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The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

muddy.jprs.me

81–90 of 291 posts

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you balance that with the need for money to afford things in life though? There's a lot of things I could go do if I didn't have to think about bills to pay.

How did they in the 1990s/2000s/2010s?

Lower cost of living and higher incomes when compared to purchasing power of a dollar.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you balance that with the need for money to afford things in life though? There's a lot of things I could go do if I didn't have to think about bills to pay.

How did they in the 1990s/2000s/2010s?

Flea markets.

Lol but I went to a flea market the other day with $100 thinking that was going to go far — I managed to buy one jacket for $80. So… I dunno.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#83
The old internet was a more homogenous society, social outcasts and technically capable people who liked interacting with computers. The content was more relatable because it was created by similar types of people. Now the internet is for everyone so the content is for everybody.

It's too easy to blame the algorithms when the algorithms are a necessary evil. TikTok has millions of videos uploaded per day. You are not going to sort through all of those on your own. The algorithm is designed to show you more of what you interact with. If you're not finding joy in what you're seeing, it's because you're not interacting with content that gives you joy. Stop watching the slop, search for the things you like and follow good creators. There are a lot of them out there, depending on what you like. That applies to any social media, not just TikTok.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#84
post #14

> I’ve been mourning the old Internet over the past year or two... As a kid on the Web from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, we knew we were living through something special. It's funny because I knew lots of people in the early 2000s who were mourning the loss of the "old Internet" then. Kind of like how everyone thinks the music they listened to as a teenager is the best and it's all been downhill since.

I as a Gen-Zer mourn the "old internet" of the 2010s. I agree and feel like nostalgia is kind of a lie.

In my own generation for example, I've seen a transition from "no good music has come out since 2000, we missed the GB/N64 era of gaming" to deep nostalgia for PS3/Xbox and Linkin Park era metal as the golden era.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#85
post #68

I really long for a new kind of web browser with a search that only links to pages that are built for the browser. Static pages, which can hyperlink to other sites but must be self-resourced in the media they show, and which are if not highly banal at least banalisable by turning on a ‘reader’ function. Maybe that internet would be hosted on a limited platform, akin to the infrastructure used by private torrent track…

Gemini? Gopher, if you're old school? I also vaguely recall something called flask

there's options for this. she's trick is getting people to write the pages

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#86

I think we just got older. People are still having a blast online, but they’re mostly kids or teenagers. Garrys Mod got replaced by Roblox, forums got replaced by Discord, blogs got replaced by vlogs. There’s still lots of fun and community still to be found online, people wouldn’t spend so much time on it if there wasn’t.

I don’t think it’s accurate to say Roblox replaced Gary’s Mod. They both released in 2006, and they’ve always targeted different audiences. Roblox has always targeted younger kids while Gary’s Mod has targeted older kids, teenagers, and adults. Roblox has had a weird resurgence in the past few years, but it didn’t replace Gary’s Mod. Heck, I’d reckon it was always more popular than Gary’s Mod among younger kids (I know I had friends who were obsessed with Roblox circa ~2009, but I didn’t hear about Gary’s Mod until I was a teenager).

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#87
I think a lot about this post along these lines:

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

I don't think the fun is gone from the internet, you just have to look much, much harder to find it. It's the needle in the haystack of attention and profit-seeking content. And the platforms aren't as neutral as the might have been in the past in helping you search.

Sometimes I swear the algorithm has learned it keeps me more engaged with incredulously dissatisfactory search and discovery rather than anything actually stimulating.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#89
post #5

A domain + compute has never been cheaper. That said, I think the signal-to-noise ratio on the modern internet makes discovery difficult.

It's approaching near impossible. The amount of articles posted to hn that are near AI slop is so high it's almost not worth using anymore.

The blandest-common-deonominator audience here on HN doesn't help, either. A modern-day equivalent of zombo.com or "Bert is Evil" or other quirkiness would have a hard time ranking highly here. Possible, but unlikely. Whereas the usual "I built My Generic SAS in Elixir!" and "My Musings On AI" posts shoot to the top.
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