<story><title>The old internet died and we watched and did nothing</title><url>https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/how-we-killed-the-old-internet</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>api</author><text>You&amp;#x27;re forgetting spam. Spam destroyed all those first generation federated systems. IRC survived because it was too niche for spammers to target much but spam is the primary thing that killed Usenet and email as a truly open system.&lt;p&gt;The closed systems were better able to fight spam because they could easily ban people and IPs.&lt;p&gt;On a deeper level spam, &amp;quot;brattish&amp;quot; commercial sites, etc. all come from when money got involved.&lt;p&gt;The old Internet was mostly noncommercial. Money changes everything.&lt;p&gt;Even on the new sites I saw a massive shift when e.g. it became possible to monetize YouTube videos. All the sudden everything became about engagement and controversy and got big and divisive and dumb and flashy.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately we must adapt or perish. There is no going back. I think all new systems must be designed with the trial by fire of spam and other profit motivated attacks in mind from the start.</text></item><item><author>Timberwolf</author><text>I thought similar. To me what Buzzfeed are calling the &amp;quot;old Internet&amp;quot; here is something I very much remember bemoaning as the &amp;quot;new Internet&amp;quot; in which dedicated protocols such as NNTP and IRC got displaced by brattish commercial upstarts whose web-based versions had 10% of the quality-of-life features and about 5% of the community etiquette. However they displaced everything that came before them because you could embed images, have an animated avatar and (most importantly) not have to delve into the world of finding a client of choice and connecting it to your ISP&amp;#x27;s news servers.&lt;p&gt;What I find myself missing more than anything else is that news server was something &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; paid for, either as part of an ISP package, as a dedicated service or your university tuition fees. The commercial model was purely the provision of that resource - not selling your data, nor being a vector for targeted political ads. There was no incentive to make the basic mechanics of discussion worse or promote flame wars in the name of &amp;quot;engagement&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;monetisation&amp;quot;, and while I&amp;#x27;m sure the smaller community size played a part things seemed to bump along with a far greater degree of civility and allowance for misunderstanding.</text></item><item><author>rasengan</author><text>The old internet died long before these centralized services appeared. The old internet was when we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites, and we were truly free in the wild wild west.&lt;p&gt;Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do.&lt;p&gt;The old internet is dead (for now) and it looks more like the BBS era today. But we innovated past that then, and we will innovate past that now.&lt;p&gt;I am greatly looking forward to all of the decentralization work that is in progress from the numerous people on HN and the internet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>takeda</author><text>IRC has mechanisms that make dealing with spam easy.&lt;p&gt;Usenet on the other hand required cooperation from all providers. Actually I blame Google for killing Usenet. They used Microsoft&amp;#x27;s EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). They acquired DejaNews, renamed it to Google Groups, provided a gateway that allowed everyone to use Usenet. This introduced a lot of spam to the network, but whenever someone reported it, they did nothing. Eventually they introduced their internal groups, and shifted search in a way that it got hard to use Google Groups for searching Usenet posts.&lt;p&gt;They did similar thing with XMPP (Jabber). When they introduced Google Talk, their service was interconnected with the other XMPP servers. Once it got popular they discontinued it and introduced Hangouts (then later iterations) Hangouts was still connected people could see each other being present people on Hangouts could message anyone, but people on other XMPP couldn&amp;#x27;t message people on Hangouts. It didn&amp;#x27;t even show an error. This made many users switch to Hangouts to continue taking with their friends.&lt;p&gt;They attempted to do the same thing with email, but were less successful (since many big companies are also providing the service), this was done through introducing various anti spam measures. You now have to jump through various hoops (SPF, DKIM, RBAC) to have your service still reach Google uses. It didn&amp;#x27;t matter that I used the same IP and domain for 15 years never had spam sent from it, but suddenly my emails started being silently classified as spam without any warning.</text></comment>
<story><title>The old internet died and we watched and did nothing</title><url>https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/how-we-killed-the-old-internet</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>api</author><text>You&amp;#x27;re forgetting spam. Spam destroyed all those first generation federated systems. IRC survived because it was too niche for spammers to target much but spam is the primary thing that killed Usenet and email as a truly open system.&lt;p&gt;The closed systems were better able to fight spam because they could easily ban people and IPs.&lt;p&gt;On a deeper level spam, &amp;quot;brattish&amp;quot; commercial sites, etc. all come from when money got involved.&lt;p&gt;The old Internet was mostly noncommercial. Money changes everything.&lt;p&gt;Even on the new sites I saw a massive shift when e.g. it became possible to monetize YouTube videos. All the sudden everything became about engagement and controversy and got big and divisive and dumb and flashy.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately we must adapt or perish. There is no going back. I think all new systems must be designed with the trial by fire of spam and other profit motivated attacks in mind from the start.</text></item><item><author>Timberwolf</author><text>I thought similar. To me what Buzzfeed are calling the &amp;quot;old Internet&amp;quot; here is something I very much remember bemoaning as the &amp;quot;new Internet&amp;quot; in which dedicated protocols such as NNTP and IRC got displaced by brattish commercial upstarts whose web-based versions had 10% of the quality-of-life features and about 5% of the community etiquette. However they displaced everything that came before them because you could embed images, have an animated avatar and (most importantly) not have to delve into the world of finding a client of choice and connecting it to your ISP&amp;#x27;s news servers.&lt;p&gt;What I find myself missing more than anything else is that news server was something &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; paid for, either as part of an ISP package, as a dedicated service or your university tuition fees. The commercial model was purely the provision of that resource - not selling your data, nor being a vector for targeted political ads. There was no incentive to make the basic mechanics of discussion worse or promote flame wars in the name of &amp;quot;engagement&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;monetisation&amp;quot;, and while I&amp;#x27;m sure the smaller community size played a part things seemed to bump along with a far greater degree of civility and allowance for misunderstanding.</text></item><item><author>rasengan</author><text>The old internet died long before these centralized services appeared. The old internet was when we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites, and we were truly free in the wild wild west.&lt;p&gt;Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do.&lt;p&gt;The old internet is dead (for now) and it looks more like the BBS era today. But we innovated past that then, and we will innovate past that now.&lt;p&gt;I am greatly looking forward to all of the decentralization work that is in progress from the numerous people on HN and the internet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>u801e</author><text>&amp;gt; The closed systems were better able to fight spam because they could easily ban people and IPs.&lt;p&gt;Unless the server allowed one to send email or post to usenet without having to log in first, then there&amp;#x27;s no reason why the provider couldn&amp;#x27;t simply disable the account or block the originating IP from connecting to the server.  From what I can tell, the providers weren&amp;#x27;t interested in blocking spam by blocking IPs or disabling accounts.  This is very similar to the robocall problem and phone companies not really trying to fix it.</text></comment>