> Yancey's Dark Forest
theory of the web. The “dark forest” is a place that seems eerily quiet and devoid of life. All the living creatures within it are hiding. Because “night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent.”
> The predators here are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers, reply guys, and trolls. It's unsafe to reveal yourself to them in any authentic way. So we retreat into private spaces. We hide in the cozy web.
Maggie Appleton on this blog literally says "Yancey Strickler's companion idea of the Dark Forest theory of the web".
I have a Dark Forest Theory of Hacker News. If I stay out of certain threads i dont get blasted. So i dont post in them. Hacker News is like Liu Cixin's dark forest.
i hope someone would say "as Fatneckbeard pointed out, HN is a lot like Liu Cixin's Dark Forest" not "Fat Neck Beards's Dark Forest theory of Hacker News".
I did not write 1000+ pages of books about this that became a world wide best seller and responsible for the phrase being a house hold word. I just pointed out they are similar. It is not my idea. It is not even my adaptation of an idea to a novel context. Im just pointing out something relatively obvious, because the original book is widely interpreted as an analogy for China's 996 tech startup culture by the Chinese readership which made it a success in the first place, so I'm basically making a pop culture reference. Even if I wrote a blog about it it would not make it my idea.
Liu Cixin did not come up with the Dark Forest theory. It’s been around for decades and many other thinkers and scifi authors had written about it before he did (nothing against him of course).
But that's missing the GP's forest for the trees (pun intended). Liu Cixin's work popularized the theory and phrasing by a massive amount both in comparison to the works that came before and as well as after.
The core point seems to be the flippant assignment of origination irrespective of the scale of contributions.
How is that not just as flippant an “assignment of origination”? Regardless of how Liu Cixin might have written the most popular treatment of the theory, he did not come up with it, and stood on the shoulders of many others who developed the idea over decades. I have no problem with giving him credit for popularizing the idea but calling it “Liu Cixin’s Dark Forest” is going too far.
Everyone knows the real originator of the Dark Forest theory was Chet, more specifically his cat.
(For those who haven't read Xtreme Programming, Chet would stumble into meetings that had degenerated into unproductive fingerpointing, and exclaim "Woops! My fault. WTF are we gonna do to fix it?", Even if he had nothing to do with it
Everything. Bad. Is. Chet's. Fault.
Also, anything good, is solely the work of Chet's cat.
Embracing this truth has greatly simplified my life.
If Chet did not, in fact, have a cat, then I must have fallen into another alternate universe again. Replace the animal in question with whatever you deem most appropriate.
I believe in this trend. The amount of people that can use powerful tools without any knowledge is increasing. Some might just GPT their way into creating more darkness. Greed is a nefarious beast. Always has been.
We will be going back farther than most realize. A person receiving a phone call in 1950, a telegram in 1850, a book in 1750, or a clay tablet in 8650 BCE all had confidence it was the thoughts and words of another flesh and blood human being. "Going back" does not mean pre-internet days, it means pre-distant communication days.
Let’s go back further. You can’t just limit your own personal engagements to non-electronic ones. You also need your entire network of connections to not be tainted.
Im somebody else replying to this thread. I think the predators will follow whichever troden path is to catch more and more victims in their nets. If the ocean of darknes dries up of victims they’ll adapt to land. AI technologies will, in my opinion, become more entangled with the real world. More devices are listening, seeing, labeling and categorizing and that will only explode in ubiquity. I think there will be no escape from it even in the real world.
The idea of this have me a chuckle. Instead of worring about skynet destroying all of humanity, we should be worried about them constantly asking about our car's extended warranty.
Seriously though, a real life robot is more expensive to make and run than an online one. Plus, there's nowhere for them to put "permanent" content, they'd have to talk to us one by one, or start graffitotagging ads everywhere. Any robots they did make would be obviously robots, and we can avoid them. It doesn't scale the same way.
I'd imagine it's closer to the original Liu Cixin reasons like security. Ideally you could leave your servers up on the Internet auto-updating, doing their work, and ignore all the "predators competing for attention" from Yancey's theory, but it takes attention to stay secure and keep backups.
IMHO much speculation for the little explanation provided. Do you have more information? Was it offered to the community to take over for those who may want or similar?
I don’t know who Yancy is but they have some complete lack of shame to steal someone else’s idea almost word for word and prepend their name to it. I don’t know what I could muster that absolute “I don’t care at all what people think of me” if I tried, and I have here and there I just don’t have it in me.
Cixin Liu of course. Now let me tell you about “elbigbad’s Theory of Relativity” (hat tip to Einstein who had a hand in its development). More modernly phrased: “‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’ -Wayne Gretzky” - Michael Scott
The problem is that the article was called "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet", not "Yancy Dark Forest". IMHO it's like "Ultraviolet catastrophe of book collecting" or "Gravity well of Tinder" : general scientific theory /hipothesis used as metaphor of a thing. Of course Dark Forest is not as well known as previously mentioned theories (although it was mentioned by Kurzsgesat, so who knows), but the whole thing is clearly explained in the essay, and the author is clearly stating what Dark Forest is and who created it. Also, the original comment probably mentioned it as Yancy Dark Forest, as "The Dark... Of the Internet" written by Yancy, not as "Yancy totally original idea".
Liu Cixin certainly didn’t create the concept! It’s a long standing conjecture that he wrote a novel about and provided a new name for. Whoever “Yancy” is has done nothing wrong- certainly nothing more than Liu. They even attribute to Liu in the first sentence! No reason for outrage here.
Spam did. The predators in the dark forest are spammers, and the prey are websites that allow user-generated content. Same economy, just different actors.
Depending on your perspective, hosting is/can be expensive in cost or time (server maintenance) or both
I just use GitHub README.md to host my journal. I trust GitHub shall be around in 10 years.
If I start an open source product or service, the homepage shall contain the reference manual and examples and all the documentation. It shall be one asset that can be copied and archived and replicated across servers and mirrored. It won't be a paragraph of text in hundreds of web pages but a single long document.
> If I start an open source product or service, the homepage shall contain the reference manual and examples and all the documentation. It shall be one asset that can be copied and archived and replicated across servers and mirrored. It won't be a paragraph of text in hundreds of web pages but a single long document.
A noble goal for sure, but much easier said than done. Complete documentation is harder than I anticipate.
Does anyone know how I can contact the creators of Txti? I've looked around and can't seem to find any contact information.
As a long-time user I value what they've done and would like to help. Ideally, if it's just a problem of it being too much work for them to secure against bad actors, I'd just take over the website and organize that work myself. No promises, though, I'd need to understand the problem better before committing to solving it. :)
I suspect the authors and I have a lot of values in common.
Alternatively, the authors can contact me at [removed].
Txti.es if you are reading this, can you provide a list of the websites that you had? We can still look at them via archive sites like wayback machine.
Thanks for everything. This was a beautiful concept and hopefully someone can take the mantle.
For someone that's interested in crawling all the URLs (by avoiding the 10k limit) that were backed up, I found you can add YYYYMMDD in the * of the URL to see the sites archived during a particular year, month, day etc...
Txti is fast web pages for everybody. Most of the world still does not have internet, but many websites from countries like the United States are big and complicated. This makes it hard for people with slow internet to use these sites. It is even harder for those people to put their own thoughts on the internet. With txti, anyone can use any device to share their story.
Txti was created by Barry T. Smith because he believes that high speed internet is a responsibility, not a service people buy. He got a lot of help from his friend Adam Newbold.
This is the right way to go for simple websites, and I do that, but why would I pay for something to do it for me when it's so extremely simple to use one of 100s[1] of open-source static site generators and host them on GitHub Pages, Netlify and many others completely free? Makes sense that this was a hard sell.
txti.es was free, and there's nothing in these comments, or the shutdown message, or the page from the Wayback Machine that mentions pricing. Why did you bring up paying for "something to do it for me" and hard sells?
"Github pages, Netlify and many others completely free" still require you to create yet another account. Always a pain when all you want is get a few words out. There might have been a useful goal in that it prevented spam, but today it's not even preventing that anymore.
That is not true that most of the world doesn't have internet. Multiple sources say it is about 64% by now. You should be careful about thinking the world is worse off than it is. Thinking former developing countries is worse off than rich countries is most of the time a outdated world view.
It is equally unhelpful conflating number of internet users with coverage and internet accessibility.
It is of no good to you that you have internet connection but the website or whatever doesn't load because you are only on a slow cell phone connection somewhere in the middle of Africa or India, where cheap "feature phones" are the only way to access internet (and thus government services, for ex.)
Or if you have connectivity in the capital and one or two major cities - and the remaining 90% of the country is "dark" because of missing infrastructure, both electrical and communications (many African countries).
Txti was created NINE YEARS AGO with a simple and benevolent mission: to play a part in a more globally accessible internet. Since then, the whole world has changed. Now, there is less need for web pages that work on flip phones[...]
- from the linked page, emphasis mine; presumably the about page the "most of the world does not have internet" line comes from was also created nine years ago.
Giving a valuable service away for free on the internet is like putting out a bowl of candy on halloween night with a sign that says "Be nice, please take one," and then walking away. There are a lot of not-nice people out there any nobody should be surprised when all the candy is gone in five minutes.
OK, you're not accepting new content because you don't want to host phishing, but why stop serving the existing pages? Does it really cost that much to run?
While I'm pretty sure that it can run on a small budget, I'm less sure that the owners have the time to maintain the site (a static website still needs to update the server, domain and certificates and while this can be automated to a degree it's still a lot a work).
If they are static sites and mostly text, they could be hosted directly out of freaking S3 for a pittance. There is no way a service this niche and this intentionally minimal consumes enough bandwidth to make that painful.
It's called an invitation, just in case anyone who has more info, or the owner, wanted to reach out. If you assumed, apropos of nothing, that's a comment on HN were my only actions on the matter, well, maybe don't do that.
Perhaps in the future be less insulting and make fewer assumptions.
Step one: since all of the pages are single pages accessed by name, the source content is likely a batch of HTML files. So: create an S3 bucket and mass upload everything to the bucket.
Step two: enable public access and hosting on the bucket
Step four (optional): register a domain via Route 53 and create a simple record that points to the bucket so we have a better URL
Making the service writable again is a different story. The technical steps of getting it online be trivial for anybody that could do the above, but dealing with the abuse cases is something else entirely.
I hope you're coming from a good place but I can't help but find this kind of comment naive and a little rude.
It's never as simple as "here's the code, have at it". Actually packaging things up and documenting it takes times and effort. Also I'd imagine it feels like somewhat a slap in the face. "Hey, I see you've donated your time and money to this project until you felt you couldn't any longer but please donate more time to package it all up for some heretofore unknown entity that might benefit".
It's a lot easier to call for something to be open sourced than it is to actually take up the mantle and carry the project further. Same as when people say "Well have you seen if someone else wants to run it if you don't?" As if that's not a massive time investment of vetting and researching, not to mention your name is still attached to it even if you hand it over. Somewhere down the line a less scrupulous person might wrest control and do who knows what with it.
Lastly, it's been my experience that the majority of people asking for something to be open sourced have never used and/or are not interested in the original thing. They say it almost if by rote.
Again, I want to be clear I'm not trying to come down or attack you personally, I just feel like this statement gets thrown around a lot without a care in the world for the effort involved. I've had it said to me, I put in the time to clean up a project enough to open source, and no one touched it again as far as I can tell. That's more than a little disheartening.
I'm definitely coming from both a place of naivety and optimism. No offense intended, in fact it's intended as respect for what appears to be a service that has legitimate use and reason to exist, hence it would be a shame for it to be extinguished entirely.
a coughing decade of work and history the owner previously volunteered to host is going to be tossed the cough away into the coughing bit bucket with no recourse once again
I would like to help rebuild txti.es if you are interested. I'm developing an identity system - with reputation - to keep bad people out. No cost, easy to use. Makes it increasingly hard to get a burner identity. Not finished but probably be usable. Micro-billing - so you can charge 0.10 {cents,euros,marks,francs or dracmas} per month/week/etc, is also in the work. email to arthurgarbanzo at gmail.com if interested. I will do the work as I am trying prove the concept.
I wonder how one would implement a reputation-based accounts system, something like lobste.rs has. To get an account, you need to be invited by someone who already has one, and if you get banned, all your children and N levels of parents get banned too.
I would simply never invite anyone. There has to be a moderate amount of "forgiveness" for people who can reasonably be thought not to have invited a deliberate spammer.
I love the design of this shutdown notice. No logo, it just starts with the text, it even doesn't have excessive padding. Makes me question why the first thing Hacker News (like all websites) has been telling me for years is that it's Hacker News, with a logo and with text. I know what website I'm on.
Rentry has an excellent UX but they haven't registered with dmca.copyright.gov so I'd be wary of setting things up there in case the site craps itself like Cohost and Hive Social.
I’m guessing the admin stopped caring as much about the mission of the site, which actually seems quite compelling, or it wasn’t as profitable as they thought, and was looking for a reason to divest themselves of it. Spam is hard to fight, it does suck in that manner, but certainly possible and certainly pulling the plug on an otherwise passion project screams “don’t care anymore.”
Personally I didn't wanted to invite to more guesses, however if this was because of any of those reasons, it does not look to me there was anyone in a hurry:
txti @txties 15. Juni 2020: "I realize txti is broken at the moment, and I'm going to try to fix it. Truth is, I haven't really been doing web development for a few years and projects like txti have unfortunately taken a back seat to life."
> Yancey's Dark Forest theory of the web. The “dark forest” is a place that seems eerily quiet and devoid of life. All the living creatures within it are hiding. Because “night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent.”
> The predators here are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers, reply guys, and trolls. It's unsafe to reveal yourself to them in any authentic way. So we retreat into private spaces. We hide in the cozy web.
https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web