I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

Ya, YT is a bottomless well of helpful info. (Just try stumping it with some obscure musical artist or band from whenever. Good luck.)

YT's great especially for doing things. A relative of mine with -some- car repair experience (mostly engine) just acquired the parts and rebuilt the car's entire front end, learning how from YT sharers.

(I used to be into electronics ... pre-surface-mount ... and from what I can tell it's the same way.)

Looking back over the last twenty years (yes I'm old, like a lot of the you in this thread), user growth has been responsible for both the Internet's success and its demise.

I like to to separate content from community, because they have different end results. There's so much music, video, comics, games, ebooks, etc being generated now that we are spoilt for choice. That's great for consumers and not so much for creators, but that's another very large topic for a different conversation. Let's just say that there's so much great stuff out there, and the barriers to getting it are very low.

But that low barrier to entry is also what I think has made communities less fun for me. Not for everyone, but definitely for people who are a little bit outcast, or who like to challenge the status quo. Kinda like the people who are drawn to HN. Because online communities are so easy for anyone to enter, conversations tend to congeal into "popular" points of view. Even when those points of view are extremes epitomized by types like SJWs or alt-right, they're still large collections of groupthink. And I find those conversations boring. This has been well documented as the Eternal September phenomenon and it has been happening long before I got onto the net in 1995.

The best fun I had in an online community in recent times was the forums and then the slack channel that came out of the Starfighter CTP games from 'patio11 'tptacek & 'elptacek. It was announced here on HN, so the initial exposure (in the scheme of the world) was low, and because everyone involved had to have a common interest of hacking market order books and/or AVR emulators, it turned out that I had quite a bit in common with the average participant. Moreso that standard comment threads here, where it's very likely I'll be arguing with some HN rando who is just looking to score karma so they can shill their upcoming React e-book.

Good communities are still out there; what makes them good is that they are hard to get into. We shouldn't give up on the Internet and consider it "done". We should be casting wider nets to connect with people that we find interesting.

Most people strongly prefer to hire their friends, so there aren't many social spaces anymore. And if you're lucky enough to get a job in the industry at all, someone might try to get you run out of the industry for violating whichever ornate Versailles-like code of etiquette they carry around in their head. Or just because they don't like you.

I'd like to get involved in the indie-web stuff but it's pretty hard to do when I have to not only stay anonymous but ensure that none of my anonymous web presences can be connected to any of my other anonymous web presences.

I mean, I'd also like a job that pays more than $15/hr and doesn't involve lifting boxes for eleven hours a day, but it's also pretty hard to do that when etc., because all professional spaces are also social spaces and if you can't social with the calculation of a Parisian courtier, well.

Has no one, the author or the comments, thought to ask their teenage kids how to waste time on the internet? My younger brother seems to be able to do so all day. I'm also stuck in the reddit/facebook/youtube loop but I have no idea how to do snapchat/instagram, what youtube celebs are popular, or other things I'm not even aware of. I remember learning about vine.co after it closed and apparently that was a huge thing.

>I feel like this problem wouldn't be limited to a person's use of the internet but would be an indicator of a person's lack of curiosity in general

I don't agree with that idea. When people say "The internet isn't fun anymore", I don't think this generally is a change in the person so much as fundamental changes in how the modern internet is experienced.

By analogy, if content on the internet is like a liquid flowing into a container, then it's predictable that the liquid will ultimately match the shape of its container. If you change the shape of that container, the liquid's ultimate shape (and thus the way it is experienced) changes in a predictable manner.

When people say the internet isn't fun anymore, this isn't a comment about what's being poured, but the structure in which it's received and presented.

Say what you will about streams of "information": I believe if you switch a man's wine glass with a dog dish, only a wino would say nothing has changed.