Comment by TeMPOraL
3 years ago
The "cozy web" is out of control these days. A lot of social utility is lost by default because everyone uses Whatsapp and Discord and other such information black holes, places where knowledge goes to die. It's OK if you're using these to chat with your family or friends, but it's kind of... less OK, when every open source project these days, including major programming languages, tells you to join their Slack or Discord for support and learning.
What's happening is that these "communities" demand you to commit first, and deny providing value to passive participants. If that sounds reasonable to some, let me point out that the entire value of the Internet is built on doing the opposite. Wikipedia, Reddit, StackOverflow, everything that you can find through a search engine - those are all resources made available by people and groups that, for various reasons, decided to share knowledge instead of hoarding it, invite passive participation instead of demanding active commitment. The good days of the Internet, the ones people mourn, back before it got fully commercialized? They were built on the sentiment of openly sharing information, giving them "pay it forward" style - not gate-keeping them in webs of trust, and/or demanding people to pay with effort.
Maybe I'm too old, but I hate the "cozy web" with passion.
I was an active participant of the 90s web, and in fact a lead editor and forum moderator for a popular turn of the millennium news site, so I understand the frustration you're sharing.
That said, I'd argue it's not the "cozy web" that's out of control, but instead the "dark forest" that has forced the creation of the cozy web. The cozy web is the only bastion of the internet left where there's still some semblance of the pay it forward community aspect of the early web.
Yes, it is at the cost of not being indexed, but it's the only way of having the genuine sorts of conversations and creation with people of shared interests that typified the early web now.
> Maybe I'm too old, but I hate the "cozy web" with passion.
I don't know if you remember the net/web split but that's exactly what it felt like. Net people would crap on port 80, demand you install a news client and add some byzantine undocumented header or join an IRC channel and send custom DCC commands. There was also a lot of gatekeeping and making fun of the normies ("I may be a nerd but look at Bill Gates, one day I'll be your boss.")
It was a culture I really didn't enjoy and I mostly stayed out of because everyone seemed so interested in exclusivity. Not too many people seem to remember those communities either which says a lot.
I came on-line at the tail end of it, when the denizens of the old were trying to find their footing in the new. IRC, mailing groups, early phpBB boards. This means I could've missed some stronger forms of gatekeeping, but the ones I do remember were all what I'd consider pretty good and desirable: it was gatekeeping based on knowledge, or interest in getting one. That is, all natural gates where the act of crossing them ensured you also could enjoy and contribute to the commons. And, importantly, they were mostly gating only write access, not read access.
The overall feel was, the gatekeeping served to bounce off trolls (before that name was common), and to redirect clueless newbies onto a path where they could either go away, or stay, learn a little bit, and then arrive at the gates again, only to find them wide open. Contrast that with the "cozy web", where the gatekeeping just tries to protect the community from the entire outside world. That's a huge change in overall feel - friendly and inviting vs. apprehensive and afraid. Viewing people as potential friends by default, vs. viewing them as potential enemies.
> and making fun of the normies ("I may be a nerd but look at Bill Gates, one day I'll be your boss.")
RE that, I may be biased, but I find it fully justified. It's not like nerds won this in any way - STEM interests, mastery of skills and concept outside of normie culture approved list (i.e. arts and performances - sports of every kind, playing or singing music, painting, writing, etc.), intellectually deep fiction, and clear thinking in general are still frowned upon and actively discouraged by the society.
While the "revenge of the nerds" memes, "Jocks being bosses in high school, nerds being bosses at work" was a good joke / dream to discharge some frustrations over, it didn't materialize either. On the contrary - if you look carefully, most of the successful bosses are high-school jocks too, and I'm talking in fields like finance and tech too. That's because entrepreneurship and playing on the market is a jock's game, not nerd's game. You win it by looking good, talking smooth, and not caring much about the accuracy of what you say - not by knowing a lot, having strong mental models, and treating truth as valuable for its own sake.
> It was a culture I really didn't enjoy and I mostly stayed out of because everyone seemed so interested in exclusivity.
Unless you're talking about those much earlier communities, way before Eternal September, I have a different view. Exclusivity can be good, and back in the IRC/early phpBB era, most exclusivity was of this kind - that is, anyone was welcome, they just had to show minimum effort up front. Contrast that with today's "cozy web", where everything is exclusive by default, and the exclusivity is of the bad kind: secret clubs to which you get invited by existing members and/or both write and read access are behind gates that require great and ongoing investment of time and effort (i.e. keeping up with the flow of the live chat).
Maybe it's the nerd in me showing, but the cozy web is way too personal in this sense.
> I came on-line at the tail end of it, when the denizens of the old were trying to find their footing in the new. IRC, mailing groups, early phpBB boards.
Ah you're actually talking about a time slightly before I'm talking about. I agree with what you mean when it comes to good-natured acculturation. A lot of those people left to the Web (or used both.) Later on a lot of the people that still used non-web services became more defensive about their parts of the net and doubled down on it.
> While the "revenge of the nerds" memes, "Jocks being bosses in high school, nerds being bosses at work" was a good joke / dream to discharge some frustrations over, it didn't materialize either.
The reason I didn't like it was because it classified the world into two types of people. Were band kids nerds or jocks? I never identified strongly with either end of the spectrum due to growing up in a low income area, so I found the entire thing to be problematic and exclusive in the wrong way.
I am an advocate for knowledge sharing and have previously contributed (a tiny amount) to the community mentioned above, Reactiflux. There, I was able to share my knowledge freely without fear of being penalized or judged through a voting system, or being heavily moderated as is the case with Wikipedia or StackOverflow. I also didn't have to worry about my contributions being eternally indexed on the internet. As a contributor, this is a feature (much less so for the lurker).
On that note, I recently had to request a deletion from Internet Archive because I shared content on my personal website that violates a ToS (it's a Slack archive that I have already anonymized). Unsurprisingly, my request went unanswered.
We seem to have interesting differences in perspective.
> There, I was able to share my knowledge freely without fear of being penalized or judged through a voting system, or being heavily moderated as is the case with Wikipedia or StackOverflow.
Private communities, especially chats, come with - IMO much stronger and impactful - built-in judging by peer pressure. That is, if someone doesn't like your contribution, it (or you) might get ridiculed in front of the entire community. At the very best, you'll have to defend the merit of what you wrote, which is kind of like replying to criticism on Reddit/HN, except you have to do it real-time. I personally vastly prefer the voting system on discussion boards. Less noise, takes more time to settle, lets you get positive feedback too (this is now partly solved in group chats via reactions), and of course:
> I also didn't have to worry about my contributions being eternally indexed on the internet. As a contributor, this is a feature (much less so for the lurker).
As a contributor, I never thought about it as a feature - on the contrary, I'm less willing to contribute something to a community (as opposed to small group of real life friends and family members) when said community is staying unindexed and unlogged - denying access to information to lurkers, and also to future community members, and even to current community members, as on such platforms search, if it exists, is so bad that it may as well not be there (also group chats make this structurally hard, too). I just don't like, and never liked, contributing anything to knowledge black holes.
I agree, but the old web did have some information black holes, like IRC, unarchived mailing lists, junky forums, and more I probably can't remember