You get an interesting collision between two expectations on licensing in a modding community for an open source game.
Modding communities have historically leaned on self-penned bespoke licences tending toward the, "only Tool fans can use this! Do not rip my sprites without permission, that means you XxSephiroth494 YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!" school of legal text. But as an open-source project, there is a convention to upload things to the content distribution network with a GPL or Creative Commons licence.
This causes some rather dramatic fallouts when "I don't have to give you any source code, it's mine and I wrote it" or "he can't just take my mod and build his own version of it" meet the inevitable response of, "you released it under the GPL, that's how it works". It gets rather messier when said work includes upstream things which were originally released under the Tool Fan Restricted Licence or similar where the original creator forbade further sharing of source code.
It's been a long time but I'm sure I remember something along similar themes being one of the essays in the back of the SimCity 2000 manual. Which now makes me all nostalgic for the days when game manuals were something existing at the confluence between readme, strategy guide and just plain good reading matter.
Companies really struggle with this, and in both directions. Startups and scale-ups tend to overcompensate to the point management hires get interviewed as super-ICs, where they'll be expected to answer technical stages at (or even above) the company's top IC standard, but only get a couple of basic scenario questions about management that anybody could answer. Sometimes you get lucky and they're good at both, but it's a big source of the "management by yelling at people" and "I can't have a 1:1 with you, I'm fixing a production issue" schools prevalent in such environments.
It's rare to find a company balanced in the middle where they're looking for someone who clearly "gets it" and can talk about technical solutions, but also has the ability to solve the people problems. (Often good managers were also skilled ICs before they made the jump, but lack of everyday practical use leaves them with a layer of rust. In an hour interview with someone you've never met before it's hard to tell the difference between "rust" and "has heard of the concepts but doesn't really understand them" though)
Obviously there's a spectrum of management that an IC can undertaken, but this is typically based around their good will and soft powers, but the wider point is they're not supported to have direct reports.
I think the article misses what I think is a vitally important part of the job: being a crap shield.
A lot of the work of an EM is wading into the slurry pit with a shovel so your team are free to get the job done: bashing your head against InfoSec teams stuck in the '80s so the CI/CD toolchain can deploy to production, negotiating freedom with a CTO who wants to specify everything to the level of individual data structures, convincing HR that no, we really do need to pay for a good senior and not hire someone with 2 years experience in a configuration galley because they're cheap.
On top of that there's the process battles; in older firms, all those interminable "but can't they just use Waterfall?" meetings that go on for hours and are spawned every time there's a minor project manager reshuffle. In newer ones, the ongoing fight of, "you can't address debt or build foundations for the future, we need features, if it can't be done in less than a week it's not MVP enough"
There's a fine balance in that I think a good EM lets their team know this is going on and get involved where they want without dumping all the crap downward. Not least because they should be coaching their team leads in that responsibility, so they can take the career step when they want.
Going back to the article, as others mentioned it does read a little bit more like a "why I'm frustrated with my manager" than a "how to be a good EM", but it's easy to misconstrue the meaning of text.
Absolutely. This is especially relevant, these days, when HR departments are basically taking an actively adversarial role towards employees.
I used to get crap from HR, if I chose to resolve personnel issues without involving them.
The problem was, they had only two speeds: Do Nothing, or KILL ALL THE BABIES. Nothing in between; despite their constant harping about how they were "on our side." Their job was to keep the C-suite happy. It was absolutely amazing how many rules that were "hard and fast," and "applies to everyone here," would suddenly fail to be implemented, when it was a C-suite doing the rulebreaking.
There were also companywide policies, meant to appease union employees, that would also apply to the other 90% of the company that wasn't union (and thus, did not have the mitigating benefits), or that were in place to manage hourly employees, but also applied to exempt (from a life) employees.
It was my job to try to mask that kind of crap from my employees, and I got called on the carpet a few times, because of it. I would do it all over again, if I had to.
Maybe I'm just extremely lucky, but I think in 20 years of working at multiple companies (as an IC), I've never really even had contact with HR besides my first and last days. I don't think I could even name a single HR person I've ever met. They tend to be there to hand me the benefits literature, then at the end I give my badge back to them, and that's it. What on earth is happening in companies where HR is part of the daily life of a standard "3rd engineer from the left" employee?
I was a manager, so I had plenty of interaction with HR.
For the most part, they weren't actually bad people, but their job was to be fairly two-faced. I think it caused a lot of issues. HR had the highest turnover in the company.
The last time I had dealings with HR, it was because I had reported that my boss did something illegal, and I told the head of the company.
They tell me to deal with HR, and HR tells me that I should have talked to my boss first.
In short, the heads of the company didn't want to hear about the illegal stuff, and HR was their shield for it.
My boss actually told me, "I could get fired for what you said." It wasn't what he did that was the problem in his mind, but that I told people about it.
I didn't last much longer at the company. They didn't fire me, but they also stopped giving me raises. When I asked for one, I was asked if I could "wait a year". I found a new job for a 40% raise 6 months later.
* the crap shield is made of Gor-tex so you need to protect the team but also expunge the toxins that build up within. Not all crap is generated outside of the team but you need to get ride of it.
* the crap shield is transparent so the team can see what's happening outside without being covered in it
* the crap shield is retractable so you can let some into the team's atmosphere. Not enough to cause harm, but keep them grounded in the imperfect world in which their work will live.
* the crap shield has a window lock, and you the manager are in control of it. This is for the same reason the driver of a car can lock the windows in the back seat to stop the kids from opening them when you're in the car wash.
Agreed. The end goal is usually to make developers as productive as possible, which means a) giving them large contiguous blocks of coding time, and b) removing roadblocks (i.e. crap)
The "crap" can be politics, legal, ancient IT practices, useless meetings, constant demands for status/updates, bickering around cost/budgets, hiring, buying time to fight tech debt, and a whole bunch of other things.
The #1 job of a manager (in all fields) is to keep his people working. It doesn't matter if it is engineering, manufacturing or the local burger joint. A managers #1 job is to keep his people working.
To keep their people working. Women can be managers as well.
Edit: I understand other languages might have gendered nouns for words like Manager, and when learning English it can be difficult to break these habits.
In English, we have gender neutral pronouns to use when were talking about "generic people" where the gender isnt known. Managers are not just male, so when a sentence is gendered like that I struggle to parse it because I think I've missed a the reason why this hypothetical manager is male.
Maybe we should lighten up a bit and not bring in politics into everything. The writer could be a male and this would be natural for them just like it would be for a female and her.
Using male pronouns instead of genderless/more inclusive pronouns in your speech is indicative of a bad managing style (or just bad style all together). As a manager you should be inclusive of all genders both directly and indirectly, which includes how you use whatever language you speak.
The people you manage could easily identify with a gender that is not physically obvious and using incorrect pronouns leads to a less inclusive and potentially more hostile workplace. This is Management 101.
I think that is still poor and confusing English when not talking about a specific person. I notice people do this when trying to make speech more inclusive, and I still struggle with parsing the sentence because of the unnessisary gender being mentioned.
Oh but not trans of course, so polite of you to leave them out in your heteronormative take on the world.
I would have hoped most were aware of the pressures the transgender community is under and would offer more care than such casual takes on gender in the workplace.
Trans people can be women as well, so saying "Women can be managers as well" does not exclude trans people because female-identifiying trans people are still "women".
It's not totally inclusive of people who identify outside of the binary genders, but saying "women can be mangers" does not exclude men or people who don't identify as either. I hope my point still remains though that using "they" as a gender neutral pronoun is a perfectly easy way to be inclusive.
> your heteronormative take on the world
I mean i am a (cis) gay male, so I don't think I have a heteronormative take on the world, but you do you.
(acknowledging this comment seems to be puposefully trolly, like a "false flag" troll)
Oh so now you get to decide how they should self identify; how very generous of you.
At this stage you really need to stop and think about what you are doing and who you are hurting; they're just words to you but they're a lifetime of hurt to others.
Be . Better.
> I mean i am a (cis) gay male, so I don't think I have a heteronormative take on the world, but you do you.
You really want to call upon the equivalent of the "some of my best friends are black" excuse? I can't even...
If you have some constructive feedback on how I could have worded what i said to be better, I’m definitely open for it. I’m always trying to be better.
Perhaps it would be been better (for a number of reasons) to say “not all managers are male” instead?
But you need to take a very long position on this.
Someone's beloved cat died? That's your problem, because it's affecting the way they work. You need to help them through it.
Someone's working well? That's great, but you can't rest on your laurels. You need to help them grow into a more senior position so they don't get bored or disillusioned.
That’s a “utilisation” view, and it’s a terrible model.
People who already have work to do are not responsive to new input.
By ensuring everyone is working all the time you also ensure nobody can respond to the unexpected.
The counterpoint to utilisation thinking is latency thinking (“how fast can our team respond to requests”).
An instance of utilisation thinking: “Our roads are not always full of traffic, how can we get more cars onto them?”. This is clearly absurd; why is “developers have work to do” a goal when “roads have cars on them” is not?
What to do when people dont deliver ?
In my current company mgrs say “we did our best”, when in fact I see ppl slacking as hell (days of doing nothing).
I didn't say that it was the only part of the job, just that it was the most important thing. Hopefully you have some knobs you can turn. At my current company if people can't deliver you try to hook them up with more mentors and if they still can't deliver, you stop giving them direct labor to work on and eventual force them out because they don't have any work and they stop getting pay raises (or you fire them usually they push them out).
Hmm. I think the #1 job of a manager is to hire, motivate and let go of people the right way. It's up to them to keep working, and it's up to the manager to figure out how to do that no more often than required.
If you do it right, it's like 90% teambuilding and 10% line management, IMO. When that ratio is inverted is where you see mediocre management.
Absolutely! A manager can either be an umbrella to shelter under, or they can be a shit funnel.
Great work gets done when you can give your engineers a hard problem (or a long list of easy problems) and let them put their nose to the grindstone to get it done, while deflecting the rabble of inane ideas for new features, shifting deadlines, office politics, customer/supplier relations, etc. etc. etc. If a manager sidesteps all those, and passes them to the engineer, there will be have no time or energy for the actual work. If they are a single point of contact where an engineer can pull in a prioritized task list and push out questions and results, that's an ideal environment to get things done.
Unfortunately, other managers which interact with these EMs can sometimes have a hard time telling the former from the latter, and have a hard time evaluating the quality of the work/difficulty of the problems being solved, so the only visible difference is the happiness of the engineering team and the accomplishments that were made.
I used to think that then I burnt out. When the manager does nothing but the crap, the manager is going to leave. The proper way is to distribute the crap evenly.
This is why I decided to stopped doing engineering manager roles. Working on the crap stuff all the times is no fun. And the longer you do it the more your technical skills fall behind. I'm fine with the technical roles along with mentoring the new engineers.
"The proper way" is not an objective thing and to present it as such is disingenuous.
The best managers I've ever worked for have all, without fail, worked daily to keep as much nonsense away from the team as possible. The worst have either only been concerned with their personal advancement, or would just make the team basically fend for itself.
Yep, a manager can focus on climbing the ladder once they offload their responsibilities onto the people beneath them. If their boss can't detect this abdication, or worse, doesn't want to see it, then the manager's opportunism will naturally be rewarded, and will encourage the opportunism of other managers in the org.
I think in general most companies, especially large ones, reward managers who push crap onto their directs. Anecdotally, the best manager I've ever had viciously protected us from executive nonsense, and he's also the most successful by far (and he was before I started). I don't think that's the norm, though.
Management isn't math. It's not a science, and there are successful managers who push as much crap onto their directs as they can, and there are successful managers who take as much of that crap as they can to prevent it from reaching their teams.
>> The proper way is to distribute the crap evenly.
This is true of "crap work" (i.e. stupid bugs, wading through documentation) but not of the crap external to the team. Your job as the manager is to deal with it all. You can either work to slow it's generation or suck it down, but it's all on you.
Maybe it is different in Software engineering than in Hardware, but if you have a team developing hardware and they encounter a problem they cannot solve they have to turn to their manager. So the manager also gets technical crap/difficulties to solve. The 5% he cannot solve goes one level higher, so basically the higher you get, the more distille/purerd crap you get.
> I think the article misses what I think is a vitally important part of the job: being a crap shield.
One of my first jobs, it was described colourfully (it was in the UK) as being the team umbrella. i.e. Protects the team from the ever circling pigeons from above that like to frequently 'deposit'. :)
All of the managers I’ve worked with on the “great” end of the quality spectrum have excelled at being sh*t umbrellas. Perhaps that speaks also to the quality of the orgs I’ve been in, as well...
This is a (the?) differentiating quality between effective management and not.
In Office Space, one thing that makes Lumbergh the manager so distasteful is you just know he would never do one thing to help anyone reporting to him.
My interpretation of this is a junior SDE position where you mostly update system configuration parameters all day instead of writing code or designing systems. People in these positions still get paid SDE salaries but aren't gaining any useful software development experience.
A galley was a large-ish, primarily oar-powered ship.
However it also refers to the kitchen on certain even larger boats.
So, it's kind of ambiguous what GP meant - either picking a cook out of a galley-kitchen (who is not the best chef, but rather someone making huge amounts of food for a ship's crew), or picking a slave off of the oars in a galley-ship.
"But will you do the boring but necessary browser testing to figure out if what you’re describing is always true, or just most of the time? And will you repeat that testing once new versions have come out? Will you go through related pages..."
This. A thousand times this. The problem for me isn't the quantity of information any more, it's the quality. 10-15 years ago if you hit an even slightly esoteric problem you'd bottom out a search pretty quickly and be on your own. Now, you'll find dozens of blog articles, community answers, Reddit threads... and unless you're very lucky they will all be wrong, from subtle "works on my machine"-isms up to "just commit a god-rights CI token to your repository, it'll be fine" - the telltale sign often being nobody can tell you why this is the solution, merely that they bashed other random solutions to related problems together until a particular combination happened to work.
Authoritative sources like MDN are vital in this context, having something you can refer to that tells you how things actually work so you can verify whether the suggestion you or a co-worker found on a blog is a sensible solution or the kind of horrible mess you'd expect to find alongside world-writable S3 buckets and services that regularly time out due to being OOM killed.
This is tangential to your point, but it’s funny how sometimes the amount of information on a topic can ultimately be a detriment due to the dilution of truth over time.
I’ve been spending my free time working with an experimental library. Google stops returning relevant results for searches on this topic around the 10th result. While this is often infuriating and leads to countless hours deep in indecipherable library code, it is equally likely to stumble upon an in depth discussion among users about pros and cons of various solutions. This context is rarely captured for mainstream tools, and when it is, those authors are lauded for their ability to contextualize the problem.
What is most disappointing to me is how often we document “what” but not “why” when most of us NEED the context of “why” to make comparisons across different tools or approaches for our use cases.
To me this is related to the "terrarium problem" of software ecosystems, where the larger the ecosystem is, the more capable it is in some sense, but the less it can actually be understood. Web tech being all encompassing has made it an unsustainably large terrarium.
And you can mitigate a terrarium's impact somewhat by defining a protocol around it, but then the protocol becomes the new terrarium. And so it goes. That is why it never really gets solved by more general-purpose layers, but it does get solved in some degree by the documentation, which at least gives you a map of the jungle, and it gets solved for any end use by distilling down to a smaller terrarium that can be understood by its definitions rather than its dependencies.
> The problem for me isn't the quantity of information any more, it's the quality. 10-15 years ago if you hit an even slightly esoteric problem you'd bottom out a search pretty quickly and be on your own.
It's not just technical information either. The internet has done this to everything. In comparison, the old mainstream media seemed to be more "truthful", in some sense. It is more truthful when it came to hard, citable facts. Most things the MSM offered as facts had cites, and turned out to be accurate. In comparison, the Internet swims in bullshit. It ranges from opinion dressed up as fact to outright lies told by trolls, and then and onto conspiracy theories from people living in some alternate Universe. Worst, since these people believe (probably correctly) that the louder they yell, the more they are likely to convince the internet seems to be mostly this stuff (outposts like Wikipedia being an exception).
And yet, I prefer this situation to what the mainstream media offered. The MSM suffered from two defects. Firstly, they were very prone to repeating accepted meme's as fact, over and over again, as if there were no competing theories. The most recent example masks where the MSM was flooded with the prevailing western expert opinion that masks had no effect. Back in the day, before the internet, I would have just accepted that. There was no easy way (where easy is spend 1/2 an hour entering search terms, clicking and reading) to fact check, so how could you do otherwise?
The second thing journalists are bloody hopeless at distilling and summarising the truth from an expert. Before the internet you rarely had an opportunity to see it in action. I had been told by elders repeatedly that if you see a story in the media about an event you attended or place you know well, you won't recognise it. That happened to me once too - it was a report about the commonwealth games in Time magazine. It was exactly as predicted - utterly unrecognisable. But it only happened once, and the lesson faded. Then the internet came along and you would read a MSM report, then happen on the comments of someone there or read the expert's own words, and it was like "wtf?". Now I find myself treating the output of journalists with suspicion, avoiding it where possible.
Much later it dawned on me why it was like this. The journalists main task, the one their employers judged them on and remunerated them on accordingly, had nothing to do with how accurately they reported the facts. It was whether you came back for more; bought tomorrow's paper, switched on the TV news; the only relevance of the truth to that endeavour is whether sticking to it brings readers or not. The combination of repeating established memes without question, the overarching drive to deliver addictive brain candy rather than information, and the difficulty of fact checking made the output of the MSM a truly insipid product.
So yeah, the Internet is swimming in endless repeats of bullshit and lies, but unlike the old MSM floating in that torrent of crap are the actual facts. You just have to put in the work to find them. And once you figure out how to do it, it's not even that much work. Knowing about sites like MDN, which is a reliable, complete, and up-to-date source of information is one of these tricks. For those of us who like our facts neat, being able to go straight to the MDN saves us literally hours of time in shifting through torrents of bullshit, or god-help us reading yards of inscrutable standards in order to find the thing we need to know. Loss of the MDN would be a real disaster in the economic sense - it would cost a lot of people a huge amount of money and time.
Still, as Wikipedia, and stack overflow demonstrate, it's possible to crowd source that style of site. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
What I like about the '70s stuff is almost everything uses standard parts you can get from any reasonable factor, and the few unique components are usually still simple enough that some hobbyist or small machine shop will be turning them out and selling them. Providing it hasn't been abused it's possible to refurbish something using only simple tools and a bit of testing, and some of the equipment is seriously good even by modern standards. (One of the main reasons I ended up with a '70s turntable is I couldn't find anything new under £1000 with the same sound quality, or that didn't require directly fiddling with belts and pulleys to change the speed.)
By comparison, whenever any of my modern kit breaks down I find the offending part will be unique to that unit, the spare parts supply is nonexistent, and there will be no published specs allowing one to cobble something together.
I spent four years at an organisation rife with this. I found two major routes for getting to work on hard problems.
The first was joining initiatives that were in such utter disarray people were willing to take any risk to get out of the "someone's gonna get fired for this" hole. They were typically rich in hard problems (the chaos was usually caused by failure to address one or more of them) and people liked the idea that someone else was taking on responsibility and becoming the person who was most likely "gonna get fired for this". I was happy taking that risk, considering the payoff in getting to work on interesting problems worth it.
In the absence of disarray, I had to go down the much slower route of finding small things that received so little attention I could just do them; nobody cared about them enough to worry about success or failure, and the time input was small enough nobody got upset about it. Over time the cumulative impact would gain me enough trust to take on something bigger, and assuming that went well things would snowball from there. In this way I "trained" one of my bosses from flipping out at the most minor suggestion to pretty much leaving me alone to get on with what I felt like, on the basis I would usually find things to do that reflected well on him.
Unfortunately I never worked out how to get anywhere with the kind of person who benefited from the hard problems not being solved -essentially those profiting from either the prevalence of bullshit or non-essential things being done as per points 3 and 4 in the article's section on what happens when you do tackle the hard stuff.
I'd also caution in my experience it wasn't useful in advancing my career at the same company - I did see a big benefit in credibility but it was among peers and the people I depended on to "get a VIP pass around bureaucracy". This has been general across organisations in my experience: the career stage benefits only come when I move on and have a load of experience in problem spaces I simply wouldn't have encountered had I kept my head down and merely done my job.
This is a consistent bugbear of mine, and I think a big factor in the resurgence of vinyl. I find it frustrating I can take a recording from a format with limited dynamic range and stereo separation, which is incredibly vulnerable to environmental contamination and vibration, where the playback device adds its own bundle of mechanical noise and unusual non-linear responses... and yet if I have a good pressing it will sound better than a "digital remaster" CD which has none of these inherent issues, because the digital copy has been compressed and limited to the point where it's fatiguing to listen to.
That said, I've bought a few modern albums which have been really nicely mastered; they've got that rich, deep '70s LP sound but available on a FLAC download without all the surface noise and rumble.
Also that section on the '60s loudness war underplays quite how LOUD some of those old mono 45s are... I typically set things up so my peaks are at -12dB when recording, and I have the odd mid-1960s single which will be pegged right up against the red if I don't adjust the levels. No wonder there were some pressings that were notorious for throwing the stylus out of the groove when people started chasing ultra-low tracking weights in the early '70s.
Dnb vinyl was very popular for a long time (still has its fans), and it was very much part of the loudness war. There are a couple of producers who were part of my record collection that I sometimes actually would not play because I couldn't be bothered dealing with the ridiculous over-mastered loudness in the track compared to what I was trying to mix them into.
I thought similar. To me what Buzzfeed are calling the "old Internet" here is something I very much remember bemoaning as the "new Internet" 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's news servers.
What I find myself missing more than anything else is that news server was something you 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 "engagement" or "monetisation", and while I'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.
I started college, and discovered the Internet, in fall of 1993. An epoch infamously known as "Eternal September" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September). The old-timers on Usenet and IRC at the time thought that me and my classmates were idiots. That we killed the "old Internet".
From my perspective though, the "old Internet" died when Deja News sold out to Google. When phpBB forums started replacing Usenet, and ICQ or other chat apps started replacing IRC.
From the perspective of those newbies, the "old Internet" died when phpBB forums were replaced by LiveJournal pages and blog comment sections. When ICQ fragmented into AOL, Yahoo, and MSN instant messengers.
Those people saw the "old Internet" die when pages and blogs coalesced into early social media.
Those people saw the "old Internet" die when social media took on its contemporary shape (e.g. YouTube videos becoming more professional and SEO-oriented, clickbait, photo and video-based social media surpassing text-based social media).
This article is just some person at Buzzfeed, writing a eulogy for the "old Internet" as understood by the generation of people who have jobs at Buzzfeed.
I don't know if I agree with your unstated premise that none of these iterations are inherently better or worse than what came before or what will come after. I think there has been a phase change from participation to consumption. The internet has become TV for most users. Not just in the sense of the viewer passively watching, but in the sense of the content itself being highly centralized. There's no more "you" in youtube. The main content feed is high production costs and celebrities, not random clever people.
>There's no more "you" in youtube. The main content feed is high production costs and celebrities, not random clever people.
The main feed by definition doesn't comprise most of the content on Youtube. I'm following close to 500 channels and many if not most of them are not celebrity channels with high production costs, but just someone with a camera and maybe some editing skills.
People need to get over this hipster delusion that quality of production is inversely correlated to quality of content. There's plenty of horrible content on Youtube with low production value from random people (take a look at reaction videos,) and plenty of good content both poorly and well produced.
Sure, there's still plenty of "You" in YouTube, but it is absolutely not what is featured by the site itself as it was in the past. YouTube would probably be much more profitable if we all consumed only those channels and it was just "Netflix with PewDiePie and Jenna Marbles". I think if they dropped all the other content at the current time, there would be a lot of backlash. The danger is after ten years of psychological manipulation of users (e.g., the main feed), many of whom will be young and not know the 'old' YouTube, they might be able to get away with it.
> People need to get over this hipster delusion that quality of production is inversely correlated to quality of content. There's plenty of horrible content on Youtube with low production value from random people (take a look at reaction videos,) and plenty of good content both poorly and well produced.
One of two of my pet peeves with YouTube videos. Good content is 90% of the way there. I don't know why some YouTubers quit there or why people make excuses for them. There are literally YouTube videos about how to make good YouTube videos. Even a little effort in production goes a long way.
(The other peeve is videos that should be 30 seconds long but are 10 minutes long. Although a good portion of that has to do with incentives created by YouTube and/or monetization of the videos.)
99% of what I watch on YouTube is how to videos by people with about 20 total videos. The biggest one I watch is Colin furze and that's about 3x a year when it shows up here. He's like 2000x the size of my next watch.
I will say a lot of stuff is much better produced these days. Proliferation of good cameras and editing software and even the big producers using smash cuts makes that so.
> The old-timers on Usenet and IRC at the time thought that me and my classmates were idiots.
FWIW, my view at the time was a bit different - the normal cycle was that fresh students et al would join each year and they would either take time to learn the community conventions or they would leave. All of us were new once (indeed, I wasn't "new", but neither was I an old timer), so the issue wasn't the newcomers being idiots. The issue is that the community worked because of the conventions. We'd say "lurk for a while. Read the FAQ that I'd regularly posted. Learn how to quote and trim so many people can have manage an in-depth conversation that is spread over time and space".
Some considered this elitist snobbery and left. Others learned and stayed (and newcomers DID bring change - the conventions werent static).
But this sort of community cant survive the fast paced ephemeral connections that the eternal September brought.
What exists now is different. Better or worse? Too complex to answer. But definitely the kinds of conversations that were had then do not exist in the replacement media. They cant, anymore than the reverse could.
I'm not aware of any culture that survives integration with a larger one if that larger one has no regard for the smaller one.
AOL added their nntp support around then. It’s called September after the influx of new college students each fall. Eternal because now noobs arrived every day instead of just for school.
You'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.
The closed systems were better able to fight spam because they could easily ban people and IPs.
On a deeper level spam, "brattish" commercial sites, etc. all come from when money got involved.
The old Internet was mostly noncommercial. Money changes everything.
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.
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.
IRC has mechanisms that make dealing with spam easy.
Usenet on the other hand required cooperation from all providers. Actually I blame Google for killing Usenet. They used Microsoft'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.
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't message people on Hangouts. It didn't even show an error. This made many users switch to Hangouts to continue taking with their friends.
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'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.
> IRC has mechanisms that make dealing with spam easy.
> Usenet on the other hand required cooperation from all providers. Actually I blame Google for killing Usenet. They used Microsoft'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.
> 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't message people on Hangouts. It didn't even show an error. This made many users switch to Hangouts to continue taking with their friends.
The Jabber coopting by Google always felt like something straight out of the old "Embrace, extend, extinguish" playbook of yore.
Unfortunately, the "old" internet involved a lot of trust. Once sufficient numbers of untrustworthy players enter the system, you have to figure out how to protect yourself from spam and malware, and for most people that means using locked down systems such as iOS and services that verify identity via phone numbers and whatnot.
> The closed systems were better able to fight spam because they could easily ban people and IPs.
Unless the server allowed one to send email or post to usenet without having to log in first, then there's no reason why the provider couldn't simply disable the account or block the originating IP from connecting to the server. From what I can tell, the providers weren'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.
> 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.
A year or so freenode was hit by spam, and now everyone needs to verify, so spam still exists, as does IRC.
Even as late as 2000, usenet survived spam, conversations continued, and spam in email was far worse. Spam in email went the way of the dodo around mid-to-late 00s, with the centralisation of the providers (gmail, yahoo, hotmail)
I run my own email server, and use a separate address per correspondent. This avoids spam entirely. I have sometimes got some spam from some addresses but simply disable that address and then the problem is gone.
That's too much time and work for 99% of users, even tech-savvy ones.
Think of it this way: lets say you value your time at $50/hour (very conservative for a tech-savvy person). If it takes an hour a month to admin that box, that's a $50/month e-mail service you have not including VPS/VM cost.
Yes, although I am not asking everyone to do it. I am only saying I do it. It is the same protocol as everyone else's email, I just set it up my own way. Other people who like to do can try this too, but I am not trying to ask everyone to do who does not want to do.
I’ve found FastMail to be my happy medium: I can give out arbitrary aliases over a couple of domains, and only have to do the config once per domain, but they take care of the actual email server part. I can then later add mailbox rules for aliases I give important senders.
Granted, the domain config would be overwhelming for my friends and family not involved in IT - even my mechanical engineer husband doesn’t quite understand what I’m doing.
Greed is as normal and natural as sex. If there is no legitimate, productive outlet for it, it finds illegitimate and unproductive outlets. This is IMHO who communist states turn into mafia states: the mafia becomes the outlet. Part of adapting to the change is going to be building legitimate profit avenues into systems so that the profit motive can find productive channels.
All the old systems had no channel at all for profit making, so it made it's own in the form of spam and similar.
> If there is no legitimate, productive outlet for it, it finds illegitimate and unproductive outlets. This is IMHO who communist states turn into mafia states: the mafia becomes the outlet.
The reason that former communist countries like Russia became oligarchies (what I think you might mean by mafia state) is because people with significant power in the previous communist system seized control of huge state assets during the disorder that accompanied the system's collapse, and in doing so took ownership of large pieces of the economy. Even under communism, power was closely held among a in-group, and that stayed the same afterward.
The oligarchy didn't emerge because average people were bored and provided for, didn't know what to do with themselves, and therefore decided to set up illegitimate enterprises.
Also, plenty of people in capitalist countries set up illegitimate enterprises like financial frauds and consumer scams of all sorts (remember 2008?), and capitalist societies have their own oligarchs - though we call them plutocrats instead.
It doesn't feel that natural. I think we should stop resorting to human nature when something fits our mood. Violence is natural but we try to stifle it because it haa few benefits. Greed should be the same. I don't think our current worship of money is healthy for the future - if you believe what they say about climate change atleast.
> On a deeper level spam, "brattish" commercial sites, etc. all come from when money got involved.
Recall too that this is about when Scientologist decided to do something about people saying bad things about them on Usenet. Though maybe you can call that money, too.
So are you saying that you believe YouTube will also perish because it's now mostly spam, albeit sanctioned spam? Not a facetious comment, I genuinely wonder. It'd be a wonderful twist, in a way.
YouTube's deplatforming and demonetizing is about improving content quality for a broad audience, so they have been taking steps to fight spammy content. They will probably have to do more.
The systems that died were systems that were structurally unable to fight spam or where doing so was prohibitively expensive in time or money.
You've put your finger on something important - innovation moved from collaborative protocols to antagonistic web sites, and we're all the poorer for it.
Exactly. The protocol era was hijacked for profit.
I believe that incentivized, decentralized protocols are the evolution of all of this and will bring the protocol era back AND properly incentivizes participants.
I hope so, but if you mean cryptocurrency wake me up when there is more to it than speculation and gambling. Other than the "wire transfer" classic use case for Bitcoin I see nothing new that anyone is actually using that is not one of those two things.
Decentralized lending via Ethereum smart contracts is now a real thing. Check out this out in a dApp browser like Coinbase Wallet:
https://app.compound.finance/
I’m current earning 3.5% apr by lending out USDC (Coinbase’s stablecoin) via dApp.
EDIT: I guess I am being downvoted because people think this is spam? I only have a disincentive for people to use this dApp: as more liquidity gets added to the pool, my payout interest rate goes down.
To be fair, "I give out vague loans in internet money" doesn't naturally default itself to being a good thing, and namedropping "smart contracts" and assuming that means anything aside from spam&scam technobabble to people outside of the ethereum is a bit of a miss on your part.
Protocols like Secure Scuttlebutt provide decentralization without any cryptocurrencies or global blockchains. It's a bit of a wild west, but I don't think that's a bad thing.
Hahaha, you keep telling yourself that. Some countries don't even have reliable network/power/etc and don't say "oh you can trade bitcoin with paper," because that's just stupid.
Sure, but there are enough countries out there that fall into both the "reliable enough connectivity" and "government control of money" parts of the Venn diagram that this is still valid.
And the world is only getting more electrified and connected as the years go on.
There was also a lack of incentive to tamp down on flame wars or care about a "quality level" of content when advertisers aren't paying for engaging content.
> What I find myself missing more than anything else is that news server was something you paid for, either as part of an ISP package, as a dedicated service or your university tuition fees.
For what it's worth, there are still commercial newsproviders out there you can pay for. There are also free ones as well. Unfortunately, the all the newsgroups I participated in as recently as 5 years ago are pretty much dead.
My experience working for the 800lb gorilla incumbent was that we didn't take competition seriously at all. Even stuff competitors did that would be trivial for us to replicate got put in the "not a priority" bucket. The few cases where we were forced to match a feature you were looking at a lead time measured in years, tending to infinity if it threatened the influence of a powerful department. And this is the reactive stuff. Forget actual innovation, other than a few toy projects that never escaped the lab!
However, this was justified: even the most promising-looking competitors tripped over their own bad assumptions long before becoming a threat. We saw plenty of novel ideas but they'd always be sunk by a failure to understand the basics of how our market worked - things like trying to put a complicated app with a thousand options at a point in the journey everyone is trying to simplify and time-optimise, etc.
If someone who knew the market well had gone at it seriously and solved hard problems rather than apply the usual hand-waving "tech! blockchain! magic!", by the time we'd noticed it would have been too late to respond. You'd hope more recent incumbents like Netflix or Twitch might be a bit more responsive, but corporate inertia can build up surprisingly quickly.
Modding communities have historically leaned on self-penned bespoke licences tending toward the, "only Tool fans can use this! Do not rip my sprites without permission, that means you XxSephiroth494 YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!" school of legal text. But as an open-source project, there is a convention to upload things to the content distribution network with a GPL or Creative Commons licence.
This causes some rather dramatic fallouts when "I don't have to give you any source code, it's mine and I wrote it" or "he can't just take my mod and build his own version of it" meet the inevitable response of, "you released it under the GPL, that's how it works". It gets rather messier when said work includes upstream things which were originally released under the Tool Fan Restricted Licence or similar where the original creator forbade further sharing of source code.