I enjoyed the internet more when I had fifty bookmarks instead of five.
Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
121–130 of 283 posts
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotally, my own search engine index starts to feel stale after about two months. I wonder what the half-life of a link is.
I'm highly tempted to run a "caching" proxy 24x7 just to keep archives of some of these decaying gems around past their lifespan on the web. I'd say I could just use archive.org (or similar), but their (admittedly necessary) respect of robots.txt makes their archive incomplete.
I also wish for a modern local archiving solution. HTTRACK just doesn't cut it anymore, unless you really want a local copy of a webcomic that stopped updating in 2003.
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#123The answer is fear. The internet used to be full of fun, and whimsey, and people doing strange things, and being accepted for it.
This applies to web sites, social media, and even discussion forms like HN.
If you try to express humor on 90% of the internet today, you are attacked by anonymous mobs of people who get dopamine hits from being offended for other people who they have not met, and may not even exist.
Case in point:
In another thread, someone accidentally or through auto-correct used the word "silicone" instead of "silicon." A helpful HNer replied:
You mean silicon. Silicone means something else.
In the early days of the internet, someone could then have replied "What a boob!" and a certain percentage of the viewers would have gotten a slight giggle from it and moved on with their lives. Those who didn't find it humorous would also have moved on with their lives.
But today, the self-righteous internet mobs would attack the person who wrote the boob comment, so people self-censor.
Almost any time someone introduces any humor into HN, for example, someone points to imaginary "rules" and gets upset that if something isn't humorous to 100% of every single person on the planet, it shouldn't be uttered in public. Well, guess what — you're never going to get 100% of the people on the planet to agree about anything, so get over it.
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#124I 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 think we would need something like a modern Geocities to encourage people to start building indices again.
It would have to support mobile, perhaps have a nice editor like the Medium mobile app had.
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#125Honestly, the internet has seemed somewhat barren to me since the death of Flash.
Technical purists disparage flash, all with valid reasons, but ignore all the respects in which it was extremely good. It allowed developers (young amateur/learning developers especially) to easily make extremely high quality games and animations, and publish them online in a format that was easy to access and run on very low-spec hardware. Nothing else I know of today comes close.
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#126I 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…
IMO it's not just about being bite-sized, memeable content catering to the lowest common denominator. It's that nearly everyone making content is copying marketing strategies. Back then it was more of a show-and-tell vibe, now everything is trying to sell something.
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#127The availability of fun and weird has redefined both fun and weird. What's relatively tame and normal by today's standards would have been groundbreaking only a few years ago. Desensitisation is the issue, not a dearth of fun and weird. A guilty pleasure of mine are some of those klrdubs YouTube videos. My daughter launches a series of them at me every now and then, and whilst many of them are so-so, a few of them ar…
Interesting take. I think it definitely plays a role.
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#128The reason the web is not fun anymore is because it's now hypercentralized. Companies that effectively control the web found the formula that works for them. They want you to mindlessly consume streams of curated information. They want you to do that at maximum throughput. Most of your "interactions" with websites are fake and exist only to improve "engagement".
If everyone starts fiddling with colors and creative designs, it will decrease the throughput of an average information consumer. Therefore, no meaningful customization is allowed. It's that simple.
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotally, my own search engine index starts to feel stale after about two months. I wonder what the half-life of a link is.
I'm highly tempted to run a "caching" proxy 24x7 just to keep archives of some of these decaying gems around past their lifespan on the web. I'd say I could just use archive.org (or similar), but their (admittedly necessary) respect of robots.txt makes their archive incomplete.
[deleted]
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#130God I hate articles like this. If you want to make a myspace clone, then make one. No-one is stopping you. 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 abo…
I wish I could upvote it 10 times.
No one is stopping these nostalgic folks. Those older techs aren't banned. They have just lost their war for network effect.