Episode: 3865
Title: HPR3865: When did the Internet get so boring?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3865/hpr3865.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 06:53:55

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3865 for Friday the 26th of May 2023.
Today's show is entitled, when did the internet get so boring?
It is part of the series' information underground.
It is the 280th show of Klaatu, and is about 32 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is thoughts about the modern worldwide web.
Hey everybody, this is Klaatu.
As many of you have probably noticed, the internet is kind of boring now.
You go to a search engine, you type in a thing, and if there's nothing on that thing, then
the search engine gives you a bunch of irrelevant responses anyway.
You go to a search engine, you type in a thing, and there's a bunch of stuff on that
thing.
Your search engine gives you all of the things that have been paid for by some big company
to put information about that thing in your head.
That is possibly what you want.
Sometimes you just want to go to a web page for a thing that you want information on,
and if someone's paid for it to be there, then that's fine.
Other times you actually just kind of want other people's views on a thing.
You want a person to tell you their thoughts about something, and while you can buy that
sort of thing, if you're a big company, you can sponsor that.
You can give a home for those kinds of content.
You can do that.
You can try to get people to contribute to that entity.
I'm thinking in terms of, for instance, good reads, a site, it's a website, and people
contribute to good reads by writing reviews of books for good reads, and most reviews usually
read like real people who have actually read a book, not all the reviews, but some of
the reviews kind of read like actual authentic thoughts about a thing, and that's kind of
refreshing, and in a way that's why I'm on the internet.
That's a big part of why I'm attracted to the internet because I can get people's thoughts
about a thing, and ideally they're informed thoughts that come from a place of actual experience.
I was using good reads as an example, and I kind of left it as it's a pretty good site,
and I didn't mean to leave it there, actually, because good reads actually isn't a very good
site.
I used to be on it.
I'm not on it anymore, or maybe I am on it, but I'm not active on it.
I don't remember if I was able to close my account or whatever, but I think I read somewhere,
and this is as spurious, this could be, who knows.
I think I kind of read somewhere that, speaking of coming from a place of experience and information,
but I think I read somewhere that good reads had been bought by Amazon, which is probably
true because everything's been bought by Amazon or Disney, so whatever.
Let's say it is true, but let's say it's not true.
Either way, Amazon is probably scraping good reads for reviews to put on to Amazon.com for
books, because at one point in time, Amazon primarily was a bookseller, I think.
The point is that even something like good reads, and again, I'm using it as this weird
example as if, though, it's like this thing of purity that has been corrupted.
I don't know anything about good reads, it's something that came to my mind.
Good reads existed, and you kind of realize at some point, while you're putting in your
reviews for books and keeping track of the books that you've read and the ones that you
want to read, you realize at some point that, oh my gosh, I'm feeding into a machine
that I don't even own, like, why am I doing this?
I'm essentially working for this company for free, and then, you know, the counterpoint
to that valid counterpoint is, well, that company is providing, some company is providing
a service to you.
It's got a server, it's got a platform, it's got a little CMS, it's got a thing that
you can put data into, and you can keep track of the books that you've read, or the books
that you want to read, and the additions that you've read, and your thoughts on those
books.
And that is legitimately a useful service, like, that's why I originally signed up to
good reads, because I thought, you know what, I can't remember what I've read from week
to week, much less from year to year, so I need a place to keep track of that.
Oh, here's a website here, I'll just sign up for it and use that.
And for a long time, for a couple of years, like, that was a very, that worked for me,
that was great, that was useful for me.
But again, at some point, at some time, during my usage of that, I realized I was actually
populating someone else's database, and I didn't know who that someone else was, I
didn't know what they were going to do with the information that I was putting in as frivolous
as it may be.
I just, you just don't know, and it's not that I think that they have anything nefarious
in mind, I just happen to think that I don't know who it is.
I don't know these people, I don't know why I would be using their service, when I could
instead just, I don't know, enter my thoughts into a text file.
But you know what, the problem with a text file is that it lives on your computer, and
that's as far as it goes.
Not that it needs to go any farther, necessarily, but then again, when it comes to book reviews,
I mean, it's kind of fun to tell people what you thought of a book.
That's kind of the idea of like a book club, or just pop culture commentary, really.
And so then I thought, well, okay, maybe I should put that text file onto a server.
Well, I ended up doing that long story short, and I just have a bunch of text files that
I review, random stuff, and I put it on a server, I put a slap to a static file, static
site generator in front of it, and I commit my thoughts via Git, and it triggers the static
site generator to turn those text files into a web page and bang, it's on a server.
I don't know if anyone can ever find that server, it's not very well indexed, it's probably
not even very well taxonomyed to be frank, but it's there, it's online.
I feel like, hey, I'm sharing my thoughts with the world.
Great.
Pat on the back, feeling connected.
That's the thing about a network, right?
A network, in computer sense, we probably, possibly, all know what that means, and if
we don't, we could go back, we could watch, we could listen to hacker public radio episodes
about networking and things like that and figure it out.
But let's assume for the moment that we understand what a computer network is.
One computer's here, one computer's there, they're able to talk to each other, they
will listen to each other.
That's actually what a people network is, too, as it turns out, and I don't know which
term came first.
I don't know if network is a computing term that got adopted for people, or if it's a
people term that got adopted for computers, I don't know the etymology of, is that the
study of insects or words I forget?
But anyway, I don't know what network means or where it came from, but let's just say
that the network, you need two things.
You need to be able to speak, and you need to be able to listen.
Those are the two things about networking that matter.
In modern internet speak, I think we call that engagement.
So a network, a network of people, it kind of in order to be satisfying, I think it needs
engagement.
It needs, you need to be able to speak and feel like you are being heard.
And then also, I think most people in a network also want to hear other people's thoughts.
And I'm not saying like everyone, I'm not saying statistically everyone, I'm saying everyone
I want to interact with are those kinds of people who want to both speak and listen.
It's a thing about conversations.
It's just that's a good conversationalist, right?
You can speak a little, you can listen a little.
Do a little bit of both in more or less equal amounts, or maybe you could listen a
little bit more than you speak.
And people love you.
It's just, that's how conversations tend to work.
It's pretty good.
So that's what a network is.
And I feel like the modern internet, and I think a lot of people in certain circles agree
with this feeling, I think the modern internet is starting to lean towards that space of talking
a lot and not listening a whole lot.
Now I'm not saying like, oh, not enough internet websites have comment boxes.
I don't, I don't, comments aren't what I'm talking about.
I think that was a corporate sort of understanding of, oh, a conversation needs to happen quick.
Let's populate everything with comment boxes so that people can give their thoughts
right now, instantly online.
And that'll be a conversation, right?
Well, not necessarily.
I mean, you could, you can have a conversation with someone through a glass pane where you
can't actually hear each other, or they can hear you, but you can't hear them.
You could say, I'd love to know your thoughts.
And then you could just let people shout, you know, without sound at you.
And you could claim that that was a conversation, hey, they could hear me.
And I asked for their feedback and they gave me my feedback.
Never mind that I, I couldn't hear them.
And that's, I think essentially what a comment section on a website tends to be, I mean,
at a certain point you get that sort of mass capacity of comments where it just starts
to be a noise generator.
You can't possibly process all of that feedback.
And so it becomes, it becomes functionally meaningless.
It's, it's people talking back at you, but you're not hearing it because there's just
too much of it.
And that's what the internet tends to in, in the comment fields, at least that's kind
of what it encourages.
It's just like quick, spit out some words and never come back to follow up on that.
Just, just dump your thoughts here and then go away.
And that's not a meaningful conversation.
So the internet, I think, leans towards being able to speak a lot.
It, it, the, the companies that own websites are speaking at you because I mean, they want
to sell stuff to you.
So they're going to speak at you.
They might pay people to write articles for them or to, to post content for them, to create
content for them.
And, and that, that works okay.
And I guess eventually they might use AI to generate that content.
So you really, really feel like you're being spoken to.
And then you're told, hey, you can speak to because here's a comment field.
Please comment.
Let's share your thoughts, smash the like button, share your thoughts.
And so you do that.
You type in a bunch of thoughts.
And so now you've spoken.
So two people have spoken.
Has a conversation happened?
No.
Because there was never any act of listening.
And you could even take the same, or the same process to like those chat bots on a lot
of websites.
Now, look, you can even speak like to a real chat field and, and it will talk back to you.
And sometimes it's, you know, it's obviously an automated thing and it kind of self-identifies
as that.
Other times it's, it's this sort of entity that you're not really sure.
Like is it just a really well performing chat bot that continually thanks you for your
patience and assures you that it is eager to help you?
Or is it a person reading a script that tells, that tells the person to type in this phrase
and then that phrase?
You, you can't really tell and functionally there's no difference.
The point is there's no conversation happening there.
Little while ago people used to say things like, oh, the internet is being destroyed, the
the great places like geocities are being taken offline and what a travesty.
And I always got confused by that because I was never really a geocities fan.
I thought, yeah, okay.
So a bunch of sites that are coded really poorly and that are probably abandoned after
like the first five posts is going away.
Like big deal.
Why does that matter?
And there are other places too that people kind of pine over, longingly and, and, and
wistfully thinking, oh, I can't believe that's going away.
And in retrospect now, and I'm talking about retrospect like a year ago, because that's
when people were complaining about it or maybe two years ago, I realized that what they
were actually saying, what they were actually lamenting wasn't the, the website itself.
It's not geocities.whatever it was that they are lamenting going away.
They were lamenting.
I mean, whether they knew it or not, I think they were lamenting the loss of that, that
true interactivity, that true sense of conversation where you could go to someone's little fan
site on some random thing that you thought you were the only person in the universe who
knew about.
And there's this fan site with like all these screenshots from that thing and, and a
episode listing of all the different episodes.
Sorry.
Now I'm starting to go down my own little imaginary site that on, on Lex for the record.
But anyway, you know, there were, there were these places on, on the internet and you
just thought, this is crazy.
Like who is this person?
And maybe you couldn't respond directly to them.
Maybe you, maybe you could, maybe they had an email address or something.
But maybe you couldn't.
And so your method of conversation was to, to spin up your own website about this, a
similar subject or that encompasses that subject.
And, and so now you're partaking in a conversation in this kind of roundabout way, but you're also
forming these like little clusters.
And of course, I mean, the more that happened, the more things like web rings happened where
people with similar interests would just link to each other's websites.
Just, here you go.
There's a link.
If you, if you liked my site on this subject, click the web ring, you'll go to another site
on the same subject.
That sort of thing.
So in a weird way, it was less of a conversation than what we have now.
I guess by letter of the law and yet, and yet in spirit, it is so much more of a conversation.
And it's also a lot more participatory and interactive.
So I've been thinking about this a lot lately because the modern internet doesn't seem to
understand that real conversations don't consist of just shouting at a wall.
So what's left?
What's online right now where there are conversations happening, like meaningful conversations?
I really badly want to say like mastodon.
I kind of want to say, oh, there's mastodon.
It's federated.
It's so cool.
Look, mastodon is federated.
It is really cool.
It's, it's, it's a great piece of technology and the community is a community of people.
So there's a lot of different kinds of people there.
And you can go on to mastodon and you can talk.
You can talk to people directly.
You can have real conversations about real topics.
I just got a bunch of help about little plastic miniatures, how to glue them together properly
because I was, I bought, I bought four different kinds of glues and I'm just not sure which one
is the right one.
So I just asked mastodon and I got a bunch of responses back and they were really, really
useful and I still can't glue things together.
I mean, it was really useful.
I made contacts.
I, I, I, I, my paths crossed with people.
I would not have otherwise encountered.
So that was a very cool experience.
But it is, it does have a sense of kind of being very ephemeral.
So I don't know how, how, how unique that is on, on the internet.
I mean, it is unique and it's important and it's significant and, and I don't want to
undersell the power of sort of communal chat.
And I think that that can be what mastodon is, mastodon and, and matrix.
These in a way and a sense for me, they're the new IRC.
They're that kind of place where you'll have some really good interactions, but it, it
might be ships passing in the night to borrow a phrase about IRC.
It might be something that, you know, you, that, that happens and then you move on.
And that's fine.
I mean, that's a legitimate form of connection, right?
I mean, we, we, we, many of us experience that kind of thing at technical conferences or
game conferences or whatever group activity you go to, you might meet someone, you might
interact and then you part ways and you never think about each other again, much less
talk to each other again.
And that's okay.
Or maybe you do think of that person, but you don't know how to contact them.
All of that stuff.
That's, that's fine.
That's okay.
That's totally legitimate.
But I'm thinking more about community, I guess, like permanent, you know, semi permanent
type communities that are building on top of each other and sort of expanding with one
another.
So, I mean, hacker public radio is a really great example of a thriving conversational community.
Not all the conversations are great.
Not all of them are easy, but they're being had and people are making connections and people
have made friends.
And I know a lot of hosts by name, only by name, but, but I feel super close to them because
I listen to their content and I hear the weird things that they do in their shows or the
cool things that they do in their shows and, and that's cool.
And I can respond to them in a roundabout way again.
And well, actually I can respond to them directly through comments, but I, I feel like the
more valuable way to, to respond to people for my money is to just record a show that,
sort of iterates on an idea heard in another show or, or that maybe it doesn't even iterate.
Maybe it's just for, for no good reason your show about that bass fishing made me think
about the time that I built a bookshelf for myself.
Let's record a show about that.
So there's, there's lots of opportunity, I think, in hacker public radio to not capture
but preserve the original, or, I don't know if it's the original intent of the internet,
but, but the internet that I know and love, the weird thing about it I guess, if, if, if
there's not enough weirdness on HBR, it is that it's, it's audio based and that I don't
really associate all that much with the internet.
I mean, I do because podcasting is a thing I, I quite like podcasting, but in terms of
like the internet, you think of it as, at least I think of it as a website, your website
that you go to, you visit, you experience that website and then like I say, maybe you
go off and write a blog post or something of your own.
But I mean, I think that is kind of just my filter, right?
Because I think of, I very much tend to think in terms of long form, quote unquote, articles
or blog posts.
I mean, that's just kind of like the way that I, that, that's what I find value in because
I like, you know, opening a web browser and, and finding a cool article to read in
an afternoon or, or while waiting for my order at the cafe or whatever.
So that's just maybe my filter.
So anyway, Hacker Public Radio, really good.
Mastered on nice, nice little IRC replacement, matrix, nice little IRC replacement.
And then there's two others that I've been using a lot more lately.
And I say using by, meaning I've been trying and those are go for and Gemini.
So if you don't know what go for is, it actually whether or not you know what go for is,
it is an early internet protocol or I guess I should say an early protocol, I don't know
if it technically like predates what we know as the internet.
I don't know.
I was never really in to go for, you know, back when go for was actually like the thing.
But apparently go for, you know, for people who were much more technical at that point
than I was.
Hacker was kind of a competitor to HTML or it was trying to solve the same, I guess problem
or feel the same need as HTML was or should I say HTTP.
And that would be that someone has a server and wants to share content in a read only way
to a bunch of people.
Go for was one way you could do that.
HTTP is also a way you could do that.
And those are basically answering the exact same equations.
Now obviously HTML has gone off in a direction very much all its own.
And go for has very much stayed as far as I can tell exactly the same.
Like again, I don't know because I wasn't there.
But go for doesn't seem to have progressed a whole lot.
Go for I have found to be really clunky and really, really frustrating, frankly.
I think a lot of people enjoy Go for partly for the nostalgia.
And I don't know if everyone enjoys it for the nostalgia of, oh, I remember when Go
for was was the protocol that I used.
But I do think some people see Go for and think now that is beautiful because it's really
simple and clunky and computing is supposed to be beautiful and clunky.
And so let's go let's go experience that again.
Now I don't really love clunky and beautiful computing.
I like easy and beautiful computing.
So Go for to me is I'm not in love with Go for but I do appreciate what it delivers which
is an experience that you can you can share stuff that you have on a server in a read-only
way to people relatively simply and I say relatively because I mean it's got Go for
uses a Go for map that is what it uses well that's what it can use by default to describe
the files on a computer now you can also just point it at a directory and say look there's
a bunch of files in this directory go read all of them you can do that.
But but if you don't want to do that then you can use a Go for map file.
And the Go for map file has a really really particular syntax it uses tabs as delimitors
and it has to be a tab character if it's not a tab character it will break.
And so it it's super frustrating it really is it is it is one of the most frustrating
syntaxes that I can imagine it's just it's the worst it is the absolute worst and I hate
the Go for map file.
The sooner I can get out of the Go for map file the better the to make it even worse like
not only do you have tab only delimiting but you've got these stupid prefixes that you
have to put in front of the file types.
So if you're pointing to a file you have to put like a one but if you're pointing to
a directory then it's a zero but if it's an HTML file then it's like I don't know a
seven or something it's just it's the stupidest the worst just the absolute worst syntax.
I can't imagine a worst way to construct a map to a bunch of files on a server.
I don't know historically why you needed all that information I don't know historically
why they chose only a tab and not just a white space or some other character but that's
what we have with Go for and Go for is kind of cool I mean despite my problems that
I have with the Go for map file it really there there's a lot of nice stuff there.
You can create you can put a bunch of text files or a bunch of files for that matter PDFs
whatever other kinds of files there are in the world probably what images I guess there
are images probably audio files all of those things you can put onto a server you can
then grant access to the world to that directory through Go for and they can user could open
up a terminal launch a go for browser and go to your server and and they'll see all of
your files and they'll be able to download them or read them in the terminal if they're
just text files and so on so it is really really nice it's a relatively quick and easy way
to kind of get that middle ground between like I don't know like an FTP read only account
and and a full blown HTTP let's do a whole internet browser session that kind of thing
so so Go for is is is a really nice way to share a bunch of stuff on a server without without
all the the bloat I guess of HTTP or the administration nightmares of FTP for instance
on port 70 there are different browsers that can look at go for and it's not really easy
to look at go for through a web browser I mean it's possible you can go to proxies you
can install I think some plugins I haven't really tried lately I just use links LY in X works
great but I mean that's in a terminal but I think that's kind of a weird benefit to go
for because the it's I'm not sure how much I want my content to contribute to the internet
these days I mean I'm not like philosophically opposed to it I'm just saying I'm not sure that
I have that need all that much I mean I obviously do because I have websites on HTTP but in terms
of also posting to go for I don't know that that's the kind of I don't know that I care about
the the intersection of go for and HTTP I might I might at some point and you might because you
might want to read you might want to have one source of of truth as it were and then have
different avenues to look at it and that is possible like I say there are there are sites that
that translate from go for to HTTP there are ways that you could dynamically translate files from
one to the other you know on on your server like when you're posting and so on so I mean it's
a it's it's an avenue that you could take the the modern take I guess on go for is Gemini and
Gemini is also fairly annoying honestly Gemini has an index dot GMI file and it has its own special
markup because of course it does why would it do something like just reuse mark it down
no it takes mark down and then insists on certain conventions and it will refuse to display text
files that are not in GM in whatever they call it gym markup or gym markdown or whatever that can
be a little bit difficult sometimes that can cause you a little bit of trouble because you'll
you'll have a bunch of files and they're they're in markdown or they're an ASCII dock and you just
want to put them on your server and walk away nope you can't do that you have to convert them to
Gemini text or Gemini markdown rather and I have tried and I mean it could be the server that I'm
using or yeah it would have to be the server right that I was using but but I I just cannot get
Gemini to display like plain text for instance it just won't it just doesn't seem to want to do
that at least on whatever I'm running which I don't know what I'm running I'm just using whatever
SDF.org is using I haven't looked into it that much probably not a great idea to go public with my
critique of the thing not knowing even what Gemini server I'm running but there you go Gemini
has has a syntax thing that admittedly is a little bit awkward sometimes however of course
there's open source solutions to everything Gemini is open source you can get a markdown to Gemini
converter on if there's a project on GitHub you can get it from pip Python 3-m pip install MD2
the letter 2 MD2 Gemini and that'll convert your markdown files to Gemini text it is remarkably
similar and that's why I think that's what's that's what's so annoying is that the similarities are
just so so it's just so silly that one isn't the same as the other so that that's probably my actual
complaint Gemini on in every other way is it's pretty darn cool I mean it's a little bit
inconvenient because I can't figure out yet how to do a directory listing in Gemini it might not
be possible I don't know so I I'm having to add my every file that I want to be visible to the
viewer into and a dot GMI kind of index file so you know it's like I would rather just be able to
point directory and say there's all my text files go read them but that's just not something that
I as far as I can tell that's not something Gemini wants to do at least yet it's early days to be
fair so I don't know I mean Gemini I think is a little bit more slick than Gofer but it does have
its quirks and it's got a certain amount of self-imposed limitations because it doesn't want to be
or become like HTTP which I mean I can respect that so Gofer and Gemini are two solutions for
sharing things on a big network that that are not super likely to be taken over by sort of
corporate interests anytime soon or at least that's the hope and it's a great way I think to
motivate yourself to get off of HTTP onto some backwards networking groups that maybe just
don't really necessarily belong in the HTTP space or the WWW space anymore and that's refreshing
I mean it's just I don't want to reiterate the first 30 minutes of this show but I just have to
point out that the internet is really boring now it's just a it's a frightfully sort of dull place
whereas Gofer and Gemini and hacker public radio and some other places are really doing a lot of
heavy lifting to keep content sort of unique and not perfectly manicured I want to say independent
but I don't know what that really means so just it's it's something that's that's I don't know
made of people and that's refreshing I'm tired of of reading the AI blog posts or the blog posts
that may as well have been written by an AI that's depressing to me I want real thoughts I want
people talking about what they think that's what I find interesting and I think that
the worldwide web doesn't necessarily provide that as much as it used to I'm not saying it's not
on the WW at all I'm just saying it's not quite there in the in the amount that it used to be
I'm not saying that Gemini and Gofer spaces are a wealth of insightful and exciting information
I'm just saying that they exist and that they're being generated by weird people who have time
to explore alternate protocols that doesn't make any of us saints or it doesn't mean that we're
suddenly interesting or that we're that we're putting out quality content it just means that there
are alternate protocols out there that some people are using and it's fun you should check it out
if you haven't already and if you want to get involved in some other way you could always
record a show on Hacker Public Radio and continue with the conversation remember what I said
about conversations earlier it's a callback thanks for listening talk to you next time
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