The old internet died and we watched and did nothing - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/how-we-killed-the-old-internet <comment><USER2> The old internet died long before these centralized services appeared. The old internet was when we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites, and we were truly free in the wild wild west.

Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do.

The old internet is dead (for now) and it looks more like the BBS era today. But we innovated past that then, and we will innovate past that now.

I am greatly looking forward to all of the decentralization work that is in progress from the numerous people on HN and the internet.

<comment><USER3> 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.

<comment><USER4> 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.

<comment><USER5> 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.

<comment><USER6> > 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> More than a dozen comments on this article and none reference the actual content of the article and miss the point of the article entirely. It's a headline the evokes different ideas but it has nothing to do with the Internet not being what it used to be. The sorry state of platforms is an issue, for sure, but it's not what this article is about. Commenting on headlines is another sorry state of Internet discussion.

The article is about a loss of content and a lack of preservation. It's about doing nothing to preserve an era of digital heritage.

<comment><USER8> I'm actually OK with that.

Mass preservation of literally everything isn't custodianship, it's viparinama-dukkha. It's coming from the same place that resulted in my great- grandmother's house being fit for an episode of _Hoarders_. She thought that each of those items might be useful to someone some day, but actually it just created that much bigger and nastier a haystack to sift through when the time came to try and sort out a few family heirlooms and keepsakes.

And, once you take that instinct and apply it to massive, corporate-owned, centralized sites where people casually socialize, it becomes even more problematic. I agree, pre-sanitization Tumblr was a great place for young people - especially queer youth - to work out their sexual identities. But nobody wants to have that phase of their life preserved in perfect detail, for all perpetuity, and nobody wants it sitting around in a big public archive just waiting for someone else to figure out how to de-anonymize people's old Internet accounts. It's OK, even preferable for some things to be forgotten.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't preserve a record of our digital heritage. But it should be a curated preservation of a reasonable subset of the content on these sites, not an enormous trash heap of everything that's ever happened on the Internet being kept around for people to fripple through when they're in a voyeuristic mood.

<comment><USER7> Yours is the sort of comment I'd hope for. It's an excellent point of discussion.

I tend to agree with your perspective myself. But at the same time, much of what we discovered about ancient civilization literally came from trash heaps. Future generations after we're gone might enjoy frippling through what we took for granted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this a joke? I mean, it's buzzfeed, so it obviously is, but seriously?

That internet didn't die at all! You're looking at the same thing with different company names! Myspace and Facebook are the same thing with a different skin.

I figured this would be an article about like, vBulletin forums, IRC, tilde pages, something like that.

They all still exist, you're just not using them, why don't you start?

<comment><USER10> BuzzFeed News is not BuzzFeed. They've won many journalism awards as you can see on their Wikipedia article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News)

I do agree that reusing the name must surely do their image significant harm.

<comment><USER11> This is often repeated, but...Can you name a large news source that has not won a "journalism awards"?

<comment><USER10> I'm not attempting to establish credibility for BuzzFeed News beyond the statement of fact I made the my first comment. BuzzFeed itself doesn't win journalism awards, regardless of how you useful a signal you consider those, because their listicle stuff isn't journalism.

I have no interest in debating the nature of BuzzFeed News's journalism beyond making this distinction clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As far as I'm concerned the internet is just a global IP network. I can still ssh to my openbsd server and connect to my plan 9 system at home. I can rent a server that is still a PC. I can rent a VPS that feels like a pc.

Until the day comes when I can no longer send whatever IP traffic where and when I want, I'm still using the same old internet. The roads are still the same. The scenery just changed with time. Everything else is just a roadside attraction along the way. And like roads the attractions ebb and flow with time.

<comment><USER13> That's all fine and good as long as you only build things for yourself (even then you'll have more trouble routing niche protocols and defending against hacking attempts) - but the scenery becomes extremely important once you involve others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Can you think of a picture of yourself on the internet from before 2010, > other than your old Facebook photos?

Nah, because I never felt compelled to put pictures of myself on the Internet before then. I still don't.

What I miss is the personal website, where people shared information and opinions about things they loved. That Web has been crowded out by, well, people posting pictures of themselves.

It's like that point in the party where the stimulating conversation ends because the host decided it's time to break out the slide projector.

<comment><USER14> I think the advance of mobile phones and the cool factor that surrounded it for a long time, and "Hey look at this picture of my coffee I am drinking right now" kind of drowned the blogosphere. It was the time Facebook could count on being cool. Which evaporated after 2010/2012.

I think my personal take is that the idea of "your content is your own" got lost in the process of sharing-everything culture.

Luckily it isn't dead, this site and the people writing informative blogs is still available.

<comment><USER8> Even blogs feel a little bit stilted to me. They encourage a certain way of organizing things that is useful for RSS syndication, but at the cost of placing some fairly tight editorial limits on the person running the site.

What I really miss is what came before the blogosphere really took off: Geocities-style loosely organized collections of static pages.

<comment><USER15> What's RSS syndication?

<comment><USER14> It's a xml format spec. It holds the latest posts in a convenient way which a rss reader can sub to. It kind of went away unfortunately, it was pretty handy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The Buzzfeed article seems to focus around a particular user usage pattern, in that these were sites I personally did not use that horribly much. My "old internet" was Digg, Slashdot, GeoCities, HowardForums, ISP `~username` pages, Usenet, IRC and a multitude of others I've long forgotten. The Consumerist has a better version that speaks to me: [https://consumerist.com/2015/03/20/where- did-everyone-from-t...](https://consumerist.com/2015/03/20/where-did-everyone- from-the-90s-go-when-we-all-got-facebook-and-quit-web-1-0/)

In any case, we all agree Eternal September was the beginning of the end. :) [http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/AOL-.html](http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/AOL-.html)

<comment><USER17> September 1993 Internet use shows the silliness of the idea of the death of the old Internet. In 1993, "...the World Wide Web, has seen the number of daily queries explode from almost 100,000 requests in June to almost 400,000 in October"

[https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/business/business- technol...](https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/business/business-technology- jams-already-on-data-highway.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all)

There are now over 4.5 billion Internet users. If even 0.002% of them make just one daily query on the web of the "old Internet," then it's still larger than the web before the Eternal September. Protocols like IRC and Gopher are more active today than late 1993.

It's true that data moving through centralized services is larger today, but that doesn't invalidate the continued life of the "old Internet" any more than the relative domination of analog communications over copper wires in 1993 meant the Internet was dead back then.

<comment><USER16> It was a tongue in cheek sarcastic comment, my friend. Whole new paragraph, smiley face at the end, fun link to the "me, too!" history, you know - lighthearted and jovial.

<comment><USER17> Intent understood! It's a classic turning point in Internet history, and I think the massive rise in traffic to 400,000 queries per day is the perfect example of how much bigger things are today and how all those old paradigms are even more alive now than they were then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oh please...nostalgia is self deception. I knew this but the movie "Midnight in Paris" had a big impact on my perspective. The main character travels to the 1920s and meets famous writers and figures like picasso. And there were people and a general view that their time was past the "good ol days", we now call their time "the golden 20s" but they thought about how the late 1800s were much better.

Anyway, back on topic: The internet is the global BGPv4 and BGPv6 network,as seen in the global routing table. It's a network and how that network functions has not changed much.

The web on the other hand has changed a lot both in terms of functionality and content. But here's a different perspective: the "old web" was very slow. There were so many limitations, i mean are we talking pre-adobe-flash? If so,you had little rich and dynamic content. You couldn't stream movies,things like napster were viewed as criminal , as much as i dislike it youtube on it's ow has given much such rich and valuable content. Social media sucks but man, we're living in the golden age of memes!. Look at all the great things that happen because people can record videos and share them live/instantly! And security! We have come sooo far!!! From how amazing twitter has been to help infosec pros communicate to all the crypto improvements. I don't think i can go back in time and be able to share or access the same sites and content i did in the past,knowing how everything was so full of holes and made with little to no security consideration. I think I can easily make the argument that the old web was a dumpster fire. But in reality, I think it was ok for it's time and what we have today works for our time as well.

Let's be real here, anyone can host a discord server and many do that. There are so many free web hosting services now that let anyone host their own site without needing to learn html or webadmin. So many blogging platforms like medium and wordpress. So many privacy friendly products and services.

The past always looks different in hindsight and you don't know what you have until it's gone.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default- free_zone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default-free_zone)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection)

</comment><comment><USER19> That's why your local storage is the single source of truth, and anything you put "on the internet" is just a copy of something from there. I mean that's how you did things riiiight?

No biggie if not. As someone said elsewhere in the thread, most of that stuff is clutter and probably best forgotten anyway. But if it's something you want to keep, and the only place it exists is someone else's site/computer/database, then yeah, it's not a bad idea to start thinking of it as being gone soon, or even gone already. (Unless you WANT it to go away; in that case you should apply Murphy's Law and think of it as uncontrollably hanging around forever.)

Growing up with computers and the internet and not knowing how they truly work is maybe the central problem here. Did you "post a picture on Instagram" or did you create an image file, upload it via an app or browser, pass it across the network, to a server somewhere, where it's getting stored in a database, to be retrieved and displayed later? Seems like if you understand how it really works, you automatically start thinking about better practices. I dunno.

</comment><comment><USER20> Parts of it were good but there was a tonne of bad stuff too. Entire sites devoted to content that is beyond indecent that were completely open. Networks of sites devoted to exploiting young people. Nothing has entirely changed in that realm except that such sites are more rare. There was a whole cottage industry of software dedicated to making using the Internet for younger audiences possible. Without it the Internet was a funnel for the most base garbage humanity could produce.

I'm all down for decentralization but I think part of the protocol should be dedicated to enabling us to filter the content we receive.

</comment><comment><USER21> I remember the sound my 28800 modem made before connecting.

I knew I have exactly 1 second below 60 minutes to be online before I get disconnected from my student dial-up.

I had ICQ. We used Altavista (and Astalavista to crack the software we illegally got). Relevant information and socializing was done via newsgroups, as well as content-sharing. Many don't know why winzip/winrar has the option to split an archive into multiple files (so they can fit 1.44" floppy disk and avoid upload limits). Later on I used Miranda so I can use ICQ/IRC/AIM/MSN from the same client. Browser wars were nonexistent. First "awesome" browser shell I used was Maxthon and content was shared on lan parties or you used obscure xdcc search engines to leech off of IRC. FPS games that I played (quake 1, 2 and 3) lagged, I had 200 ping - which is how I learned about the importance of latency and what it is. It dropped to 50 once I got ISDN.

Now, why did I type this? Not to present myself as "the old internet user". I don't consider myself a user of internet from "before", I'm well aware of even older generation whose internet looked even different. I'm just saddened by the fact that buzzfeed, one of the worst ad-ridden sites that exists, is making this kind of an article, spreading false knowledge (which is what it does anyway). It's not even an article. It's made by someone who used Facebook when it looked slightly shittier than it does now.

That's not "old" internet. The consumer-generation that's lifeblood of leeches such as buzzfeed/youtube has no experience nor right to write about "old" internet. They simply haven't experienced how internet used to be when total population online was well below 50 million people and when broadband was a luxury.

<comment><USER22> > The consumer-generation that's lifeblood of leeches such as buzzfeed/youtube > has no experience nor right to write about "old" internet

While I share your sentiment towards Buzzfeed and clueless millennials, I don't think it's entirely fair to say they have no right to write about the "old" internet.

I began to experience the web around 1997, and it was different in a lot of ways compared to now. More personal pages, less centralization, little content policing, Netscape, Real Player, etc.

I'm sure some old fart from the 80's would tell me that I didn't know the "old" internet because I'd never used Telnet to log in to a BBS. While there's truth to that, it doesn't mean I don't have my own perspective of what's "old".

<comment><USER21> When I used "they have no right" \- what I meant was this: they haven't experienced anything fundamentally different 10 years ago, therefore they can't be writing about something that "died" simply due to the fact there was nothing different to experience back then that doesn't exist today. The article seems forced, as any article from fake-factory would be. I'm always skeptical towards such content, that attributes to my negativity when typing all this. I merely find it ironic that someone who has no clue about the matter is writing about it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > _The internet of the 2010s will be defined by social media's role in the > 2016 election, the rise of extremism, and the fallout from privacy scandals > like Cambridge Analytica._

When I think of the internet of the 2010s I think of clickbait farms like Buzzfeed politicizing _absolutely everything_. This statement by them is 100% in line with the type of content "journalists" have produced and polluted the internet with the past 10 years.

<comment><USER15> That's the thing about extremism, it comes in lots of flavors. And clickbait farms are incented to whip it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm sick of hearing about the death of blogs.

I read more blogs now than ever. More than in the 90s. What are you even talking about? As a percentage of online content? Who cares? there are more blogs to read on any topic than you can read in a lifetime.

> A look through its "Deathwatch" page — a list of websites and services shut > down over the last 10 years — is harrowing.

It's really not.

</comment><comment> augusto-moura There's a project focused on backuping this kind of information[1]. It's actually a distributed and communitary way of doing it, anyone can run a "warrior" instance and help the project. Modern problems require modern solutions

Edit: In the project wiki there's a lot of interesting links, like this one listing all tracked projects that are dying[2]

[1]: [https://www.archiveteam.org/](https://www.archiveteam.org/)

[2]: [https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Deathwatch](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Deathwatch)

<comment><USER25> Unfortunately newer systems seem more resistant to archival than older. Compare getting a copy of a mailing list vs. getting a copy of a forum like phpBB or (even more modern) archiving a copy of a subreddit or Facebook group. Some people on a mailing list may already have a full copy simply from their participation in the list, and if the list has archives then presumably they are in a format which has stood the test of time. The other cases contrast with this. You can run wget on online forums, though the result is not as clean as the mailing list. Someone (maybe me) should write a bot to parse the pages into something more useful. I've also seen a script to scrape subreddits, though in my experience scraping subreddits is rarer than spidering forums. No idea what you can do with Facebook groups.

While I am irritated by how much of the internet has been replaced by JavaScript, one advantage has been the exposure of APIs that can be reverse engineered, as seems to have been done in the recent Yahoo Groups case. So there might be some hope here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is indefinite retention and archival of all the shit put online really good for anyone other than AI feeding? When encryption eventually breaks and all our old private emails, AIMs, and other junk can be searched as easily as Shodan are we really going to be glad we have an extensive digital history?

I don't think it's as simple as more data = better.

</comment><comment><USER27> People love to trash talk WordPress, but by being consistently correct and committed to its principles, it got this single line in this article:

"WordPress has managed to keep chugging and even bought Tumblr off Verizon."

It's because Matt Mullenweg and co have held the line on open source and the open internet for more than a decade now, and we should all be grateful.

Everything cool I've gotten to do in my life I owe to learning to code via building WordPress websites. I hope in the next decade WordPress and companies like Automattic become the example to aspire to instead of people throwing more fuel on the never-ending VC trash fire.

<comment><USER28> Automattic has raised US$617.3 million in six funding rounds, the latest one being 3 months ago. (Source: Wikipedia.)

<comment><USER27> Automattic was founded 15 years ago, and despite being a profitable and growing company for most of that time, has only raised $617.3 million, mostly to fund specific expansion projects. At no time have they sought 10x returns or some kind of spectacular exit for the benefits of its shareholders. It's not even close to the disaster that is most of VC world.

<comment><USER28> 617 million is a lot for the general sector. Quora has raised 226 million; the company behind Stack Exchange, 68M.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Companies don't make internet culture; people do. People make communities; > they make the inside jokes; they make their own mores and unwritten rules. > But people need the web services and platforms made by companies to create > this culture. We're locked in a symbiotic relationship: We, the users, need > the companies, and they need us to keep running. When they shut down or > delete our precious stuff, it's because we've abandoned and neglected them > for years already, leaving them to starve.

This line resonated most with me. Truly though, it's sometimes not our first instinct as developers to design for the future- the current culture of "build an MVP as soon as possible" doesn't always incentivize forward thinking.

If you're interested in thinking about how we can better design software solutions to support online communities further into the future, you might be a good fit for a discussion group I'm starting soon, called VC3. We're trying to bring together people who are as interested as we are in solving the problem of building meaningful virtual community. Building communities that stand the test of time are part of that.

If you have any questions, shoot me a message (profile) or check out our website at [https://vc3.club](https://vc3.club).

</comment><comment><USER30> It is interesting that people say "the internet never forgets", yet this article clearly shows it does.

Do we want the internet to forget, or not to forget? Is forgetting so bad? Not everything needs to be collected and catalogued and preserved forevermore.

There is a lot of crap out there - I'd be happy for some personal stuff I posted many years ago as a much younger and naïve person to just slowly rot away.

<comment><USER31> "The internet" never forgets porn. It never forgets your dox. It will never forget anything it can use against you for the lulz.

Everything else is a house of cards, though. It's just software on a server, after all, and if no one cares to back it up, no one will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> First, it didn't _die_ , it attenuated. It's still there. Even Gopher is still there.

Second, when one says, "we did nothing", well, speak for yourself, eh? Lots of people did a lot of things and are still doing them.

But the normals do not care. It's that simple: apathy and complacency (the twins demons of our New Age) and a good stiff whollop of ignorance.

(Over a _billion_ people don't know that Facebook _isn 't_ the Internet! Chew on that.)

Meanwhile, you know who _didn 't_ lose all their content? _This guy._ Because backups. (Another thing normals try not to think about.)

I've been saying _for years now_ that the world is bifurcating into Eloi and Morlocks.

This is "victim" blaming, yeah, but in this case IMO the "victims" are to blame: no one's forcing people to be Eloi. If you care about your digital shit, back it the frak up already.

(E.g. Tarsnap, Amazon Glacier, a box of DVDs!?)

<comment><USER31> >Over a billion people don't know that Facebook isn't the Internet! Chew on that

While that's a common axiom bandied about on HN, as is your general tone of condescension towards "the normals" (Eloi and Morlocks, seriously? You know the Eloi were the villains, right?) I'm certain that practically no one who uses Facebook is actually unaware that the rest of the web exists.

<comment><USER32> I was about to go on a bit of a rant about my general tone of condescension but I caught myself. I'll tell a joke instead.

"You know how stupid the average person is, yeah? Well, by definition, _half_ of them are dumber than that."

> I'm certain that practically no one who uses Facebook is actually unaware > that the rest of the web exists.

I wish there was a way to make a bet on that because I'd like to take your money.

> You know the Eloi were the villains, right?

Are you sure? The Eloi were the innocent beautiful idiot surface dwellers, the Morlocks were the grotesque cannibal machine-tenders, eh? My metaphor is that tech-elites (myself somewhat included) are the Morlocks and the users are Eloi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Shocked how many of the creators I'm interested in who previously would have had a website presence now only have Instagram pages.

Mostly find it shocking because Instagram is so anti-internet you can't even post links to promote/sell your work...

</comment><comment><USER34> The old internet is still around, if you know where to look.

You just need to look past the light pollution of google, facebook and twitter.

</comment><comment><USER35> Wow a super one sided article. Pretty sure that with the advent of cheap VMs for hosting or even seeding has increased the total number of personal servers but I could be wrong. Bottom line though is that the internet opened up to a much larger user base and this shaped the majority of interactions we see. I don't think there is anyone who could reasonably claim the Internet was hindered by the rise of large tech companies. Hosting your own server or using sites who's interfaces didn't translate well with other cultures was a barrier to entry for a huge portion of the world. Having everything look similar and hosting content easily and seamlessly made it so even non-English speakers could access the same content. There have been some big hiccups caused by things like conflicting ideals and automation which helped create the ongoing battles we have now where likes are monetized and content is pushed aggressively to vulnerable sections of the population but with those new problems also came new rewards. We are living in an age where a huge majority of the world is connected in ways we never could have dreamed of in 2010. Right now I see the world as being on the precipice of cooperation where we are all shouting at each other but if we step back we might just realize that while everyone is fighting we are all still coming to the table, posting our content and inching closer and closer to a fully connected society.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm more worried about technological and legal chokeholds on free expression like GDPR, whose main effect was to nag users with a popup about cookies on every major website.

To me, it feels like the original possibility of inventing something, posting it online and earning a passive income is all but dead today. Too many hurdles now must be overcome. You pretty much have to learn a programming language, containerization, the various layers of HTML/Javascript/CSS deployment, amoral stuff like SEO and bribing influencers, to even have a chance at making more than $10 per month.

When I think of every major innovation in web dev since 2000, almost all of it has gone the opposite direction from how I would have done it. Instead of autoscaling distributed servers, programming languages and databases, we ended up with "bare hands" tools like Kubernetes, async-await and sharding on proprietary monopolies like AWS locked into physical regions. My description of what's wrong is fuzzy at best, but I feel it deep down, that this trend away from computer science to application has all but halted progress.

I could write at length (seriously dozens/hundreds of pages) about better ways of doing all of this. I already have to some degree. But nobody cares, and nobody listens to me since I never built anything that made any appreciable money. So what's the point? There isn't one. That's the internet today. Late- stage capitalism, pretty people, and divisive political discourse. Dystopia.

<comment><USER37> You know? In another galaxy, a long time ago there was some young guy who did freelance sysadmin and education for private people and small businesses, while assembling personal computers maindays in some omputer store. Let's call that time 1995, where one early evening young Largo was asked by the very established owner of some electronic parts import-export business with whom he was on good terms if he liked what he does, and if he wanted to do it any longer?

Whereupon young Largo LOL'd almost hysterically and said: 'What? _NO! " This is so fucked up it isn't funny anymore!'

He was very surprised and asked why, young Largo couldn't say exactly why and needed some minutes to collect his thougts and then began:

'This may come as a surprise to you, with me being an atheist, but what we have now reminds me of the story in the old testament of the bible about the building of the Tower of Babylon.'

That indeed raised some eyebrows!

Young Largo rambled on about the siloing of data in different non- interoperable applications for reasons of customer tie in, which is against the interests of said customer. About the bloat in software which requires ever more potent hardware in regular intervals with every new software version, while the old ones would be perfectly servicable if they only could read the data from the newer versions, which of course is a No-Go because it is against the interest of the software producers.

He rambled on about lack of stability and unintuiveness of UX while compairing that with kitchen- and general household appliances, which would be considered useless and broken if they required the effort PC's did then.

He fantasized on about something which combined the ease of use of Hypercard and Visual Basic in some hypothetic platform with the versatility and networkability of some Unix, extendable with modules available in countless variations like in DOS/WIN in a way every other 'module' would benefit from, because of extended capabilities and 'teaching' them new data formats, creating a bespoke environment exactly fitting your needs, while being able to run on ridiculously cheap and small hardware, nonetheless capable of reading everything you could reasonably throw at them.

Young Largo rambled on about the impossibility of this happening in our current society and economy with patents, intellectual property, and so on, that this was easy to see and extrapolate into not getting any better EVER!

Because even then bloat was a thing.

What young Largo didn't really knew at the time were Plan9, OS-9, QNX and TRON but he had dabbled in 386/FreeBSD, early Linuxes, knew some FORTHs and some Assemblers and paid a shitload of money for his ISDN to get onto the internet with his hot rod Pentium.

Young Largo concluded then that this all was nothing else but the biggest bullshit job creation program since the building of the egyptian pyramids, and at the end of the day almost as useless as them for society, with a few exceptions of research and simulation, CAD/CAM and such, but not applicable to the general public.

When asked 'But what for!?' he answered: 'How should i know? TO THE STARS!'

There could be a prequel to this, where an even younger Largo said in school that he wanted every computer being able to speak with each other, one big universal library, when being asked in class what the biggest thing he wished for would be.'

That was pre- or proto-internet

Anyways, in a purely technical way all of this is possible, and even has been realized in parts, or as complete proof of concept, _except the ability of handling proprietary data formats by already entrenched market players behind their moats.*

So one part of the army of bullshit jobbers is pecking like vultures at the long rotten carcasses which were thrown out of some research labs eons ago for antimonopolistic reasons, producing nothing but bloated zombies in different paint schemes. Another part specializes in exploiting the bullshit jobbers with proprietary software and services which don't really run according to their needs, but clogging their toilets, while the part who feels like it is the airforce tries to simulate being intelligent while unable to reliably reproduce or even explain their cheap stunts, the part being the navy looming beneath the waves and snorting..err snorkeling every and any shit, while the real spaceforce which does solid engineering could have been up in the sky in O'-Neil cylinders since decades, if the rest of the retarded shitheads wouldn't have dragged them down so much.

Instead of the universal library with nice haptics i got craptastic movieplayers in different sizes, which i use like giant microfiche readers. So be it!

 _Aye häff SPOQQN!_

<comment><USER36> I hear ya, that's about the time I was coming up too. While your colorful vernacular isn't exactly how I might have put it, I think that it illustrates the frustration felt by many, ever since the beginning of personal computing.

I also wish that HyperCard had been a bigger influence on the early web. It was written in human terms for techno-novices trying to get real work done. As HyperTalk evolved into AppleScript, it lost its original elegance and is now just another cryptic toy language that is difficult or impossible to write without a manual.

IMHO to fix all of this, we need to bring back ideas like research budgets of perhaps 5-25% and every company over say 50 employees or $5 million/yr gross having some form of 20% time for in-house projects. That can't happen as long as everyone is competing with each other just to survive though. And not when the leading internet companies plow most profits into share price and dividends instead of free and open source community tools.

I wish we had more stories of individuals and groups that made enough money to retire, but instead of just reinvesting into the status quo, went on to fund real innovation through philanthropy or alternative business structures like co ops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Funny how they use services like MySpace and Flickr as the "old Internet". For me, the old Internet was Geocities and IRC, where sharing content required a maker mentality, not a service.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's sad to say, but "we" as people who enjoyed the old internet or felt compelled to build and contribute to it are a tiny minority of internet users today. We are a niche. The vast majority are people looking to watch youtube, TikTok or some other social networking garbage. It's sad but this is the reality. People who are just looking for entertainment or social dopamine think the old internet is "boring" or "looks dumb".

:(

<comment><USER31> >It's sad to say, but "we" as people who enjoyed the old internet or felt compelled to build and contribute to it are a tiny minority of internet users today. We are a niche

That's not sad, actually, it's great. Being upset about that is like being upset that too many people use telephones who've never operated a switchboard or know morse code.

The internet (or at least the web) was never meant to be a niche redoubt only for nerds and programmers, it's supposed to be for everyone. The old hacker ethos was about liberating _humanity_ from censorship and centralized control of access to information and communication, but now that that vision is actually coming to pass (kind of) people are complaining about how the normies ruined.

Fie. Fie, I say.

Also, almost everyone from the 'old internet' is watching Youtube and using social media as well. Your implication that everyone using social media is only doing so for entertainment or a dopamine rush is inaccurate. There are more hardcore, old school nerds on the modern web than there ever were on the old web.

>People who are just looking for entertainment or social dopamine think the old internet is "boring" or "looks dumb".

Nobody says that. Your can stuff your sorries into a sack, sir or madam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Technology and how we share information always moves forward, this is just a new iteration, I expect that soon we will see decentralized internet services based on what we have learned from cryptocurrency, most services being hosted on others pc with high encryptions and high availability. Imagine a data center that is just the entire world.

</comment><comment><USER41> Interesting that they don't mention the business model that powered the old internet: VC money based on a vague promise that a large enough user base, coupled with ad revenue, would bring untold riches.

As TFA says, most of those sites switched to paid accounts as the promise of "build a huge audience and work out how to monetise them later" didn't actually deliver any money.

So it's not that they died (they're mostly still there). It's just that they're not free any more.

I think the next decade will see this more and more: people actually paying for the things they use on the internet, because they realise that's the only way this will work now. The rise of information products and services focused around actually providing what their customers want, for a reasonable fee.

<comment><USER15> > I think the next decade will see this more and more: people actually paying > for the things they use on the internet, because they realise that's the > only way this will work now.

I think that "pay what you want"/crowdfunding models can fund a lot of the stuff that used to be provided "free" back in the day. The thing about paying for stuff on the internet is that many people find it quite inconvenient. It's not about the actual monetary expense, that's a minor factor (although it _is_ a barrier to causal browsing, in and of itself). It's everything else you have to deal with as part of paying for something.

<comment><USER41> I'm curious, what's the "everything else"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> All I ever see from media and journalists is bitching and moaning about centralized services shutting down, yet none of them have taken the effort to implement their own decentralized systems. The protocols exist today. Smart media would do wise by adopting them.

</comment><comment><USER43> Right. Buzzfeed. Trying to slide itself into the group that just watched it die, eliding over all those times it injected Old Internet's regular IV drip with 100 mL of a 25 M solution of listicles and clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER44> One aspect about old archived stuff: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten)

</comment><comment><USER45> The saddest thing about this is how desperately people cling to records of the past, as if they matter.

If you actually missed something from back then, you would remember it, and it's not really gone. If you don't remember it, it wasn't important. But here people are, trying to convince you you've lost something that you don't even know what it is.

The first time you lose all your files, it feels like disaster. The second time, you realize it's just digital materialism, and you get along just fine without it.

<comment><USER25> > If you don't remember it, it wasn't important.

I've found time and time again that something I thought wasn't important before can end up being very important later. That's only what I can remember, too.

Plus, there's a selection bias in what you remember. If you don't remember it, how would you know that it's important or not later?

If the cost is small then I think "digital materialism" is probably mostly okay. I've come to the conclusion that it's hard for me to predict the importance of things later, so if something appears to be ephemeral and has even a modest chance of being important later, I'll archive it and organize it so I can find it later if I want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I always considered the "Old Internet" to be before 1994.

Get off my lawn!

</comment><comment><USER47> Meta: Does nostalgia always pick up during the holidays? Is this the time when we reflect, on computing as well? We were reminiscing over the _Windows 95_ GUI, of all things, a week ago. What's next, "in defense of COBOL" or "the elegance of PC DOS 3.0"? If you look hard enough and you have some personal connection, any antiquated architecture seems worth reminiscing, but thank god all of it went away.

<comment><USER37> Sounds like a worthy title for some Cyberspatial Archeosociologists.

</comment></comment><comment> yoz-y Is it worth preserving all social media content from MySpace, Facebook et al though? I see the argument for blogs because people usually put more thought into the articles and they are more likely to be timeless. However, an endless stream of breakfast photos or drunken lashing out may well be better off deleted. Imo, the danger lies when the "serious" conversation/publishing moves to ephemeral platforms.

</comment><comment><USER48> But nowadays we have so many personalized stuffs distributed across the Internet. For example you can just build a static page and put up on Github for free, and there are so many startups that provide all kinds of blogging (some of them are very serious and educational, just one level below books).

I'd say that if the old Internet died then let's look forward to the future and build something new.

</comment><comment><USER49> Kind of ironic when these type of articles inevitably show up on these heavy, slow, ad-ridden websites such as this one..

</comment><comment><USER50> Predictions: Reddit will make the next list.

</comment><comment><USER51> We can do something

[https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its- way-c...](https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-can-find- a-new-one)

We have already been there with AOL, MSN, CompuServ. We learned that instead of government regulation we just need a really robust open-source permissionless ecosystem of software to run on servers and clients, like the Web, to disrupt them.

I saw this coming in 2011 and built a company to be part of the solution. If you want to learn more about the solution, ignore the token part (that's to make it more like Xanadu) and read this to diagnose the problems and the solutions:

[https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed- Operating-...](https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating- System)

Contact me if you want to join the effort btw. Especially if you're proficient in Javascript and/or PHP and like to work from home.

</comment><comment><USER52> Oh hey - this is my dept. [https://kickscondor.com](https://kickscondor.com)

I cover what's happening in modern personal blogs and independent web weirdness. Rest assured, you can now put Buzzfeednooze safely behind you...

<comment><USER53> I've been following your blog for quite a while now, and I enjoy it a lot. Are there any other link-blogs that you recommend? (besides the usual ones like kottke, etc..)

<comment><USER52> Oh thank you and yes, link blogs - the biggest one for me right now is at imperica.com. The weekly 'web curios' roundup. I link this one a lot, so apologies if you've seen it already. (And I'm sure you mean Waxy in the 'usual' ones, right?)

I've also linked to these quite a lot, but hey:

* [https://philosopher.life/](https://philosopher.life/) (see his 'link log' pages)

* [https://www.gyford.com/](https://www.gyford.com/)

* [http://tilde.club/~jonbell/](http://tilde.club/~jonbell/)

* [https://thingstoclick.com](https://thingstoclick.com)

* [http://fimoculous.com/recs/](http://fimoculous.com/recs/)

The Internet is lacking good linkblogs - people don't run them nearly as much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The internet is what you make it. Until the incumbents legislate an impenetrable switching cost for themselves, if don't like the way the internet serves people, you have the power to give them another option.

</comment><comment><USER55> I had a very interesting experience yesterday. Falling completely off my year- long diet, I decided I wanted a pizza at all costs. So I went to a pizza store. As it turns out, this was a store I had managed 30 years ago, and I haven't been inside one of these stores since, so it made for a nice moment of comparison. People are the same, the business is the same. What have computers brought?

It used to be, when you talked about computers, you talked about data, although at the time we confused behavior and data. Here's my computer. It has my pictures. I write programs on it. There is a thing. I posses this thing. It holds other things I posses that I can do neat stuff with.

But a weird thing happened. The arcade had sex with the IBM PC. That is, computers stopped being about "things I own that I can do things with" and became almost exclusively about the experience, the game. Having a good time.

If you'd asked me in 89 what the store would evolve into in 30 years, I'd probably say something about robots. Paper free, human free. Maybe humans out front to talk to people with robots working behind the scenes.

Instead, the computers controlled the workers. They took orders, they printed tickets to be stuck on boxes, they provided instructions, they tracked how much time the worker took for various things, they provided a cool interface for people to both order and see how their order was being processed. Who owned what that did what? Nobody cared.

If you have an enjoyable, perhaps addictive experience doing X, and it's free, who cares about ownership or data? We never thought behavior/experience and ownership would be separate, so we reason poorly about it.

On the old net, I would visit sites lovingly-crafted by their owners, with everything their owners enjoyed. We shared the experience of their creation, both creator and consumer. If there was a problem, I'd email. Your site doesn't work. You own it. Fix it.

The new net is full of companies providing unique and fun experiences that people like, collecting data on their fellow humans like their lab rats with the exit strategy of being bought out by even larger companies with even more data. We create things we do not own. Instead we're like prostitutes in a red light district that are forced to dance in glass windows. We are displayed. Our existence and the things we create is owned by others. They choose to show the parts of us as they will. Your data isn't important. My experience online using some app is important. Everything else is subservient to that.

The old web is gone because it either died or was eaten by companies who understand the new selection criteria. Anonymity is gone. Privacy is gone. Ownership is gone. We are left with just a collective experience which we will optimize for at all costs.

</comment><comment><USER56> I've heard that less new websites and blogs are actually bad for large services like google in terms of their search product

</comment><comment><USER57> The old dies anyway; what we need to do is to learn from their mistakes and prolong your life any means possible

</comment><comment><USER58> > If you remembered how to log in, you could download your old chat logs.

AIM never stored chat logs, did they?

</comment><comment><USER59> It is ironic that when I loaded that page on my mobile device i could see those scare ads for old people and then more ads covered up the content.

Makes me think the back button is still the best thing since sliced bread and I wonder when Google is going to take it out of chrome.

</comment><comment><USER60> Time for buzzfeed to experience ego-death and realize they're not immortal and nothing they do will be either.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death)

</comment><comment><USER61> i'm still using irc

<comment><USER62> Yep. There's a million of us still active on IRC daily. Federated protocols > centralized services.

Also, the old internet where everyone hosted, or at least coded, their own website still exists. In fact almost all the old internet is still around. It's just that most people are stuck in their walled gardens and can't see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Where is Hotmail, Geocities, Xoom, Webring, Metacrawler etc? lol

</comment><comment><USER64> I think it's more accurate to say "The old Internet evolved while we watched. Because after all, that's what technology does and we like to see where it's going."

</comment><comment><USER65> > and did nothing

False, it's just that plebeians like ourselves have no power against politicians anymore or the corporate world.

<comment><USER66> >plebeians like ourselves have no power against politicians anymore or the corporate world.

That's just what they want you to believe. You won't fight because you believe no fight is possible. The good news is, that's not true.

(Gee, feel like I'm writing the _V for Vendetta_ script or something!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Unfortunately the old internet died because "instant gratification" wins the masses. Zuckerberg clearly understood "dumb fucks" and went "full retard".

</comment><comment><USER68> This is a bit rich coming from buzzfeed.

</comment><comment><USER69> News outlets like buzzfeed contributed to that. The old internet was an uncensored free for all and I really doubt that is what they are advocating for here.

<comment><USER70> Of course not, because extremism is on the rise according to this article...

If they got one whiff of what the wild west days were like, they'd be writing their Congressmen. They couldn't shame corporations into taking down sites they disagree with.

<comment><USER71> > They couldn't shame corporations into taking down sites they disagree with.

Just host your site behind Cloudflare and optimize it for Google SEO. With the admitted and notable exception of two websites, they'll host absolutely anything and give it top rankings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> This is a terrible article and tries to make something out of nothing.

we're supposed to shed a tear because AOL died? Is that really a version of the internet that we wanted anyway?

</comment><comment><USER73> Unlike that article, the old internet didn't have inline video ads, mandatory cookies, and social media bars at the bottom. Not to mention dynamic pages that can load 100 ads if you scroll long enough.

I swear my reading comprehension has been poisoned by the new internet.

<comment><USER74> I guess everyone forgot the days before pop-up blocking was built into every browser? Sure, Javascript modals are disgusting, but by definition they have to be one at a time, not a giant stack of ads every time you browse a site. Also, lets not forget the joy of being nagged to install Flash and Real Player on every website.

<comment><USER75> Along with the fact that we have the option to block all of those distractions now. With my blocking extensions, that article was a single photo and all text on a plain white background. It was a very enjoyable reading experience.

<comment><USER15> Back in the day, blocking all the distractions (well, almost all of them, <blink> and <marquee> tags were a thing) was the _default_. You had to click a button in order to load all images inline, _after_ the text had finished loading.

<comment><USER37> And hitting ESC stopped animated GIFs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Buzzfeed did not watch and do nothing, they actively participated in creating its replacement. The author of this article is so tone deaf that he rails against social media giants dominating the netscape in an article with "Tweet" and Facebook "Share" buttons at the top.

<comment><USER77> I can dislike the state things are in and still use the tools available to spread a message or advance a cause without compromising my morals.

<comment><USER76> Not if what you dislike about the state of things is having a few major entities control the spread of messages.</comment></comment></comment>


Rocket League left behind on macOS and Linux due to DirectX 11 shift - <AUTHOR> https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/357261/Rocket_League_left_behind_on_macOS_and_Linux_due_to_DirectX_11_shift.php <comment><USER2> Epic is probably one of the biggest enemies of Linux since they're killing Linux support of every game/product they buy [1]. And while games aren't as important as some business/productivity applications, people do get lots of enjoyment from playing an occasional game. It's a great stress relief. And now even those little indulgences are being taken away.

Epic's CEO, Tim Sweeney, is extremely negative on Linux if you check out his Twitter feed [2] and I get a feeling from reading his comments that he despises Linux with passion.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19844241](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19844241)

[2] [https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/964284402741149698...](https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/964284402741149698?lang=en)

<comment><USER3> I honestly cannot blame someone in that business for hating linux. The number of variables to test for if you only care about windows gamers is staggering. Linux is 10x harder than windows if you care about supporting any arbitrary distribution and driver stack. I think if users were willing to load a linux VM for each game they'd like to play, this would be more manageable from a game developer's perspective.

I understand SDL2 exists. I understand that Valve has "mostly" pulled off linux/macos support. But, is it really worth it from a business perspective for _all_ game developers to support linux? How big and wide do your margins need to be before it makes financial sense to fully support both operating systems? How many features (or even titles) will stay in the backlog because your developers are busy chasing down the 5000th weird linux network/GPU/sound bug that only occurs on this one kinda-old version of Ubuntu?

<comment><USER4> Supporting only a single distro of Linux would be fine. If it's not my prefered distro, I'd be happy to dual boot into another to play a game. But I don't want Windows on any of my machines, even as a secondary OS.

<comment><USER5> People always say this, but then post support comments saying stuff like "nobody uses Ubuntu, everybody uses _insert distro here_ ". It's a big mess to support.

<comment><USER6> I'm still not sure.why game developers are aiming to support distros rather than library versions. That tends to be the biggest problem with linux is the huge number of versions of libraries each distro could have or not have and the location of said libraries on the system. That's the issue crossplatform developers should be aiming to tackle rather than trying to cater.to every single linux distro. That's like trying to shoot at minnows in the ocean with a BB gun.

<comment><USER7> I don't even understand why anyone bothers with targeting dynamic libraries. Why not statically compile everything? The system calls aren't changing are they?

<comment><USER8> Even if you could statically link everything else you would still to dynamically link to the system's native user-mode graphics drivers, which in practice means that you also need to dynamically link to other libraries used by your application and the drivers (like glibc & libllvm) in order to maintain compatibility. Static linking against glibc isn't really recommended in any case.

Nothing prevents you from providing your own preferred versions of _most_ of the dynamic libraries along with the application, however. It should be possible to limit external dependencies to libraries that actually care about maintaining compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Rocket League's creator, Psyonix, was bought by Epic last year. The is concern/belief that this move is a precursor to making Rocket League an Epic Store exclusive, as the Epic store is Windows only.

Psyonix stated that they would offer refunds for Linux/ macOS users. In the first few days post announcement, everyones' refund was being denied. It appears that this has since been resolved. I received my refund yesterday.

<comment><USER10> This is one extra thing I don't like about Epic store - Valve has a Linux client & hosts many Linux native games, is active in many open source projects including GPU drivers and even actively works on improving Wine/Proton to get Windows games run seamlessly on Linux.

Epic does nothing like that and even actively pushes games to be exclusive this Windows only, using their Windows only client.

<comment><USER11> > Epic does nothing like that and even actively pushes games to be exclusive > this Windows only

Don't Epic make Unreal Engine, which supports Linux? I'm not sure it's fair to say they do nothing, if that's the case.

<comment><USER12> Epic also owns one of the largest "anti-cheat" software companies. That refuse to support linux, or work with Valve on making it work on proton.

There are quite a few games that work great with proton, but can't be played online because the anti-cheat won't run. Like Arma3. It runs great in linux, but the binaries are always 3-6 months behind the windows ones. so your choice is to find a server with 2-3 people on it, or run it on proton, see lots of servers with hundreds of people, and can't connect.

Also the problem with fortnight, pubg, etc.

<comment><USER13> Their anti-cheat software might have a hard time getting any injected shellcode to run under Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If user base on those platforms is very small then it makes no sense for the developers to spend resources to keep it updated. At the end of the day its about demand and supply.

<comment><USER15> _If user base on those platforms is very small then it makes no sense for the developers to spend resources to keep it updated. At the end of the day its about demand and supply._

That's only if your business model only looks at the next quarter, and if you don't care about your brand.

Amazon, and department stores before it, became huge because they made an effort to cater to all needs. That allowed them to be the go-to brands for people looking for things.

Imagine if in its early days Amazon ran the numbers and discovered that textbooks were only a small portion of its sales, so it stopped selling textbooks. Then it noticed that cookbooks were only a small part of sales, and those were cut. Then it noticed that mysteries were only a small part of sales, so they went out the window. Next thing you know, nobody shops at Amazon because its focus on the big numbers turned it into a niche provider.

If a games publisher chooses to restrict its platforms, that's its business. But I won't think of it for "games" in general when I want to find a game.

<comment><USER16> I love... well, ok, I _use_ Linux, and I've been using it for almost 20 years now. A lot of the software I write to earn my living runs on embedded Linux systems. And _still_ I'd rather poke my eyes out with a toothpick than port, or write, a game for Linux, targeting general hardware. If I owned or managed a game studio, I'd keep on using Linux, but I wouldn't publish a Linux game for the life of me, not with things being the way they are now.

If Linux were just a niche platform, that would be fine. But supporting _desktop_ Linux systems is disproportionately difficult -- it's a small niche, but it's a lot of effort. Userland APIs break all the time. The constant churn in the graphics and desktop space leads to a lot of instability and bug reports. Between Wayland being default on some distributions, unstable graphics drivers, and the umpteenth rewrite of God knows what other component in Gnome or KDE, you get to deal with the sort of bug reports and crash dumps that used to pop up fifteen years ago when a Longhorn beta was leaked and everyone tried to run their games on it for shits and giggles. Linux desktop is basically a neverending beta. People don't write games (or software) for it for the same reason why you don't write games for a leaked Windows beta.

It's no coincidence that Linux is such a big player in the embedded and server markets, but not in the desktop market. Writing desktop software for Linux in 2020 is about as enjoyable as chewing nails. It's an unstable and flimsy platform to target, and not a very profitable one, either. I can't blame any company for skipping it.

Edit: someone else posted this here and yep, it's spot on: [https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760](https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760) .

<comment><USER17> It's nice that you have embedded experience but as long as you don't write in directX there is no difference between game development among these platforms except for the massive black box of strange stuff that is the windows API. I would take the Linux API any day over that for basic I/O and most drivers are baked in. There is a reason all consoles historically besides xbox are made in top of a stripped Linux kernel.

<comment><USER16> That's absolutely not the case!

First of all, there's no "Linux API". The kernel does expose a stable interface but you're not going to write a game just by issuing system calls.

But the kernel is pretty much the only piece of this tech stack that exposes a stable interface. Pretty much everything else changes a lot. There are exceptions -- SDL2, for example, is great to write against. But most things aren't -- they change a lot, and they're undocumented. This tends to result in duplicate code that goes out of date and results in all sorts of strange quirks and bugs. phk has a good summary of this here: [https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257) .

As for drivers: there's one set of drivers that aren't baked in and they're critical for games, namely nvidia drivers. Anyone who's done graphics programming on Linux has their own horror stories about nvidia's stack. I won't bore you with my own, suffice to say that things are never, ever as easy as "you just write against the OpenGL API and you're set".

"Historically", I'm not aware of any major console that's built on top of a stripped Linux kernel. Sony has been using their own franken-BSD since at least the PS3. Don't know about Nintendo but given how much effort has gone into the occasional port for Nintendo hardware, I doubt they're using Linux.

Linux has been only recently adopted by some console devices, and those are basically embedded systems. You target a single hardware platform (with a single, known set of quirks), a stable kernel, a stable driver, a stable set of userland libs. It's not great -- backporting kernel fixes is notoriously finicky, for example. But it's a scheme that, at the very least, allows you to write code to implement whatever functionality you want to implement, instead of wasting time impedance-matching between userland APIs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was _so_ excited when Rocket League first came to Linux, but that was several years before Proton[1] was released.

But according to [2] the game runs really well on Linux via Proton. Personally, I don't see any problem using Proton to play the game on my Linux gaming-rig.

[1]: [https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton)

[2]: [https://www.protondb.com/app/252950](https://www.protondb.com/app/252950)

<comment><USER4> The concern is that Epic will add EAC and that Proton is going to cause you to get banned or they pull the game from Steam and move it to EGS which doesn't run on Linux, and likely never will. So the question becomes why should I put more effort into a game that's likely not going to be available to me in the very near future?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is what I hate about ever-changing games. If it's such a big change, just make a new game, Rocket League 2. I'm sure people will still complain for some other reason, but no one looses what they paid for.

<comment><USER19> They'll still not want to kill the servers for the old game and the net result is the same - users stuck with an old game that can't go online.

<comment><USER8> There's no reason they can't just let users run their own servers for older games. We're not talking about a MMORPG here, where centralizing the servers might make sense in order to give everyone a shared experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd be normally more upset about this, but the last sentence is a biggie in this situation. Psyonix is offering full refunds for the base game (which is better than nothing, although I wish it included DLC etc) to anyone, even outside of the two week window.

<comment><USER21> Atleast I got dlc refunded. I had to make manual refund ticket, automatic one was rejected because I had few hundred hours of game time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The refund process is a mess. I followed the directions on the Reddit page last night and got an email from Steam saying they're refusing the refund because it's been more than two weeks.

Other people on the comments have said similar things.

</comment><comment><USER23> SuperTuxKart ([https://supertuxkart.net](https://supertuxkart.net)) is a free racing game similar to Mario Kart and it also has a "Soccer" mode where you play in an arena with a ball and two goals like in Rocket League.

<comment><USER24> I love SuperTuxKart. It's the first game I install on any new computer, and I've beaten the story mode several times. I usually focus on the racing modes, but I've tried Soccer as well.

SuperTuxKart is not an alternative to Rocket League! If you go into it expecting anything Rocket League has -- polished realistic-looking graphics, physics that let you jump and tilt and drive up the walls of the stadium, a thriving online play community, a matchmaking system -- you're going to be disappointed.

<comment><USER23> Your criticism is correct. It is similar in the gaming principle but way way behind in user friendliness and polishing. That said, as far as I know, this is the best alternative that we have right now on Linux. Having played it with kids (who never played Rocket League before) I can say that it can be a fun activity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's both surprising and unsurprising to me how many comments here are focused on EGS (which is not what the article is about) and almost nobody is talking about how Rocket League's macOs and Linux players make up less than 0.3% of the players, combined. SMH

<comment><USER26> ^ developer time is worth crazy much, it's just irresponsible to waste lots on it on a 0.3% of the users.

just go ask the actual playerbase if they'd prefer the devs working on linux/macos ports or actual gameplay/issues affecting the average player and see the answer.

<comment><USER27> Seems more irresponsible to not refund the game and DLCs, though. What refunds are happening seem sporadic and limited to base game only, which is pretty reprehensible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow, in the past it was 1 or 2 different 3D architectures. Now we have 3 of them:

DirectX on Windows, Metal on macOS, Vulkan/OpenGL4 on Linux

<comment><USER29> Vulkan/OpenGL are multiplatform

<comment><USER30> They are less multiplatform than you would like, though. MacOS is stuck on an old version of OpenGL with no chance of updating since they deprecated it, and it has no Vulkan support (ignoring translation layers like the one Rocket League used, of course). On Windows, Vulkan is a second-class citizen that isn't always available.

And beyond that, there's the age-old problem of driver quality- for a given platform, using the native API tends to hit fewer bugs, perform better, and support more features. This has been true for years with Direct3D vs OpenGL on Windows, for example- browsers on Windows all wrap Direct3D to implement WebGL.

<comment><USER31> So everyone except mac. And you have MoltenVK

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> aaron-santos > Unfortunately, our macOS and Linux native clients depend on our DX9 > implementation for their OpenGL renderer to function.

I'm not a gamedev and just have some hobby xp in DX and OpenGL, but I don't begin to understand why an OpenGL renderer would in any way depend on DX. Is this just code for "we have such few Mac and Linux users that it isn't worth our time to support OpenGL"?

<comment><USER32> AFAIK: The way DX9 works for Windows software running under Wine, is that wine has a layer that intercepts all DX9 calls and retranslates them into OpenGL. There is no equivalent for DX11.

<comment><USER33> Wine has supported DX11 for over 2 years at this point[1]. However, how is that relevant? Did the Mac and Linux versions use Wine?

[1] [https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/01/wine-3-0-released- direct...](https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/01/wine-3-0-released- direct3d-11-support)

<comment><USER32> No clue. I was making an educated guess. I was stuck with DX9 for a while because I wanted some stuff to run under wine. I switched to opengl nearly... 6 years ago now? Didn't realize it had been that long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm always amazed by the longevity of DirectX 9. It was a truly excellent graphics API. DirectX 11 had more features, and was in some ways better designed, but it was always really painful to have to reimplement some of the things that were stripped out of the D3DX utility libraries that formerly were part of the SDK.

</comment><comment><USER35> Honestly the game was not playable on macOS. If you wanted to play on your MacBook you had to run Windows with bootcamp, which you can still do. So I doubt this change will really impact anyone.

Can anyone talk about how it plays on Linux? I can't imagine a huge playerbase there.

<comment><USER21> 60 fps@1440p with gtx 1060 on linux, can't remember if it was limited to 60 fps, but that was good enough for me. Never tried in windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Maybe I am missing some context here, but why would a game studio make a backwards-compatibility-breaking change to the engine a five year old game? I know that it's a popular game, but this sounds like an excuse to me.

<comment><USER37> It's backwards compatible for 99.4% of their users. Maybe there is future feature work they want to do, but are limited by DirectX9. Maybe they got tired of working with a 20 year graphics library and it's cheaper in the long term for them to update to the latest.

<comment><USER38> As someone currently maintaining code that targets Direct3D 9, it's really not worth living with the constraints if the vast majority of your users can run stuff targeted at newer APIs like D3D11. I don't blame them. Newer APIs deliver better performance and useful features, and there are great new debugging tools that don't work with D3D9.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> What I find a bit odd about this is the existence of the Switch version.

Surely the Switch's graphical power, presumably it's not going to get a bunch of fancy new DX11-esque features. I imagine they'll do the minimum to keep the Switch compatible with other clients in multiplayer.

But if they're keeping multiplayer compatible with an older Switch codebase, why not keep it compatible with older Mac and Linux branches?

</comment><comment><USER40> The previous thread was [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22133431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22133431).

</comment><comment><USER41> The article makes it sound like they were running DX9 in Linux and MacOS. If true, how is this so? Is there some type of X11 extension that implements DX9 or something?

<comment><USER42> They probably have their own abstarction layer that implements the subset of DX9 they are using on top of opengl. This is very common on linux ports as it is hard to justify the cost of a full rewrite of the graphic engine.

<comment><USER33> Feral Interactive has managed to port many games to Vulkan. They even updated their port of Mad Max to Vulkan after release.

<comment><USER42> Yes, and I own copies of many of their ports :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Does anyone know why DirectX 11 is so much better than DirectX 9?

Looks like they were using some kind of translation layer that was translating DX9 calls to OpenGL.

<comment><USER44> DirectX9 is ancient, like somewhere between an original Xbox and an Xbox 360 in features. It's very difficult to use any modern graphics techniques with it. DirectX 11 is the most recent version of that classic style of graphics APIs, with DX12 being to DX11 sort of what Vulkan is to OpenGL. If I had a legacy DX9 codebase and I wanted to use some features of newer GPUs than what existed in 2002, I would convert over to DX11.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Well… Linux and macOS users can try it under WINE, perhaps?

<comment><USER4> For how long? People train for this game like any real-world sport. Imagine if a bill to make football illegal within a year seemed very likely to pass, do you keep practicing?

<comment><USER46> If I played RL at a professional level (I do at a collegiate one), I would make sure I have a windows partition. It's not a massive issue for this scenario.

<comment><USER4> Most people don't play and practice sports truly expecting to become a paid professional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The game ran pretty bad on macOS though. Same computer with a GTX 1080 runs the game on win10 at hundreds of FPS with everything maxed vs barely able to run the game on macOS with all the detail on minimum.

</comment><comment><USER48> It's because of things like this that I won't play closed-source games anymore. The modding community has demonstrated repeatedly that they are willing to maintain ports of these things, but only as long as the source code is open so they can actually, you know, do the port properly.

And before someone rails on me about anti-cheat, or about reduced profits because of the whole game showing up on torrent sites, I'm not talking about that stuff -- I'm talking about the bare minimum client code that is required to run the game.

<comment><USER49> Serious question - What open source games do you play? I'd consider myself a "gamer" and I can't think of many recent successful games that are open source. Indie games sure, modding support sure, games without any DRM sure.

But very few are "open source".

<comment><USER50> Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is probably the best example of a "community driven" open-source game.

[https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm- DDA](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA)

<comment><USER4> I absolutely love that game. I'd really like to see people play it live on Twitch, I think it'd go really well with the live chatting dynamic. There has been very few, but they always use tiles and I don't want tiles overwriting my imaginary version of objects.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Parallel Shader Compilation for Ray Tracing Pipeline States - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallel-shader-compilation-ray-tracing-pipeline-states/ <comment><USER2> In normal rasterization you can simply render your geometry with a single active shader (one vertex, one pixel etc). This is because you have direct control over when a specific type of geometry is rendered.

With raytracing you do not control when which geometry is rendered. Thus unless you want to simply use a single UberShader for the entire call to DispatchRays you need to link the geometry with the specific raytrace shader. (shader binding table [https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pictures/20...](https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pictures/2018/dx12_rtx_tutorial/Images/DXROverview.svg))</comment>


A $3B Plan to Turn Hoover Dam into a Giant Battery - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/24/business/energy-environment/hoover-dam-renewable-energy.html <comment><USER2> There's a pumped-water electricity storage facility near where I live, called Northfield Mountain. It entered service in 1972 and has been in use since then.

When electricity demand is low, the grid operator uses the excess to pump water uphill. When electrity use is high, the water flows back down into the Connecticut River. Horthfield Mountain can deliver just over a gigawatt of energy for eight hours with the generators running at full bore.

It was originally built as a complement to the (now-decomissioned) Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. That plant generated 0.6 gigawatts continuously, and functioned most efficienty if it wasn't ramped up and down to meet instantaneous demand. So, the storage facility provided a way to vary the power output from the grid.

The Times piece contained these words:

...utility-scale lithium-ion batteries cost 26 cents a kilowatt-hour, compared with 15 cents for a pumped-storage hydroelectric project. The typical household pays about 12.5 cents a kilowatt-hour for electricity.

It's a little misleading. The 26 cents and 15 cents figures are for capital expenditure to build storage capacity, which can then be used over and over (for 45 years in Northfield Mountain's case). The 12.5 cents is for a kilowatt hour consumed.

Also, I fear the 12.5 number represents lazy journalism. The current residential rate in Los Angeles is 17.8 cents/kWh, and in New York City (home of the Times) it's 21.0 cents/kWh. Rates vary a LOT geographically.

I hope journalists can learn to understand energy economics better, because they are a way for the rest of us to learn about them. And learn about them we must when fossil fuel use diminishes.

<comment><USER3> 26/15 is the estimated cost per kwh. Really there is a huge variance, especially for pumped storage because because of highly variable capital cost.

Capital costs are in the 100s-1000s dollars for kw of pumped storage.[0]

[0][http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph240/galvan- lopez2/](http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph240/galvan-lopez2/)

<comment><USER4> Similarly for the batteries. If lithium-ion could be had for $0.26/kWh then a Tesla Model S battery would be $26.

As it stands, Tesla batteries are estimated to be around the $100/kWh level for individual cells and projected to fall below $100/kWh at the pack level in a couple of years [1].

[1] [https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla- battery-c...](https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla-battery- cells-this-year-100-kwh-tesla-battery-packs-in-2020/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The elephant in the room that I'm surprised wasn't mentioned is that there's no spare water in the Colorado. The Colorado River Compact allocated more than 100% of the current flow of the Colorado River to the different states (and a separate agreement adds up Mexico as well too), and it's at the point where a "good" winter snowpack means that the water level doesn't fall instead of providing meaningful recharge. The snow in 2016-2017 meant a return to 2014's low, but 2014 itself saw a miserable 20-foot fall in lake levels that there's no prospect for reversing. So where will the water to pump into the lake come from?

<comment><USER6> The water is pumped from lower down the river to higher up the river.

No water is lost in the process - you can still use that same water for feeding almond trees or whatever you guys like to use it for.

<comment><USER7> First, the water is lost - because evaporation over the large area of the reservoir only increases with its area, which increases with its level

Second, the scheme decreases flow, and that means level of the downstream. This means negative effects on ecosystems downstream.

Third, large hydroelectric dams require subordinate downstream reservoirs to tackle exactly the second problem - keep the downstream flow of the system (of the two+ dams) at least at some acceptable level to hide the variations in the main dam's outflow which are due to daily/weekly/monthly/yearly fluctuations in inflow and power requirements.

Fourth - hydroelectric turbines require some amount of backpressure to operate. If the backpressure (that is the level of water downstream of the dam) gets too low, they can't operate unless risking damage. (that's actually the original reason behind the subordinate downstream dams)

So the project just does not make any sense. Where are they going to get the water?

<comment><USER8> > "the scheme decreases flow"

Can you spell this out in more detail? I would have thought that in the near future, it would just time shift flow from daytime (when solar production is high) to nighttime, but perhaps my mental model is over simplified?

<comment><USER7> The most obvious explanation is that for an unit of power (not energy, mind) one has to spend a unit of flow (which is unit of volume per unit of time) falling over a unit of height (which the dam is for).

Now if you pump that unit of flow back up, total downstream loses that same unit of flow.

Second order effect is that when you pump water back up into the reservoir, it is evaporating at an increased rate.

Determining the evoparation increase is not trivial, since the reservoir surface area increases much faster than linear compared to its level at the dam. If they didn't, the dam would've been that much higher, because evaporative losses of the future reservoir are a major factor in the design of the dam.

<comment><USER8> I'm only asking about the first order effect (your second point, not your first). My question was: if you're letting that water back out every night, don't you get the unit of flow back then? It's delayed by up to 12 hours, but is that a really big effect?

<comment><USER7> You have to keep enough water somewhere downstream of the dam for the night so that you have something to pump up during the day. If you don't, there's either not enough water to pump up, or severe level fluctuations. If you do, it requires another dam, evapo losses, etc, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nit: Lake Mead is the battery. Hoover's generators are extracting power from that "battery" constantly.

The plan from TFA: Take water that's already passed through the generators at Hoover and, using solar and wind power, pump it back upstream into Mead to be processed again. This gives us the ability to supplement hydro with solar and wind. I guess if this is more efficient than other batteries, it's not a completely crazy idea. It does, however, have potential negative impact on downstream ecosystems.

Also: I assume that we don't extract 100% of the available potential from the dammed water: how much water flows past generators (instead of through them) and how does that change when upstream water supply changes? How much of a decrease in this "loss" can we get from this solar/wind plan?

<comment><USER10> At Hoover Dam, 100% of the river flows through the turbines with no bypass. The dam was originally built for flood control. Power generation is driven by downstream water demands. [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam#Operation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam#Operation)

"The entire flow of the Colorado River passes through the turbines."

<comment><USER11> But it isn't 100% efficient in converting potential energy into electricity. Even if the generators were 100% efficient, resistance in the pipes leading to the turbines slow down the water, not all the water hits the turbine blades, the water that does doesn't transfer all its energy (the water would have to have zero speed after the turbine to do that, and the turbines would have to be at the bottom water level)

<comment><USER10> Understood.

I took the OP's "how much water flows past generators" to address whether all the dam's outflow goes through the turbines or whether some is diverted around them.

The former is the case. The latter only happens when spillways are in use, which is rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The political challenges sound immense. The last paragraph in the article sums it up nicely.

> "The hurdles are minimal and the negotiations simple, as long as everybody > agrees with Nevada"

Besides the Hoover Dam/Lake Mead, what other large scale energy storage opportunities exist in the United States?

<comment><USER13> This might sound insane, but the great lakes might work, with a joint Canada- US plan. Raising one of them by a foot would be all you'd need because their area is so huge.

If you're willing to look outside the US, a wild but interesting mega project might be to try to do the same thing with the South Aral Sea. Pump water all the way from the Caspian. The North Aral is cut off by a dam/dyke and the south Aral barely exists anymore, causing major economic harm. Fill it with salt water and salt water fish to revive the fishing economy while using it as a giant battery.

<comment><USER14> Niagara falls (Erie -> Ontario) is already a huge hydro eletric power generator with variable flow. Instead of storing water though they decide how much water to allow over the falls for tourists. More during the day, less at night.

Thinking about the terrain, it would probably be relatively easy to setup a dam somewhere that acted as a battery, downstream is basically already a giant bowl... I suspect the tourist industry would complain though.

<comment><USER15> They create more electricity at night when less electricity is generally consumed? Odd. But interesting.

<comment><USER6> They want niagara falls to look great for tourists.

When nobody is looking at night, it pretty much stops.

<comment><USER16> Not only that, but so much water gets diverted during the night that the tourist ships could not operate.

Reducing water flow helps to preserve the falls too. The water has substantially changed their shape, even over a time period of 2-300 years: [https://www.marriottonthefalls.com/blog/2015/02/06/rate- eros...](https://www.marriottonthefalls.com/blog/2015/02/06/rate-erosion- niagara-falls)

During the Post-Great Big Blackout period, the Falls power generation ran with night-time levels of diversion during the day-time. The tourist boats that go near the falls got furloughed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There was an episode on planet money about this. [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/06/15/620298266/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/06/15/620298266/episode-848-the- world-s-biggest-battery)

</comment><comment><USER18> Pump storage plants are used all over the world for decades, that they are more efficient than Lithium batteries should surprise no one.

<comment><USER19> When there is a dam already producing electricity, you just reduce the flow through the dam rather than pumping the water back uphill. That is by far the most efficient way to handle excess generation from other sources in this case. This is a politically driven proposal whose implementation will be a boon to private producers at the expense of taxpayers.

<comment><USER20> Those generators and flow valves likely cannot respond quick enough to the momentary power surges

<comment><USER21> A hydro turbine on a dam with no penstocks can probably go from 0-100% in 5 to 10 seconds.

The limit is pressure waves in the water conveyance system due to changes in flow through the turbine. If the water conveyance system is only the width of the dam and encased in concrete it is going to have minimal transients compared to a 7km long steel or HDPE penstock on which the time from 0-100% is more like 2 minutes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> After moving to the Columbia Gorge I became fascinated with the dams and energy production on the Columbia. Over the last 75ish years the whole river has been turned into a battery through a series of dams and reservoirs. The scale is astonishing - Grand Coulee itself produces ~6800 megawatts (about 3x of Hoover Dam).

For those interested [A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia]([https://www.amazon.com/River-Lost-Life-Death- Columbia/dp/039...](https://www.amazon.com/River-Lost-Life-Death- Columbia/dp/0393316904)) is a great book documenting the creation and long term implications (from cheap electricity for the Manhattan Project, to agriculture, to the collapse of the Salmon population) of the project.

</comment><comment><USER23> Despite that this was submitted four hours earlier than [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637437](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637437) , that one has more comments, at least at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER24> Duplicate of this [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637437](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637437)

</comment><comment><USER25> NPR's Planet Money recently had a good story about alternatives to traditional batteries in "#848 The World's Biggest Battery" [https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...](https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=620288114)

</comment><comment><USER26> The Bath County Pumped Storage Station has been doing a similar thing since '85 and can be characterized as the largest battery in the world.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_S...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station)

</comment><comment><USER27> A similar project has been on construction in Europe [https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nant_de_Drance](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nant_de_Drance) Cost of $2B. I had the chance to visit the caverne where the turbines will be, really amazing engineering!

<comment><USER28> Pump storages are already all over Europe for decades. The most famous one being Kaprun/Austria, built by the Nazis in the 30ies. They are all over the Alps, as the green party lets them.

Those pump storages provide the very expensive peek electricity all over Europe, needed for the spikes in the morning and noon.

Nevada probably didn't need it back then, Hoover Dam was built for flood protection, and since then the levels are too low to work efficiently as pump storage. But since peek energy is in high demand they think it over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Looks like the real version of Fallout universe imagined by Bethesda

<comment><USER30> Many of the Fallout games are indeed set in the western half of the US :)

<comment><USER31> And specifically Hoover Dam appears in New Vegas.

<comment><USER32> yeah an the quest focuses on activate energy from Hoover Dam :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The article says the desired pumping station would be located 20 miles downstream from the dam. Why would it need to be so far?

<comment><USER18> My guess is to get an economically height difference to the dam.

<comment><USER34> No, any extra height to pump water up compared to the height of the dam is just wasted power. They wouldn't do that without a good reason.

My understanding is you can't just stick an inlet on the river, otherwise you could only pump water up when the dam was running (defeating the point). You need to build some kind of reservoir.

Additionally, with hydropower it's not enough to build a dam above your generators. You also need to get rid of the water exiting your generators fast enough. If there is any restiction on the outflow, the back pressure will decrease the generation capacity.

My guess is the distance is needed to meet these requirements. Enough space to let the water slow down, then enough space to build a reservoir.

<comment><USER18> Why would it be wasted power? Height difference = stored potential power. I was talking about that maybe 20 miles downstream the pump-size/-energy consumption to stored power is more efficent.

<comment><USER34> Because the height difference that matters is the difference between the water level in the lake and the turbines.

If your pumping station inlet is 20m below the turbines, then any energy used pumping water upto the height of the turbines is wasted, because it can't be recovered when the water comes back down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This seems incredibly stupid. If you use excess electricity to pump water backward at the dam, you may as well just shut off the flow through the dam instead. That would be more efficient and cost nothing to implement.

If we're talking about so much excess capacity that the dam would be closed AND water pumped back up, that would be interesting. But wouldn't the river go dry? It's not like there's a lake below the dam for that.

This whole thing seems more political than practical. I'm guessing the private producers will somehow get a financial benefit from this at the expense of the taxpayer.

<comment><USER35> It depends an awful lot on the lag between demand and excess supply. It might use the noon sun to pump water that was used to meet morning demand.

<comment><USER19> >>It depends an awful lot on the lag between demand and excess supply. It might use the noon sun to pump water that was used to meet morning demand.

You could just shut off the dam at noon instead. Then run it full tilt in the morning.

<comment><USER36> They can't just "shut off the dam at noon" because of all the downstream users, a dry river bed isn't much of a tourist attraction.

<comment><USER37> A pump causes the exact same problem, except a few miles downstream.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>