onboard third-party scripting like message boards and stuff past hand-coded static HTML
this represented the end of the self-sufficient yeoman web homestead dream but allowed the focused communities that supported things like webcomics
until all was centralized when the social platforms realized the old “portal”, “push content” dreams with 2.0
Your regular reminder that reblogging visceral images of dead or dying human beings, as a form of activism, is the quickest way to make me drop a blog. I see the point you’re trying to make, and replace it with “I already knew murder was bad and have a strong personal preference for not seeing unwarned-for images of torture in my personal space, thank you very much.”
Guys, don’t do this.
(Bonus politics: have you ever seen a photo of a dead white person? No, me neither. Photos of dead non-white people are frequently taken and published, always under the laudible aim of conveying important news. But over time, it does make one wonder why, say, images of wars in far away places and unjust murders and natural disasters are best illustrated by a photo of a dead, non-white child - but something like the Manchester bombings is not.
On a case by case basis, there is always a good reason to take and show these photos - but when you take a step back and look at the culture as a whole, turns out some bodies are seen as more worthy of respect and dignity and privacy even in death, and others ok for public display)
that’s what we were trying to do with the Internet in the ‘90s with rotten.com and Stile Project and that, bypass the unworthy fainting old ladies and stabilize the world as a Mexican newspaper, where we ALL confront our nature as disposable meat or are else properly driven from the public square
Humanity is just fundamentally unworthy of technological civilization.
Remember when we were young and the people fundamentally worthy of technological civilization were gonna be humanity?
You: uhhhhh hi I’m new i guess, just wanna chat about my favorite show too or whatever
iNvAd3rJ1M posted: *pounces* HELLOoOOOO NEW PERSON!!! *throws confetti*
911_NVR-FRGT posted: Hi there! You’ll find a Relaxed Atmosphere Here in Our Community! *points* Beer is In The Fridge, Curfew Is At 9! Haha I’m old
SSJgoku1994 posted: I am a pineapple! Monkeys!!!!!
Drag0n~Swords posted: Forsooth, a stranger doth enter the realm!
dumbledoreftw posted: Welcome! Hope you stick around! We don’t bite….. much!!
Greg posted: HITLER WAS A MISUNDERSTOOD GENIUS AND ILL GIVE YOUR WHOLE FAMILY AIDS IN HELL YOU PIECE OF SHIT
Lady*Unicorns*76 posted: “lol” (Laughing Out Loud!) don’t worry about greg sweetie! He’s just our little pet troll and you get used to him!! ;-) <3<3<3
ah, David Willis, the Jeff Vogel of webcomics
When someone writes the inevitable history of the “white women in wheat fields” aesthetic I hope they’re honest enough to acknowledge Hegre and Met-Art
Reblog if you remember those 6 months the entire Internet was being funded by ads for the X10 webcam
This is some anorak-ass obsessive Web 1.5 content shoved into a clickbait listicle Web 2.5 format
Running since 1999, Makeoutclub is shutting down
Does anyone have any good resources about “why Wikipedia worked?”
What I mean is – there was this time early on when almost everyone, including me, treated Wikipedia as both (1) completely untrustworthy and (2) not at all comprehensive. This made sense, since it was just a collection of words put together by god-knows-who, covering only the topics that god-knows-who felt like writing about for god-knows-what-reason. But these days, it’s treated as a useful first place to look for information about almost anything.
I’m not so confused about how (1) changed, because Wikipedia has various ways of resisting vandalism and of getting dedicated teams to creating articles deliberately. It’s not actually just like reading bathroom graffiti, which is how we used to think about it back in the day.
But (2) still baffles me. How did Wikipedia get to be a real encyclopedia, indeed possibly the most encyclopedic encyclopedia ever created? Everyone knows about “fancruft,” and I’ve seen complaints that the overall content is skewed toward the interests of techies with lots of free time. But that skew is far, far less pronounced than I ever would have imagined at the outset. Even if Wikipedia doesn’t literally cover everything, it feels like it does. You can look up things too boring, too esoteric, too wonkish, too trivial, too down-to-earth, too “academic specialists only” – too anything – for any other encyclopedic effort to cover, and there it is, on Wikipedia, presented in a careful formal voice, as if you’d just dispatched a personal research assistant to report on it for you.
What confuses me is why volunteers created this thing. I can see people wanting to work on Wikipedia articles about personal areas of interest. But if that were the only motivation, I can’t imagine it being nearly as comprehensive as it is, particularly about things few people care about. What motivated people to make it so comprehensive, and why did they succeed? Is there any way we could have predicted this in the early days? Can we recreate this success with other projects?
Don’t have an answer but might be worthwhile to consider its contemporaries that didn’t work, or at least to the same extent – the user-edited encyclopedias h2g2 and Everything2. I was on E2 for a while and you’d think it would have the edge, being run and promoed by the guys at Slashdot, the then-HQ of techies with too much time on their hands.
You’re one of the good ones, Jim.
