This entire thread makes me realize that what people are missing isn't the internet but their own childhood.
I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
141–150 of 340 posts
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#142This entire thread makes me realize that what people are missing isn't the internet but their own childhood.
I thought so, too. There are still enough communities hosted on phpBB, there are still enough ways to tinker around, join IRC, find ridiculous geocities-like websites or whatever. It's more that people choose to use FB, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#143I 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…
As usual it depends what you focus on.
20~30 years ago privacy was no issue, you’d actually want to meet people who shared the same communities.
But online commerce for instance was for the crazy snd the average netizen would bail in front of a credit card form. In comparison we moved leaps and bounds forward.
At its core it was so primitive we had to trust each other, and this meant fun things were funnier, and serious things were harder. I think got balanced where fun things are rarer, and serious stuff became accessible.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#144I 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…
A big part of the change has been a mass influx of extremely low information users. In the early years of the internet people that were on it were high information tech enthusiasts. Now we've reached the point that there are more Facebook users than internet users... At least if you ask them [1]. The average level of intelligence on the internet has dropped dramatically.
And I think this is bringing out the predators in mass. Those predators run the gamut from the guy feverishly hacking away in Eastern Europe to the greying man in the 25th story in NYC wearing Armani. Exploiting these people is the latest gold rush. That exploitation could be for financial ends, political ones, or just simply for the lulz. It all makes a lot of the internet very fake. Any community that gains any size starts to experience massive levels of astro turfing and various image management teams (professional and amateur) trying to sway opinion one way or the other.
And then every site has to have voting features of some sort or another. Ostensibly it's about content prioritizing come filtering, yet go look at all of the extremely interesting things that get left to die in "new" even on here. Or the phenomena where something will get submitted 9 times, be ignored, and the 10th time explode. It has very little to do with content filtering. The vote systems are just a tool for growth as it creates an addictive feedback mechanism. But at the same time it also is like a dream come true for those that would like to manipulate or sway others artificially.
Finally there is outrage culture. I'm still not sure if this emerged organically or not, but it's certainly been a drain on the internet. There are lots of people trying their hardest to be offended by anything, and spin everything is the worst possible way imaginable. And since a certain sort of people just thrive on drama, this nonsense spreads like wildfire. Did you hear a coffee shop called the police on two people that refused to buy anything or leave? "OH NO THEY DIDN'T!!?!? THIS WILL BE OUR TIANANMEN!" Or something...
[1] - https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#145He'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…
“Go to Tumblr, Facebook groups, Instagram... Reddit... 4chan” All of those have one thing in common to me, which is that they’re not meant for holding conversations on. Facebook pretends to be but if you post more than a couple of replies they get collapsed up. All those sites are “here’s a picture/video, make a kneejerk response, move on.” Ok sure that’s optimised for timewasting - I just want to see content, I don’t want to have to dig through text to get it - but it’s boring, non-interactive, repetitive timewasting. I think we lost some magic when you stopped being forced to deal with individuals in chatrooms/forums/their own personal sites in order to see stuff, even though it was also really inconvenient.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#146So summing up the distinct ideas on this topic:
- lacking of community feel is a good point
- people being older and less excitable another great point
- the late stage of S curve and early adopters being overwhelmed by the scumbags is also good point
- the change to identity-first internet is also interesting
Did I miss something? I also feel some structural misalignment of perception vs. reality. The old adage is You can't trust anything on the internet but I notice that even if I still conform to that, I somehow end up trusting the internet as a whole - that together with the hive mind I would be able to arrive at a conclusion. It's just not true anymore. I know it's false to categorize internet as a singular entity, but I think that's what hapened on the emotional-euristic-type-1 level of decisions and it needs to go. This may be a derivative of earlier points, but may also be a whole separate point.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Update: Spent the evening researching software options for the "old school" style forums, and it seems like Xenforo is a solid choice in terms of active development, lots of addons/themes, and not crazy expensive. So I think I'll snag a license and put it on a droplet later this week when my wife is out for the evening :) Also think I found a good domain for it that I'll snag tonight as well.
What's wrong with Discourse? It seems to be a popular choice. Here are some more ideas: https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#social-networ... Flarum looks like a worthwhile option: http://flarum.org/
I like Discourse too. (better than all the others mentioned so far)
There's also Talkyard. It's a bit like Discourse, and has Slack chat features (maybe nice with informal chat channels?) and StackOverflow like Q&A topics. I'm developing it. Open source & beta. https://www.talkyard.io/forum/
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Join a discord server for a relatively niche interest that you have and not only will you meet many others with similarly deep interest in a water cooler format but you will be able to work on your hobby much more effectively with a close community of like minded people. Discord is a place that still has conversations and communities, not broadcasts and celebrities.
Or go with good old IRC. In my experience on Discord you only find absolutely toxic communities, which is not very surprising, considering it's the casual equivalent of IRC.
Try joining smaller communities. Being in a server with 10-20 regulars is very different from being in one with 200, forget 2000.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#149I 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…
I think a major factor is the fact that the internet is now mainstream. In the early days, you had something in common with everybody, simply by being on the internet. The place was silly with people absolutely floored by the idea that they were casually chatting with someone halfway across the continent, something only possible on very expensive phone calls until then. Everybody was also, by necessity, an early technology adopter.
It's much easier to strike up a conversation with a stranger when you have something meaningful in common, and the early internet was that. Today, it's the equivalent of walking down the street, it's just infrastructure. Infrastructure is great, but it doesn't help you make friends.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#150Earlier 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?
To me, HN is rather anti social ( = anti forum), & prevents anything but a bunch of strangers meeting at a cafe, to discuss a piece of news for a brief moment, then leaving, to never see each other again, and being unable to message each other later.
And if you come to the cafe an hour too late, because it was night in your time zone — then it's empty already.
(Explanation: 1) At HN, if you reply to someone a bit later, s/he will never notice, because there are no reply notifications, and in his/her comments & replies list, your comment will get buried far down below other comments s/he has posted, and others' replies. And 2) if you visit a topic that is some days old, and you post a comment — no one will ever see it. Because there's no way for other people, to find the most recent comments (your comment) that have appeared since they were there the last time. Here's a way to fix that?: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... )