of these old days - especially usenet. Features we had in newsreaders to find, save, organise posts - filters, killfiles, saving, collate into collections - are sorely missing from.-iphigenie (May 04, 2011, 02:17 PM)
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Have to agree there. Usenet is so efficient. Not designed to be pretty, just efficient. Too bad more people didn't build better newsreaders over the past two decades. NewsLeecher was/is the bomb.
40hz:
I was there, and I don't remember the graphics, just the text. But man did that suck!
-zridling (May 03, 2011, 05:09 AM)
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I was there too. And I don't remember those graphics either. Although my memberships were with The WELL, Compuserve, and Delphi - so maybe I missed something (yeah right!) by not having a Prodigy account?
But I didn't think it sucked at all. I liked the pure text environment.
When AOL first came out, I (along with most of my recycled BBS cohorts) was skeptical and scornful of all the graphical 'junk' being displayed. 'Real' online users were hard core text and keyboard command aficionados. To paraphrase Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring: Our online service has no graphics. Our online service needs no graphics!
And we all called AOL, along with it's pretty client software, a passing fad suited only for small children and those that were unable to read.
In the immortal words of Rod Stewart: "Look how wrong you can be." ;D
40hz:
I still thing the internet from today, especially social media, has a lot to learn of the ecosystem of these old days - especially usenet. Features we had in newsreaders to find, save, organise posts - filters, killfiles, saving, collate into collections - are sorely missing from . And some of the idioms of the days could do with a revival (standard format for collections, finger, plan files, geek codes) perhaps as microformats :)
We have more problems with noise, trolls, fame-seekers, topic hijacking, fakeries etc. now than we had then, and the way communities had evolved to handle it could be useful patterns even now :)
-iphigenie (May 04, 2011, 02:17 PM)
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Oui, je suis d’accord. :Thmbsup:
I think you're spot on about the benefits to be gained if the internet users copied the best practices that came out of Usenet community development. Because that might provide the community that Usenet had - and most of the web lacks.
To some extent, most of our current community problems could be expected however. Because the web and Usenet came into existence in very different ways.
Usenet participants developed a sense of community because they were actively involved in bringing Usenet into existence. They were participants rather than simple users. But such large-scale community development doesn't seem to happen very often on the web. Most of today's internet is released as a fully developed experience which is then 'sold' to a target audience.
As a result, much of the web has devolved into a form of interactive entertainment, designed for an audience rather than as a vehicle to serve as a source of community. Some of the more successful ventures (Twitter, most MMORPGs, etc.) have succeeded in bringing about a faux community experience of sorts. But these "user experiences" have more in common with affinity groups or poker clubs than they do with the classic notion of an online community.
I guess you could say that that the reason a sense of community is so sorely lacking is because there's not a global community for the web like there was for Usenet.
And there's also a lot of truth to the adage: Nothing good ever survives being discovered.
The Native Americans probably felt much the same way when they realized the whole world would soon becoming to their shores. :)
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