71–80 of 283 posts
> Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? Etiquette. For example, humor is frowned upon on some forums (HN included).
HN actually holds the current record for being the most humorless forum on the internet (sorry, can't seem to find link atm).
Lets start with the scripted spaghetti jokes, work towards functional humor then eventually do classes. OOH!
"Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?!?" Turns post into an advertisement
That being said, I think sometimes it's better to just reply based on the title and theme of the HN post and not focus on the other promotional elements or ignore the post altogether provided that the poster is not really trying to spam or deceive us... Coming up with creative ways to work your own struggling ideas into conversations online is not really easy when you don't have a marketing staff and lots of ad money.
All the fun and weird stuff is still around, it just typically doesn't SEO well and doesn't show up on Google, and is too long-tail to show up on popularity-based algorithms like those of Reddit or Facebook. 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
Perhaps it is the way we think about the internet that has also changed...
Back in the day, when I wanted to find something on the internet, I knew I was going to have to dig and search and explore. My mind expected this experience.
Since web 2.0, my mind doesn't work the same way.
The problem is that people didn't like MySpace. It looked like crap and giving people that level of control made them feel bad. Only a few fearless kids actually made the gloriously crappy content you admire.
The other problem is that the Internet is well-settled terrain now, and users have many many options about where to hang their hat(s) and what they do there. Try convincing a Medium author that HTML is a good authoring tool.
This article is the Internet version of "good old days" nostalgia, which is, ironically, retrograde and horrifying. One important exception: if the internet ever deprecates the tools needed to make another myspace (http 1.1, html, css, available ip addresses, ability to host a durable process) then you'd have my full-throated support. And of course you're allowed to like old things that failed because of market pressure. Just don't fool yourself that the world is worse because the thing you like fell out of fashion. As much as I hate to admit it, the world is better off without coin-op arcades.
I think it's a wide-scale effect of everyone scrambling in trying to make Internet money to fund themselves through our current tough and uncertain times but finding out that a lot of the Web 3.0 stuff and the Gig economy was undercover "scammy A.F.". Many people do not have savings now because of crypto, stock manipulation, and NFT schemes... There is a lot of heavy stuff going on around the world right now, and man…
You need populaces with higher than 86% literacy to make things like, "Internets" work.
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 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 love hopping in and hitting the "surprise me" every once in a while, and reading some obscure webpage written by an actual person with a passion for a subject. In the past I've seen a site dedicated to the soundtrack for a film series (I can't remember which), not even necessarily streaming the soundtrack or something, but just a bunch of articles about every facet of these soundtracks.
Just now I got linked to a page about Kodak Photo CDs
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.
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…
Reddit and other social media has largely replaced it I'd say (not to the same quality though).
I feel like Reddit doesn't really have links anymore. The subreddits that have external links are usually spam subreddits which humans don't visit.
The human-inhabited subreddits seem to mostly be favoring selftext, images, youtube videos, maybe wikipedia, and possibly some image hosts (but they are falling out of favor since imgur turned to shit). Very rarely do they seem to link to other websites.