Monday, February 12, 2018

On being Internet-homeless

I am not homeless in any real sense of the word, what I refer to here is that I no longer have a primary landing page for Internet browsing.

In the very beginning, my landing page was the University of Kansas.  My browser was Lynx, text only, and everything I could think of doing was available from the University of Kansas website.  At that time, the list of all Internet websites was a 30k text file.  We passed it around.  Hypertext transfer protocol (http) was just one of the available protocols, we used ftp a lot, and archie and his cousin veronica were also useful.  What we consumed was software and text files.

That right, we used to download text files to read.  It was the 1980's.  All the TV channels on cable fit from 2-13, with channel 3 for the VCR, channel 6 was CNN, 8 was WGN, MTV was 10.  A phone number was associated with a place, not a person.

At the same time, long distance phone calls were expensive and there was no easy public access for the Internet.  Clever hackers from the ham radio community helped develop FidoNet, a store and forward network of computers connected by modems over analog phone lines.  I supported FidoNet node 1:382/70 for a number of years, until DSL internet because affordable and within reach of residential budgets.

Then came The Well.  That's where I encountered John Barlow, who was trying to humanize online communities with norms of respect and politeness.  I learned much from The Well.  I miss it fondly.

Once The Well spun into irrelevance, being taken over by matters of scale they did not anticipate, we had Slashdot.  The Slashdot comment moderation and blogging system changed everything, they had taken the best parts of The Well and turned it into a PERL script.  It caused community to happen.  Social media was born.

What has happened to Twitter and Facebook in 2016 happened to Slashdot in 2004.  I jumped to a clever and well-written blogging interface called Multiply.  Unfortunately, Multiply had no business case, it had no way to make revenue, it was still too early for Google-text ads, so it died after being harpooned as a peer-to-peer trading service in Asia.

The community I was a member of at Multiply fractured at the same time, some went to Reddit, others to Facebook.  Reddit was far too vicious for me, so I settled into Facebook, and started a Twitter hobby.

Now I have to leave Facebook.  I can't be a part of what that has become, and Twitter is not a community as much as it is an organized concauphony of curated sources of trivia.

So, I don't have a home page.  This is kind of new territory for me.  I have nowhere to just go to get on the Internet.

The New York Times (and other papers) are too stoic.  YouTube is too random and chaotic.  There's not a true community in either location.  That's weird.