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

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

#51

Post by taneq »

dchuk wrote: post #27
foolofatom wrote: post #13

I think the internet is less fun now -- I can't decide if its from maturation of technology or maturation of people though. (Has anyone else felt like things became less fun as they got older?) I felt a greater sense of community 10 years ago when I mostly used IRC and PHP BBs. The communities were smaller, and it was fun even if you disliked people. Flame wars and trolling were mostly for the audience's amusement, b…

I’ve actually been thinking about this recently, as I was also a heavy forum user back in the day. Why don’t we just start a forum for the HN crowd? Not a new interpretation of the forum model or anything like that, literally any instance of vbulletin or phpbb or something comparable and “traditional”. If people are genuinely interested in this, I would be up for spinning something up over the weekend.

> Why don’t we just start a forum for the HN crowd?

So HN doesn't count?

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

#52

Post by arca_vorago »

JimboOmega wrote: post #21
foolofatom wrote: post #13

I think the internet is less fun now -- I can't decide if its from maturation of technology or maturation of people though. (Has anyone else felt like things became less fun as they got older?) I felt a greater sense of community 10 years ago when I mostly used IRC and PHP BBs. The communities were smaller, and it was fun even if you disliked people. Flame wars and trolling were mostly for the audience's amusement, b…

I don't know either but I have absolutely had the same experience. Although for me the heyday of IRC was 20 years ago, and even then (in the late 90s) it felt dated and quaint. People at that time were moving on from ICQ to AIM, and IRC was the old, weird place you went to get anime DivX videos in particular. I do think the maturation of "troll culture" has really devalued a lot of the Internet. Virtually any event o…

IRC is still alive and well, and honestly since so many have forgotten about it has become a much more tight knit community, depending on which ones you frequent... people should really try it out.

Don't forget your cloaks!

The real time nature, and the kind of people that hang out there, make it very worth it. I frequently get direct access to a dev on irc... you don't get that on twitter or a bug report.

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

#53

Post by torstenvl »

abledon wrote: post #46

Kids can see the f *in cosmos on their phones these days. hookup with 20+ chicks with tinder before their 20th birthday. I tell ya, by the time the next generation is 50 years old they wont want to live, the suicide rates will be high, nothing to live for... seen it all done it all lol.

Hookups and stargazing apps are not the sum total of human existence. It makes me deeply sad that anyone could even fathom having nothing to live for after such a shallow facsimile of experiencing life. There are so many amazing experiences in the world that even someone with no commitments and scads of money could barely scratch the surface of they lived a hundred years.

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

#55

Post by mturmon »

pmoriarty wrote: post #40
cityzen wrote: post #6

I have been saying I've "reached the end of the internet" for awhile now. I am 44 and have been working on the web since mid 90s. I remember so much cool stuff from then. Trying to get a 56k modem to work, dealing with the fact that you couldn't always get online or if you did you could get kicked off at any time. I remember streaming the Tibetan Freedom Concert with realplayer back in '98. The first mp3 i got, napst…

"Now it just seems like every website online is trying to steal and sell your data." I remember the days before the Morris Worm, the days before we were all drowning in malware, before you had to worry about your bank account being hacked in to, before your personal data stood a good chance of being leaked, stolen, or held for ransom, before the corporate/government gold rush for profit, spying, and control. Spam and…

Nice comment. I’m thinking that some technologies, if handled carelessly —— and we have been nothing if not careless —— merely recapitulate existing power structures.

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

#56

Post by Robotbeat »

gkoberger wrote: post #44

I think a lot of people here are missing the point. Yeah, there's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel like a community... it feels more like watching reruns on TBS. I remember making actual friends on message boards. Friends I eventually met in the real world. I don't think relationships like that are really formed anymore. Most of social media now is a broadcast, not a conversation. People (m…

That's why I have private Tweets now and still use a pseudonym.

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

#57

Post by lostctown »

gkoberger wrote: post #44

I think a lot of people here are missing the point. Yeah, there's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel like a community... it feels more like watching reruns on TBS. I remember making actual friends on message boards. Friends I eventually met in the real world. I don't think relationships like that are really formed anymore. Most of social media now is a broadcast, not a conversation. People (m…

The nodes on our existing social graphs are too large. I'll define a node in this case as a user's potential social graph over time. A naive social network that mitigates this is nextdoor. I say naive because the concept of a "neighborhood" on nextdoor results in a lot of bigotry and noisy neighbor effects. Kind of literally in this case.

But the idea of breaking down large nodes in favor of smaller nodes tied to the community in which a user resides is a decent idea. I speculate we'd see greater efficiency in self-regulation, too. It's not a silver bullet, of course. At least globalization tends to decrease cultural ignorance.

I'd wager global social networks are here to stay, but I think a powerful network could arise that focuses on more refined slices of the social graph.

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

#58

Post by crankylinuxuser »

taneq wrote: post #51
dchuk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve actually been thinking about this recently, as I was also a heavy forum user back in the day. Why don’t we just start a forum for the HN crowd? Not a new interpretation of the forum model or anything like that, literally any instance of vbulletin or phpbb or something comparable and “traditional”. If people are genuinely interested in this, I would be up for spinning something up over the weekend.

> Why don’t we just start a forum for the HN crowd? So HN doesn't count?

No. not compared to where we were.

Usenet was like every HN, phpBB, digg, slashdot, and reddit in one. I await those days again.

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

#59

Post by keithnz »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #28

He's just old. Go to Tumblr, Facebook groups, Instagram. There's thousands of places to waste your time with vapid, unyielding streams of barely entertaining content. I recently spent hours going through bad geography memes. Geography. Memes. Or you could go old-school. Fark.com is still around, as is SomethingAwful. Reddit has tons of content. And if you're not at work and looking for a horrifying thrill ride, 4chan…

Exactly this. They just got old.

I started playing on the internet in 91, I used IRC mainly, it was exciting and fun talking with people around the world, not many people were on the internet..... to me it went down hill from there, it started being more of a tool with the various phases of new amusing things :)

other people started at various points and they would go through a similar thing, it's a great toy that slowly becomes a tool but you can still use it as a toy, but often less inclined to do so, mainly because the toy changes shape all the time and the way you originally played with it morphs into something else.

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

#60

Post by est »

nanomonkey wrote: post #14

The author hasn't come across the decentralized web (ie scuttlebutt or dat). That's where I've found all the personalized interesting content.

> all the personalized interesting content

Can you name a few topics? As a new user I can find any useful content.

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