On HN with its dang moderation that is often praised, I have noticed a tendency to ascribe Slashdot's fall to poor moderation. That wasn't actually how things happened, though.
Slashdot's decline started in the years around 2004 because of a site redesign that was taken very badly by the community, and the sale of the site to new owners who began to make all kinds of annoying changes with a view to monetizing. A lot of longtime users bailed out. It was only due to this loss of the productive participants that the site seemed to be taken over by low-quality posting.
I remember the site UI change, but I was mostly grumbling because it looked even more 1990's post-redesign. I didn't realize that cause people to leave en masse. I'm surprised UI was more important than discussion, esp. when the UI change wasn't really that dramatic, IMHO.
The UI changes weren't especially popular, but I don't think they were the cause of a mass exodus. I think it's more that Reddit was gaining in popularity. Slashdot posts had to go through their "editors," who were kind of laughingstocks who regularly let dumb mistakes through, reposted old articles, and regularly posted low-quality, flamebaity articles and thinly disguised advertisements. People put up with it since the articles were largely an excuse for a discussion topic. But then Reddit bypassed this and let people submit things directly. And the quality of Reddit posts and comments was a lot higher since it drew a more cerebral crowd in those early days, which made it more of a threat to Slashdot than the more mainstream Digg (which it also replaced ultimately).
For me, HN suffers in the comparison to Slashdot, because HN is an example of the arguably overmoderated internet of today. Slashdot had a vibrant culture of troll posting. It wasn’t just dumb one-line slurs or whatever, which no one would want to see. Rather, it was often longform text crafted to a downright literary quality, to the point where many Slashdot regulars would choose to browse their discussion threads at -1 to see those posts. Some of those troll posts ("BSD is dying", etc.) became part of the subculture, it helped create a real feeling of community around shared cultural references.
Yes, on HN one can toggle "showdead", but that is rather hidden away in one's user preferences, so very few people do it. Anyone creating an original troll post might also get a chewing out from dang for trying. In my view, this makes HN more similar to Facebook or Reddit that have very heavy-handed moderation compared to Web 1.0.
On the contrary, I feel that "troll culture" is (along with commercialization) one of the things that has ruined the net. It's basically a form of bullying, and over the years, as bullies do, they've steadily escalated in their trolling.
Harmless pranks from the 4chan crowd morphed into harassment campaigns like Gamergate and Pizzagate, then to 1/6 [edit: the storming of the US Capitol].
Anyone disingenuously complaining that their "freedom of speech" is under attack because they or their hero got booted off Facebook, Twitter, or some small forum, needs to learn to distinguish between private website operators and the government.
> Anyone disingenuously complaining that their "freedom of speech" is under attack
"Freedom of speech" is a philosophical concept, not a legal principle. You seem to have it confused with the US-specific "First Amendment", which is the one that only applies to the government.
I personally see a big problem with social media banning trans-people (Facebook), or declaring that the whole LGBT crowd is inappropriate (Livejournal, Tumblr). I think it's a problem when scientists sharing Covid-19 information get banned for being ahead of the official CDC/FDA guidance (Twitter)
Maybe the solution isn't legal, but I still think it's bad that we have a massive media apparatus that can wipe out any voices it disagrees with, and which is fairly eager to use that against people like me.
Good points. Scale and centralization make the world of Facebook et. al. a much thornier problem. They've become Too Big To Fail™, with all that entails. Not to mention antitrust issues, but that's a digression in itself.
I see some hope in federated systems, and, for that matter, old-school forums that have survived. Usenet still sputters along, but it's not what it was before spammers ruined it.
Definitely agree, HN has been downvoting too much lately and it used to be the case that contrarian views were rarely downvoted, and it was reserved for rude comments or baseless allegations, personal attacks, etc. Today, HN sucks just like any other major discussion board. Conformism is real and downvotes are a tool used to silence and discredit real opinions and insights - although they might be uncomfortable and challenges your long held views - that's exactly the thing that I love about the old internet.
HN is held hostage by people with a particular ideology and conformity, not just political, but across the board.
The lack of images limits the ability to create Gemini content on many subjects, however. Just off the top of my head I could name discussion of artworks, some travel writing (no, it isn't all just inane "influencer" shots – bicycle tourers and overlanders like getting some photos to have an idea of what the terrain to traverse is like), building stuff, classical philology where the original edition of a text as it was typeset has to be examined, and so on.
These are subjects for which there are already many minimalist HTML blogs around, but the lack of image support on Gemini makes it impossible for them to support that ecosystem.
Nothing about Gemini prevents you from linking to images.
Furthermore, nothing prevents Gemini clients from eagerly fetching linked images (based on the URI) and displaying them inline- if the user chooses such a client.
Being strictly text-oriented is simply the default, and a default that must be taken seriously by anyone writing a page.
Both Markdown and Gemini's markup are missing some semantic tagging useful for screenreaders. The disabled should not be second-class citizens in any new web community.
Take ISO-639 tagging for words in a foreign language different from the main language of the document. For example, real should be pronounced by the screenreader differently in English and Spanish, coin differently in English, French or Irish, etc. A screenreader might be able to use some heuristic to identify the language of longer snippets of text, but for one-off words it doesn’t have enough data to work with. HTML has the lang="" tag to guide screenreaders, but I am not aware of any Markdown equivalent.
How common is the use of these affordances in practice? I'm just now discovering that it's possible.
I'll say this: it's very cool that it's possible to make text more accessible to people using a screenreader than it is to people reading it raw. For instance, if I were to refer to the real real, I would do what I just did, and italicize the word to indicate that it's foreign. Someone who knows how Spanish works can interpolate from "italic real" and get /real/ instead of /ri:l/ out of it, and that's basically what a screenreader would do, literally say "italic real".
I'm not convinced that accessibility demands that words be pronounced properly under such circumstances. Note that someone completely ignorant of Spanish would just see "italic real" and maybe think it represents emphasis, so the sighted are not at an advantage here.
Again, it's pretty cool that there's a way to do it in HTML! Semantic markup is neat, even if it doesn't get used much.
Foreign-language words used in a text are not always set in italic. For example, the author might use a proper noun (so unitalicized) like the name of a minor city in a foreign country that isn’t going to be in the screenreader's dictionary. In these cases, language tagging helps the screenreader output something intelligible instead of garbage.
Generally, use of this tagging is obligatory to meet accessibility guidelines. If in practice people don't use the tags so much, this is a problem. Again, the disabled should not be second-class citizens on the web or any medium that aims to substitute for it.
I don't know how common it is, but I do it. I encode foreign terms as <span lang="de" title="above everything">über alles</span>. How the client deals with that is up to the client, but most of the browsers I've used will show the title attribute if you hover over the term. I also style the <span> tags with the language attribute.
Portals are still sometimes made to make it easier to discover independent content, you aren't the only one concerned about this. However, the problem is that independent creators often stop paying for hosting or domain registration at some point, so any manually created directory eventually abounds with 404s.
I would suspect that even fans of independent content would be turned off by browsing through a large amount of Wayback Machine links, because Archive.org insert their own markup, and often the images in posts don't get archived.
People like using the Wayback Machine when they know that certain content used to exist, but not necessarily to discover new things unfamiliar to them.
Roman Catholics monks often being "real people who have real conversation" is largely the result of certain monastic orders being created with laxer rules on interacting with the secular world. Historically, and still today within stricter Catholics orders and in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, monks and nuns are encouraged to limit conversation on secular themes. Definitely one can go and interact with the monks or nuns, but that interaction is best limited to conversation on spiritual themes, discussion of work that has to be done, or just enjoying the silence together.
If you move to the USA from the developing world or even Eastern Europe, regardless of what job you do your salary immediately soars above whatever you made in your country of origin. Taxation on many consumer goods is also likely to be lower. (For example, electronics can be expensive elsewhere due to high import duties or VAT.) Of course, cost of living in the USA is also much higher, but nevertheless lots of immigrants feel that they have moved up in life just because of the higher wages and consumeristic lifestyle now available to them.
That would be terrible for anyone living there, as would the environment, and the environment of every country around that country, etc.
Regulation = Civilization, Taxes = Civilization, Safety Net = Civilization
Now that doesn't mean you want a regulatory nightmare, the USA has real problems with license monopolies and city regs in some areas, but you also don't want unrestricted capitalism like the USA has that destroys people, society, and the common environment. Europe has a lot of work to do as well but at least they grasp this fundamental concept. The middle ground between these two is always hard to nail perfectly.
The article says that people need not just political engagement but contemplation, standing outside the present moment and communing with something beyond. But is that a view that Americans now necessarily share? One concept that maybe has become quietly mainstream is materialism. (By that, however, I am not claiming that supporters of whatever American political camp are literally Marxists.) That is, any kind of moment away from present-day political struggles might be viewed as capitulation or as callously ignoring the plight of the oppressed.
As a non-American, I get the impression that this is a growing trend from it appearing even on e.g. internet literature forums in the last few years: poets writing abstract work at a distance from the political concerns of the present and seeking a certain timelessness and glimpse of eternity (think T.S. Eliot in “Burnt Norton”) sometimes get called, by the Americans present, socially irresponsible and doing nothing for POC.
Interesting to get some context here on Oltenia. Coming from Transylvania, where water is good and plentiful (often coming straight down from the mountains), I was shocked at how parched many of the villages I cycled through were, and how bad the water from the wells they relied on often was.
To add insult to injury, we're also destroying the trees in the cities and along roads, and people are quite happy with that. I've literally had conversations that went like "Why do we need all these for? You have a drink or two, crash into a tree and die. They should cut all of them".
For some context, Romania has about the highest road fatalities per capita in the EU.
They wanted to cut the trees along the roads in France too for similar. They wanted to remove the trees up to a certain distance which I can't remember.
The issue is that whole forests are being removed. If they weren't, removing a bunch of trees along the roads for safety wouldn't make that big of a difference.
But trees in cities is a different beast, though, and I think it's criminal to remove those, especially in Romania where, thanks communism, there aren't that many trees to begin with.
There was more illegal deforestation after '90 because the commies would have thrown perpetrators in jail without appeal. After the communist regime fell, new black market deals were struck with corrupt forest rangers, logging mafias were formed, forests in the country of Harghita and elsewhere were cut down. There was even one policitian named Attila Verestoy¹ who was nicknamed the chainsaw of god (a pun on Attila the hun's nickname) specifically because he was part of the Harghita logging mafia and has facilitated illegal deforestation. His and other logging kings' legacy lives on. There you have it.
I don't think the cities were in such a bad place before the Revolution, this is a more recent thing. They "prune" the trees by cutting pretty much every branch, then a couple of years down the road they cut them off because they've died. I've seen this happen many times.
You're right, of course, those in forests and those in the cities bring different benefits, but most people don't seem to care enough about either.
Being an influencer is an enormous amount of work. Sure, one could build a brand around games, but maintaining that brand is constant effort, even though the audience rarely sees it.
Slashdot's decline started in the years around 2004 because of a site redesign that was taken very badly by the community, and the sale of the site to new owners who began to make all kinds of annoying changes with a view to monetizing. A lot of longtime users bailed out. It was only due to this loss of the productive participants that the site seemed to be taken over by low-quality posting.