Maybe it is time to explore deep/dark web. It is more like nineties on the Internet.
I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
101–110 of 340 posts
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#102This is exactly how I've felt for the past few years. Besides Facebook, I think a large part of it is not being quite as young and open to new things. E.g. I'm under 30 but I never got into Youtube, I don't even know how to find good content on it.
There is an astonishing amount of good content on youtube. In the last 3 or so years it has blossomed into something of a renaissance and begun to grow into what I always kind of hoped "citizen content" could be. To my mind it is the most obviously beneficial of all of those "web 2.0" companies. Do you like jet engines? Prepare to lose the rest of your day watching AgentJayZ talking about his job repairing jet engine…
Love seeing another agentjayz fan here!
Want to spend hours watching somebody repair marine props and shafts on machine tools? Keith Fenner does excellent, detailed repairs.
Regular car reviews makes incredible car reviews of mostly normal cars (this detailed review of the PT cruiser is amazing. Watch the WHOLE thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c)
Ben Krasnow (on applied science) is an intellectual and engineering treasure. Watch anything he makes.
Youtube has for sure become one of my favorite websites. There is SO much good content there.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#103I 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 often fondly look back at my initial online gaming memories, where games like Runescape and the early Halo series offered a huge online community feel. As Runescape/Halo series developed and time went on the feelings of the games changed, and people in Runescape were more focused on efficient Exp gaining or competitive playing in Halo. I have yet to experience the same kind of online communities that were present o…
Runescape will always have a special place in my heart.
Aside from its community it was the first browser-based game with really good 3D graphics, at a time where table-based browser games were the norm. And it was even free!
For a non-native English speaker like me in hindsight Runescape helped me a lot with English vocabulary, granted a lot of it wasn't really helpful thanks to its fantasy setting, but still it helped to improve my English skills significantly.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is important to curate it, but I applaud the idea. I would say; only allow people with over a certain karma score on HN (>1000)? That way you benefit from the quite strict moderation here. But indeed I remember the days on vBulletin forums; all my remarks against ‘you cannot make friends over 30’ that I uttered here come from there: most my current friends and one of my best friends I met on forums. It jus…
I think to kick things off it will be best to allow anyone to sign up and potentially lock it down in the future if things get out of hand. Usually forums have features like limiting new thread creation to users with enough karma/comments, so that can help a bit in keeping quality up.
Drop me an email if you need help anyway. I tried many existing options and have not found any good so far.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Use Discourse. It's not only the most advanced from a tech perspective, but it also aims to promote strong communities.
Am I the only one who is totally confused by discourse? Maybe it's because rhe demo instance was reset way to often or something but I've never really seen a really working discourse instance. (I think both Mozilla and Canonical (has?) run one but they weren't to active either IIRC. Anyone has examples of a working discourse community?
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I exist in an IRC channel of about ~40 nicks comprising some bots, some inactives, and maybe 20-25 that talk fairly frequently. Most of us are oriented on computers throughout the day, so there's really always someone chatting -- there are patterns to when people chat, based on timezones, etc.
When any of us are in another person(s) city, we tend to meet up. Some of us sync and travel to certain conferences. There's been a few in-group marriages, a few deaths.
This is a group where the bulk of us have been around for close to a decade or longer. Newcomers are rare, which is good for noise reasons among all else probably.
The only thing I've had similar to this was the core group of friends I had on a MUD in the late 90s till the early 00s.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#107Nothing I've found on the internet has yet replaced the sublime excitement I felt when dialing into a local BBS in a small town in California when I was a kid.
There were maybe 4-5 people on at a time, but I still remember the total thrill of chatting with them and imagining who they might be, where in town they lived, what they looked like. Oh, and how much money I could make in Tradewars that day.
My biggest question about this feeling of a long-lost treasure has always been, am I just getting older? Is it just nostalgia for those first experiences of connection through a network? Because if I liked local BBSes so much, you'd think I'd like Facebook or Nextdoor ... but no, I strongly don't. I can't even explain why I don't like them, but it certainly has something to do with anonymity and imagination. In dial-up BBSes, MUDs, IRC, AIM, ICQ, and Livejournal, I was always anonymous. I could be whoever I wanted to be, express myself freely, make friends, and only then choose to reveal my identity — to individuals. Today, so much of the internet is predicated on establishing my identity as quickly as possible, and then profiling me -- tracking my behavior, building a chronology of my behavior, showing my timeline, revealing what I liked or disliked, compiling that data, repackaging it into a derivative, mining the derivative for value. It's so far beyond fun that it's exhausting even to describe.
The one thing I am pretty sure about is that this feeling of "I used to do X, it was so simple and fun, what happened?" can be more than just nostalgia. That is, I felt this way about something else several years ago -- tabletop role-playing games. I kept thinking, damn, the guys and I used to have so much fun playing those games: face to face, low-tech, up all night with our D&D sheets, laughing and drawing, etc. It seemed like simple nostalgia for childhood, until I got together some grown-ups and ran some D&D games. And you know what? Three years later, I’ve made some great friends, deepened existing friendships, and had a blast.
So I wonder if, for me, what’s missing in my internet is that feeling of a small community — and local, maybe? — with anonymity at its core. I’m not really sure and more thought is needed.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is an astonishing amount of good content on youtube. In the last 3 or so years it has blossomed into something of a renaissance and begun to grow into what I always kind of hoped "citizen content" could be. To my mind it is the most obviously beneficial of all of those "web 2.0" companies. Do you like jet engines? Prepare to lose the rest of your day watching AgentJayZ talking about his job repairing jet engine…
Love seeing another agentjayz fan here! Want to spend hours watching somebody repair marine props and shafts on machine tools? Keith Fenner does excellent, detailed repairs. Regular car reviews makes incredible car reviews of mostly normal cars (this detailed review of the PT cruiser is amazing. Watch the WHOLE thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c ) Ben Krasnow (on applied science) is an intellectual an…
> Love seeing another agentjayz fan here!
Honestly his stuff just comes first to mind as "outstanding, fascinating videos I would never have seen without this platform." Say what you want about Youtube but they sure have enabled an amazing flourishing of creativity and sharing.
Will check out your others! RcR though... there really should be a warning. That is some advanced cynicism. Don't get me wrong, I love them. But your link is, how should I say, "the deep end"
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#109I feel you brought out the critical point very well. There is the internet sucks the vacuum from our lives like FB, Twitter or blogs, News...while there is a whole lot of utilitarian needs fulfilled on the other side...And, yes, I have felt the same, the fun part has diminished except following News and occasionally some brilliant links..
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Use Discourse. It's not only the most advanced from a tech perspective, but it also aims to promote strong communities.
No doubt that discourse is really nice software, and I will give it a go, but it does lack the “nostalgia” referred to by the original comment I replied to with this idea. All options are valid at this point though!
I am a huge fan of Simple Machine Forums