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I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

nymag.com

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Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#11

Post by peterburkimsher »

My guilty pleasure is 9gag. It's blocked in the office (thankfully), so I spend way too much time on it when I'm not at work. I used to read a lot of webcomics (XKCD, Joy of Tech, Pon and Zi, QuestionableContent, Poorly Drawn Lines, The Brads) and user-generated art (DeviantArt). 9gag lowered the barriers to entry and made it easy for images to become viral. It's also now transitioned into auto-playing videos instead of static pictures, which is killing comics :(.

My boss asked me to watch the CS231n lectures and learn TensorFlow, but he didn't give me a dataset. So I downloaded the history of the 9gag hot page, over 60k images. I'm also interested in learning languages, and I find that comics with dialogues are a great way to learn how to talk to people. I then wrote my own image viewer to let me tag pictures as a comic/not comic.

So now I'm still wasting time looking at memes, but I can pass it off as "productive" work, training a machine learning model to find dialogues for language learning.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#13

Post by foolofatom »

I think the internet is less fun now -- I can't decide if its from maturation of technology or maturation of people though. (Has anyone else felt like things became less fun as they got older?)

I felt a greater sense of community 10 years ago when I mostly used IRC and PHP BBs. The communities were smaller, and it was fun even if you disliked people. Flame wars and trolling were mostly for the audience's amusement, because even if you really disliked each other you had nowhere else to go aside from quitting entirely. Nowadays there are so many options that people don't really commit to communities anymore.

I'm glad this thread was posted. It'll be interesting to read people's thoughts.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#15

Post by yodsanklai »

scottmf wrote: post #2

This is exactly how I've felt for the past few years. Besides Facebook, I think a large part of it is not being quite as young and open to new things. E.g. I'm under 30 but I never got into Youtube, I don't even know how to find good content on it.

Youtube has an incredible amount of high-quality content hidden in tons of garbage. Unfortunately, I find the recommendation system to be inefficient. It's good at suggesting videos very closely related to what I watched before but it's not able to suggest new things that could be of interest.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#16

Post by ricardobeat »

I miss GeoCities/Tripod, and the time where search engines would always return new, quirky pages for whatever you searched for - no big media publishers or professional bloggers. Lots of fan-built pages, or just people showcasing their hobbies.

These days I find myself stuck in a loop of HN, BBC, Reddit, eventually designernews or YouTube. The latter makes me feel trapped but is still mostly valuable content, whereas reddit just feels like a massive time sink in the worst sense.

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#17

Post by charliepark »

cityzen wrote: post #6

I have been saying I've "reached the end of the internet" for awhile now. I am 44 and have been working on the web since mid 90s. I remember so much cool stuff from then. Trying to get a 56k modem to work, dealing with the fact that you couldn't always get online or if you did you could get kicked off at any time. I remember streaming the Tibetan Freedom Concert with realplayer back in '98. The first mp3 i got, napst…

It sounds like you're content being offline more, which is great. If you miss it, though … per your comment that "nothing worked back then but that was part of the experience", you might enjoy seeing if there's a local Homebrew Website Club meeting near you (https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club). I've gone to a couple meetings of the SF one, and it's a nice, earnest, group of makers, looking to build cool stuff on the internet, independent of corporate efforts "to steal and sell your data". They have a sense of that feeling that "The internet was a mess back then and even though it was frustrating as hell, it was exciting."

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#18

Post by sho »

scottmf wrote: post #2

This is exactly how I've felt for the past few years. Besides Facebook, I think a large part of it is not being quite as young and open to new things. E.g. I'm under 30 but I never got into Youtube, I don't even know how to find good content on it.

There is an astonishing amount of good content on youtube. In the last 3 or so years it has blossomed into something of a renaissance and begun to grow into what I always kind of hoped "citizen content" could be. To my mind it is the most obviously beneficial of all of those "web 2.0" companies.

Do you like jet engines? Prepare to lose the rest of your day watching AgentJayZ talking about his job repairing jet engines in such detail I'm surprised his channel isn't a national security violation. Like teardowns of tools and sardonic commentary? AvE. Electrical engineering discussions? EEVBlog. Planes landing? Cargospotter. Interesting shit? Wendover/half as interesting. Analysis of famous Roman battles? Historia Civilis. 2 hour long videos of japanese train rides from the cabin? ato5kgyasetaito. I could go on.. and on.. and on.

I suppose I am letting my tastes show a little here but to me the issue isn't finding the content, it's knowing when to stop!

Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

#20

Post by slagfart »

nanomonkey wrote: post #14

The author hasn't come across the decentralized web (ie scuttlebutt or dat). That's where I've found all the personalized interesting content.

pls help me get online, nerd

Seriouspost: Agree with all that’s been said. Corporations have turned the web into an unpalatable wasteland. The prospect of someone finding out my name and job has taken all the joy out of calling someone a fuckhead online. I want to find it again.

I will start searching, but the good communities I’ve found have been invite only.

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