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I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
211–220 of 340 posts
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#212This entire thread makes me realize that what people are missing isn't the internet but their own childhood.
Agreed; I guess many of us will have a blind spot when it comes to recognizing our own minds aging, and our memories accreting into a golden history.
Seems to be a part of the human condition.
Time's arrow moves in one direction, the past cannot be reclaimed. The challenge is to not become bitter about it.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#213I think it's the age factor. No one makes friends in their 30s and no one is excited to find new things as they get older. If you ask younger people, they can tell you a 1000 ways to waste time on internet, be it instagram, snapchat or other such apps which grown-ups don't even know about. You are just getting older.
While we all love the same things that excited us earlier in our life we also know what will disappoint us again. Even after 5 minutes I can tell a lot of things that I won't like in a relationship. The other person is not a blank white board anymore, because the other person is not so different from all the other people I met before. The new stuff is also often just a reiteration of something that has already been there, which means it's not new and not exciting.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#214I miss GeoCities/Tripod, and the time where search engines would always return new, quirky pages for whatever you searched for - no big media publishers or professional bloggers. Lots of fan-built pages, or just people showcasing their hobbies. These days I find myself stuck in a loop of HN, BBC, Reddit, eventually designernews or YouTube. The latter makes me feel trapped but is still mostly valuable content, whereas…
This. The way search engines seem to prioritise company run sites and the way everyone's turned everything into a business venture now are the biggest issues with the modern internet.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#215I 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.
Great idea.
Since we're reminiscing, unless I have you mistaken for someone else, I suspect that we both may have been a part of the same community way back when. Regardless, I look forward this; sounds like it could be fun.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is pretty much how I felt as a long-time TF2 player super excited for Overwatch to come out, and then very sad once I realized what kind of game it was. You grab your friends and play Overwatch, while you play TF2 and meet your friends. And also a parallel, TF2 obviously still exists, but all of the servers I used to play on are gone now. Haven’t found anything else quite yet. FFXIV actually was super enjoyable…
This is a thing that's bugged me for a long time: the death of dedicated game servers. Game servers had to be run by communities, and they were gateways and feeding grounds for those communities. However, games don't typically use dedicated servers anymore; they use matchmaking. You're right -- matchmaking means you gather your friends first. More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again, a…
I feel like the death of dedicated servers has in part led to the rise in toxicity in games. In community servers, if someone was being rude or annoying they would get kicked. Nowadays you just hit the report button and hope eventually they are dealt with. In the meantime you're stuck with them until the next game.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a thing that's bugged me for a long time: the death of dedicated game servers. Game servers had to be run by communities, and they were gateways and feeding grounds for those communities. However, games don't typically use dedicated servers anymore; they use matchmaking. You're right -- matchmaking means you gather your friends first. More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again, a…
> More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again, and even if you did, there's nowhere to find them again later. There's no community to join. This actually reflects a change I remember WoW making and finding really hard to accept. They changed the rules for "find a dungeon" such that you didn't match people on your own server. Which seems great - because now there's no need to wait 10 mins…
Yeah I was talking with some people about this a few days ago actually. The change is not entirely bad, though. For example, in my own case, I actually like the change. I'm not 22 years old anymore (as I was when Burning Crusade came out and I was at the height of my 'raiding career'). I don't have the time to join a raiding guild to see end-game content, and I don't have the time to sit in Stormwind spamming Trade to form groups for things. I like how the group finder makes it easier to just do the content and get some gear and experience the game without time commitment.
Of course nothing is free and as you've rightly pointed out it has come at the expense of the cohesion of individual server communities. The WoW Forums, back in the old days, were full of inter-server rivalries for raiders and when they brought in cross-realm matchmaking in the patch prior to BC there was some nice rivalry for PvP within server groups -- you could still only group with people from your own server but you would be matched against other servers. That's all gone now. It seems like it's impossible to know if you're even on your "own" server because of the way the phasing works now.
Anyway not sure where I'm going with this. tl;dr I agree with you but the change isn't entirely bad.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#218I miss GeoCities/Tripod, and the time where search engines would always return new, quirky pages for whatever you searched for - no big media publishers or professional bloggers. Lots of fan-built pages, or just people showcasing their hobbies. These days I find myself stuck in a loop of HN, BBC, Reddit, eventually designernews or YouTube. The latter makes me feel trapped but is still mostly valuable content, whereas…
Try https://wiby.me/
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#219This entire thread makes me realize that what people are missing isn't the internet but their own childhood.
Agreed; I guess many of us will have a blind spot when it comes to recognizing our own minds aging, and our memories accreting into a golden history. Seems to be a part of the human condition. Time's arrow moves in one direction, the past cannot be reclaimed. The challenge is to not become bitter about it.
It's a known cognitive bias
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a thing that's bugged me for a long time: the death of dedicated game servers. Game servers had to be run by communities, and they were gateways and feeding grounds for those communities. However, games don't typically use dedicated servers anymore; they use matchmaking. You're right -- matchmaking means you gather your friends first. More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again, a…
> More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again, and even if you did, there's nowhere to find them again later. There's no community to join. This actually reflects a change I remember WoW making and finding really hard to accept. They changed the rules for "find a dungeon" such that you didn't match people on your own server. Which seems great - because now there's no need to wait 10 mins…
I quit WOW at about that time, I played from release, the golden days were TBC && WoTLK, but the rot set in when 40 mans were retired. Doing a 40 man and getting the gear from a 40 man was a defining ambition of guilds, not many guilds managed to set themselves up to do regular 40 man runs and you had to ladder up the 40 man content when you did - molten core and on and up. This pressure and ambition drove really strong social behaviour; act up and you'd be kicked, and that's your chance of the end game gone. Tolerate idiots in the guild and risk a split or a leak of defectors. The problem was that the spreadsheets at Blizzard showed that only about 5% of the players were getting to experience the end game. So... they went to 25 man, then they opened 25 man to pickup queues and the drivers for pve guilds faded.