Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?

If you don't care for software development, I would suggest you to try your hand at self hosting. I am having a ton of fun with it.

It's easy and fairly cheap to get started. I bought a refurbished Dell Optiplex to be a home server, and I am getting a lot of mileage out of it.

There's all sort of applications you can self host nowadays, it's highly cuatomizable, and can be extremely useful on top of it.

If you have an old computer lying around unused you can even try turning it into a home server to see if it suits your tastes.

At least for me was something highly addictive.

It’s hard for me to know if it’s the computers that changed or my stage of life.

I think they become less fun sometimes during the later stage Web 2.0 era as everything shifted toward services. For most, computers became a thin client to access services on the Internet. To me, this isn’t very fun. The computer becomes an appliance to access services rather than one used to run programs that can be customized and tailored to the user. Of course that local experience can still exist, but only for users who are very intentional. For shared experiences, it’s only for users whose friends are also intentional. This intentionality usually means doing a lot of extra work. This work was not an issue when the pay off of new functionality was there, but is harder to justify when it’s often less functionality for more work… the main upside being freedom and agency over the experience.

Seemingly every service being a front to collect and sell data also makes things less fun. There is a certain level of trust that needs to exist when running software and that trust relationship has been broken, even by real companies. It makes it hard to trust anything, which pushes me away from trying new things that might be fun.

This change coincided with my transition to adulthood, where priorities shift. It’s impossible to say if I’d still find computers fun in 2026 if I was 19 again, but my gut tells me I’d be a lot less interested.

If there is a path back, I think it might be along the lines of Pewdiepie’s newfound love of Linux. He seems to be having a ball.

No one knows. Don’t worry about it. Just because it resolves to a number doesn’t make it matter.

Once every single thing connected to the internet (iPhone + 10 years?). Tech products, software, video games, etc. were new and exciting ways to solve problems. Now every single thing is a way to monetize, steal your data, or lock you into a platform to do those things later.

> I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own

With due respect, are you sure you aren't just burned out? Not finding joy or even meaning in the thing you used to do for decades and justifying your disinterest by saying it is all pointless and futile sounds like typical burnout symptoms to me.

Surely there are many bad things about modern computing. And yet when I look around I see people — especially young people — still out there making silly stuffs on computers like we used to. Baby's first ray tracer, baby's first JS runtime, make for fun's sake with no intention nor possibility of profit in sight.

I don't know you well, but from the way you talked about your feelings, I feel you might be too harsh on yourself. You don't need to manage all the complexity of a side project. You can take the first step first before deciding how far you want to really get into it. And you should not just dismiss "mindless entertainment" — perhaps that is exactly what people need to recharge themselves.