31–40 of 283 posts
"Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?!?" Turns post into an advertisement
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN actually holds the current record for being the most humorless forum on the internet (sorry, can't seem to find link atm).
There is a specific type of gem you find on HN sometimes: full-blown rants. I find them very entertaining and started to collect them recently.
This sales pitch doesn't impress me. The internet isn't fun or weird any longer because corporations have taken over, and most normies aren't going to bother to learn how to build and operate their own websites. Just like most normies aren't going to bother to become their own sysadmins so they can run GNU/Linux on their PCs. Most people are fine with the Web being what it is today: QVC with a comments section.
haha this is gold :)
I remember the thousands of interesting and weird pages listed on StumbleUpon - directories of obscure topics, avant garde art projects and detailed field specific blogs - many of them both pretty and thoroughly made. Mind expanding stuff. I feel like today all of that has moved to silos like tiktok and instagram, in extreme short form formats that are easily disposable - so almost no one creates truly great "compila…
I did this for quite awhile using bookmarks, and the link rot is real. If 10% of my historical bookmarks were valid, I’d be pleasantly surprised.
"Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?!?" Turns post into an advertisement
Everything is money. But! There are subcultures that are hard to monetize though, e.g. furry subculture since it comes with so much pornography. No brand wants to be close to that. At this point, as a furry artist, I feel it's refreshing that this very weird and mostly harmless adult nature keeps the rest of the art also somewhat safe and in the hands of small artists.
It’s fucking GREAT really, furry is poison to megacorps and there’s a ton of room for individual creators to thrive without corporations relentlessly optimizing their cash extraction at huge scales.
Fun and weird has moved into TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram with stickers, music, sounds and overlays. It allows millions of people to enjoy creating fun and weird things and not only the handful of people who want to mess around with html snippets. I miss it too, but we are the minority.
I've spent the last year or so building tools and algorithms specifically to dig up "fun and weird". It's still there: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random