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The internet is already over (2022)

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Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#121

Post by shiroiushi »

jart wrote: post #104
asdff wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be better to instead say, what does a discord server offer to you that a mailing list does not for your technical user group? I think most people are on discord because its fashionable and they are unfamiliar with older technology like mailing lists, which were more common place when they were only children perhaps.

Staying one step ahead of HR and lawyers? They monitor everything you do over email.

You should never use your work email for anything that isn't work-related.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#122

Post by manuelmoreale »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #32
manuelmoreale wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to offer an alternative: people who still write on personal blogs and like to interact with each other. https://ooh.directory is constantly growing if you want to look for things to read. https://kagi.com/smallweb Is a fun alternative way to discover new content. I started a series almost a year ago to help people discover interesting humans and their blogs: https://peopleandblogs.com/ Bearblog has a discove…

If I'm gonna be honest, I never liked blogs. Never liked reading them and never liked the idea of writing one. Forums were the cornerstone of the old internet and more or less completely extinct today.

And that’s totally fine. Forums are still out there and still a viable option.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#123

Post by SteamUsersLol »

lazide wrote: post #117
mrkramer wrote: post #13

My take on declining online social engagement is; a lot of people like to consume online content passively e.g. just reading Facebook posts or watching a YouTube video without actually liking or commenting. Another thing is; increasing number of people came to realize that privacy does matter and they refuse to participate in online dramas that can damage their reputation or harm their mental health.

IMO, it’s due to burnout due to pathological manipulation. Which is also playing out in politics and the media/advertising, and the macroeconomic fed rate situation. They’re all related. Business cycle wise: - it starts out mellow, with lots of positive ROI and few downsides. Few know about it at first. - as awareness grows, so does competition. While there is a ton of room to grow, this isn’t a problem. Growth doesn…

> Pluses: in 20-30 years, there will be a lot of older folks who are very hard to fool or manipulate.

I disagree. Tech literacy is going down, partially due to an overreliance on dashboard-style mobile apps and phishing scams are still widely effective. I have seen people lose mails and accounts to strategies that have been unchanged for an easily googleable 11 years now. Perhaps the inevitability of exposure is a numbers game, but I'm overall pessimistic, I think a lot of scams will become a lot more "personal sounding" due to AI agents, and a preparedness reset is coming.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#124

Post by shiroiushi »

parl_match wrote: post #57

> It’s already trite to notice that all our films are franchises now, all our bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style, and all our pop music sounds like a tribute act. This whole article reads as "i expected things to stay the same and they are" There are still tons of great films being made, and new concepts spinning up - just in non-traditional places or ways - netflix, apple tv, etc. So they're…

>And "all our pop music sounds like a tribute act"? Lmao. If you listen to the same top 40 pop crap, sure! There's tons of great pop acts that are way smaller - but again, if all you do is look at "most played" and listen to the radio, you're going to hear the same monoculture bullcrap

Sorry, this just isn't true. If you aren't listening to the "top 40 crap", then you aren't listening to pop, you're listening to something that isn't pop at all.

There aren't any tiny pop acts at all. Those aren't pop. The definition of "pop music" is that it's popular, hence the name. If it's some band that barely anyone knows about, they might be great (in your opinion), but they're not popular by any reasonable definition, and thus aren't "pop music".

When people complain that modern pop music is all terrible, it's a perfectly valid position. The music industry is not at all like it was 40 years ago. It doesn't mean that all recent music is bad.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#125

Post by shiroiushi »

lmm wrote: post #74

Meh. No, the internet isn't going away. Yes, it's not the countercultural thing it once was. Counterculture is still happening, just not on the first page you go to on the internet any more. No, manufacturing going from 20% to 14% of the economy does not mean the world is ending. And no, the random coincidence of who has a bunch of oil money right now doesn't mean anything. The internet will outlast Islam, culturally…

>They can't comprehend it in the same way that we can't comprehend actually believing religion the way medieval people did. It's not coming back.

Who's "we"? There's billions of people today who really do believe in religion the way that medieval Europeans did. The middle east is full of them, and there are multiple countries where the religion and government are inextricably joined together (such as Iran and Afghanistan). Sure, a large portion of the people in liberalized Western nations no longer believe that stuff the way medieval Europeans did, but there are many others who still do. The US has many of them too, trying to control government policy according to their beliefs.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#126

Post by DocTomoe »

lazide wrote: post #115
pyrolistical wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of incentives to game this to distribute your whatever. It’s just that the moderation is pretty good

Also the crowd is brutally cynical, which tends to discourage a lot of it.

To the contrary, this crowd is one of the most pleasant on the internet in 2024.

A prime example of why gatekeeping is necessary and working.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#127

Post by DocTomoe »

asdff wrote: post #93

A big issue with the internet is the commercialization aspect of it. Any time you get an organic community of actual users, that's just chumming the water. That's a good quality population of users for the marketer unlike a lot of others out there. They are going to try all they can to get into that community and use it for advertising, to make some use out of it versus to leave it be on the table. Entropy favors ens…

A big part in that was ISPs who often enough deliberately killed self-hosting with dynamic IP allocation and asynchronous upload/download rates, necessitating hosting somewhere else, which came with an extra cost, either in ads or in money.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#128

Post by shiroiushi »

peterleiser wrote: post #18
reddalo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone is here I think this is the answer. Once upon a time we were way fewer people, and many interests were shared among those people (because we pretty much were all "geeks"). We've always had trolls, spammers, etc. but it still felt like we were part of a big community. Now everybody is here, and that feeling is no more. It's like moving from a small village or town (where everybody knows each other) to a hug…

And nobody makes Monty Python or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy references anymore. I had a boss 15 years ago who had watched all things Star Trek, just like me; Knew all the things. But at one point he mentioned he wasn't really a fan, it was just "required reading, part of the literature". This is an interesting one. There used to be certain things that all nerds knew, and could talk about, use as analogies a…

>geeks and nerds shouldn't be gatekeepers about what the entertainment is, or the literature, because that cuts out a lot of people who should feel included.

But the sports fans never felt this way, and were always happy to cut out the geeks and nerds that didn't give two shits about the sportsball game they watched that weekend. Why should the geeks and nerds need to worry about including the sports fans, but not the other way around?

>I think social media, politics, streaming services, etc. have totally blown away these shared frameworks in society, and it's kind of a bummer, even though it's great to have lots of choices. People used to watch the same TV shows and talk about it the next day.

When Game of Thrones was the new hot TV show, it seemed like everyone and his dog was watching it, and that included the sports fans and the nerds too.

>I guess sports is basically the last thing that's shared.

Back to my first point. I don't know any sports fans in my circle of friends and work colleagues (who are all techies of course). If any are, they keep it to themselves, thankfully.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#129

Post by weitendorf »

nickdothutton wrote: post #77

We got the Internet that advertising built. This was not how we (well some of us early 90s and before) users assumed it would pan out. It has been my experience that private Internet communities (groups, forums, messaging chats) are where the quality discussion happens these days. Away from the advertising and the controversy seeking (and anti-tech) mainstream media reporters.

Small private communities are contrary to some of the most important, biggest promises of the Internet (and the web): that it would be open and really big. It was supposed to be a place where some kid in rural Africa with only 8 years of schooling could learn how to be a software developer, or where people could naturally find and join communities too small to have a local presence (eg people really into collecting vacuum cleaners).

I don't think it's just an advertising/cancel culture problem. It's partially a problem with the internet being so decentralized that spammers and scammers can operate with impunity, pushing a ton of work onto people running online communities because countries like India and Russia don't properly go after cybercriminals - even if someone SaaSified forums, this is still a significant burden.

It's also kind of a UI problem: if Google search starts to suck and gets filled with trash, as has happened, it breaks the core pull-model of the web. If Reddit starts to suck and get filled with trash, as has happened, it breaks the core push-model of the web. Together the two kind of Embraced-Extended-Extinguished the web, but maybe something like an RSS reader, different web client (eg a browser that didn't nudge you into making google queries as the main way to operate it), and more capable search engine would be able to fix these.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#130

Post by tivert »

suzzer99 wrote: post #102
nickdothutton wrote: post #77

We got the Internet that advertising built. This was not how we (well some of us early 90s and before) users assumed it would pan out. It has been my experience that private Internet communities (groups, forums, messaging chats) are where the quality discussion happens these days. Away from the advertising and the controversy seeking (and anti-tech) mainstream media reporters.

Like this site, one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the internet because no one has any incentive to game it.

> Like this site, one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the internet because no one has any incentive to game it.

There's tons of incentive to game it. If it wasn't, why would all kinds of startups and tech companies have alert bots and slack channels implemented to allow their employees to swoop in and participate in HN threads that are relevant to their marketing interests?

IIRC, the one's who've come clean about doing that have been fairly scrupulous about, but I'm sure they're just the tip of the iceberg.

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