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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

#231

Post by CosmicShadow »

gsich wrote: post #138
kuschku wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's 'toxic'?

Toxic usually means full of assholes. People will get super mad at you and swear at you and say very bad things in general if you make one little mistake or don't know something. If you are a noob, prepared to get treated like shit and told you should die violently in real life.

Much like you'd hear about a toxic environment at home or in a poisonous mine, it's a very dangerous and bad place to be.

In some games, where the only way to have fun is if everyone knows all the rules and has skill and is playing seriously, one person who falls out of that spectrum can ruin it for the other(s) and thus people start to get angry very quickly and don't hold it inside. Games like League of Legends is 5v5 and highly skilled. One poor player can result in a 20-30 minute game with a guaranteed loss and no fun along the way, so it becomes very easy for people to spit vitriol at them. You get punished for leaving as well, so you are locked in for a certain amount of time, held prisoner if you will, by someone who doesn't meet your standards and whose weaknesses you can't overcome yourself no matter how good you are. Yes, this sounds like a horrible system and an easy recipe for disaster. On the flip side, if both teams are good, it can be very rewarding.

One thing I like about Heroes of the Storm, which is very similar to League, is that they solved a number of issues that results in less toxicity. It's still there, but it's taken much longer to grow and is still at such a lower level then what I remember League being years ago. I even got an email from Blizzard saying they banned someone I reported, so that makes me feel like at least something happens when I report bad behaviour. Since the game was designed to allow for comebacks and a single player's contributions can't hurt you as hard as in League, a strong team can still have a chance with one weak player. You still have assholes though and you still have rough games.

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

#232

Post by viridian »

CM30 wrote: post #209
tluyben2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there were only a few people around and they were tech savvy and often entrepreneural especially in tech forums... Now when a forum gets any sort of uptake, it is jumped on by marketers and other spammers. So elitist, I guess but it was automatically back then I guess.

Good moderation feels like a better solution than invites or elitism here. Have the forum open to anyone, but be ruthless when it comes to removing low quality content or marketing spam in any form. Maybe even set things like signature links or certain aspects of the post formatting to be only accessible to those with 5 or more posts, and have any first post with a link in sent for moderator approval. Human moderatio…

Not to mention the social shaming of people trying to sell things is always pretty scathing on forums. In general they tended to promote good content by liberal application of both the carrot and the stick. No one wants their product associated with a 17 page thread about how product X is sold by a bunch of annoying spammers, oh and by the way for anyone interested, turns out CEO of the company shilling this product has a kink.com account looking for a strong domme in the SF area to punish him :thinking_emoji:

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

#233

Post by eswat »

susam wrote: post #89

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is still around and that's one of the few places on the Internet where I still see tightly knit communities with old Internet buddies from the early 2000s. I am quite happy that IRC is less popular than the world wide web. As a consequence of it being less popular, it has not become riddled with ads, political influence, and addictive content popping up every few minutes, like the web has be…

I’ve had this idea once or twice of developing an always-active IRC web client to help the newer generation of users join networks and channels that they’d most identify with. Mostly in an effort to get more people in these said channels and keeping discussions flowing.

Given what a more accessible Internet has done in general, I’m not sure if the IRC idea would be better or worse…

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

#234

Post by viridian »

silveroriole wrote: post #145
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…

“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’…

4chan is nothing but conversations. They can span 7 minutes or 7 months depending on the board and the topic, but they otherwise work exactly like forums where the order is determined by post bumping. Try hanging out around a slower board like /lit/ and you'll notice they are essentially forums.

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

#235

Post by vcpnt51 »

newsbinator wrote: post #207
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…

I may be wrong on this, but lately I find the Reddit hivemind has gone into overdrive. On any given sub, you're either "with us" or "against us". It's gotten to the point that making a perfectly benign comment that couldn't possibly be seen as taking a side or disagreeing with anyone's opinion is insta-downvoted or attacked, assuming it's not parroting whatever the sub's current talking points are. I'm not even refer…

The main subs are super super stupid. Pun after pun. Maybe the parent comments are a bit thoughtful but that's it.

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

#236

Post by slfnflctd »

abrookins wrote: post #107

Nothing 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 questi…

When Google did that 180 and went from recommending that people use anonymous user names to attempting to require that they use real world identities, that's when I knew a sea change was happening on the internet, for the worse.

Anyone who isn't using an anonymous handle on a regular basis somewhere is missing out on an essential life experience. It's one of the few channels in the world where we are all intrinsically equal - aside from text skills - and can bypass surface judgments or historical baggage to just say what we're actually thinking (or a lot closer to it). I think this is a healthy and even necessary outlet for a lot of people.

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

#237

Post by lifeisstillgood »

apatters wrote: post #203
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…

It's definitely changed and it happened slowly so we didn't notice at first. In the 90s and the early aughts the social fabric of the Internet was comprised of a number of small communities, each of which had a distinct membership and culture. By the 2010's the big players had come along and supplanted these Internet communities. Facebook talks all the time about its "community" but it's more like a theme park which…

> All the big social networks employ this model of throwing everyone into the same arena but humans aren't wired to feel at home in that environment, so we get all these weird side effects like social media causing depression, loneliness, and the angst expressed by this writer.

That is an amazingly good point - its very easy to be lost and lonely in a crowd.

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

#238

Post by bovermyer »

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…

A 30-something is old? I feel like we have differing age categorizations.

Then again, I'm 36.

For my part, I've spent less time on things that don't matter and more time on things that do matter. So while yes, the web has lost its luster from my teens and twenties, I think my general sense of life fulfillment has broadened considerably.

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

#239

Post by twic »

frio wrote: post #95
y2bd wrote: post #61

Earlier 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 miss this so much. I used to play TF2 on a server that ran a single, somewhat obscure, map. Lots of randoms would drop by to try the map; some would stay and become regulars, some wouldn't. I did. The same regulars would be there every week, many of them every day. Some players were good, some not so good, nobody took it too seriously - we tried hard, but nobody got salty. There was the odd feud, but no griefing. They had alltalk voice chat on, and there was a constant stream of entertaining chit-chat. One guy would come on half-cut and start lecturing about physics. We had a half-joking clan tag, someone set up a website with a forum, there was a challenge match against an American clan at some point. Good times.

It's been rubbish since matchmaking came in.

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