In a nutshell, my internet routine has become: Check email > check ESPN > check HN > check WSJ. Every blog site I visit nowadays is literally full of ads, popups, etc...the content to ad ratio seems to be about 50/50, which is just bleh. I 100% think the internet still has lots of interesting things, but I think so much has moved to a centralized location nowadays, its a bit harder to find the unique parts of the web.
Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
171–180 of 283 posts
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#172(2019)
Previous discussion from not really that long ago when this was first posted, probably alot of same sentiment as the question has been asked many times last few years.
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#173btw it is worth mentioning for those interested that a German guy recently cloned the old myspace: https://spacehey.com/
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#174I don't understand. Having those 3 quirky HTML tags is fine, but can users add other tags? How do they go about doing that? Can they enter the React definition of those tags somewhere on their site's configuration? Or in the page? Or install them from a marketplace, like the Sticker Packs of some apps?
Right now this reads as "content platforms today don't let you enter code, so publish with us we don't allow code but we have confetti".
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#175Wasn't the hugest reason that they stopped allowing people to write their own code in myspace and made it into something nobody uses anymore was because you could do code injection attacks on it? [1] I mean doesn't anyone else remember that kid who got convicted of a felony for getting everyone's myspace pages to say 'but most of all, samy is my hero'? [2]
[1] https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2019/readings/advisory4.5.06...
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#176There are lots of fun and weird things on the internet, but SEO prevents you from seeing most of them---you end up seeing only the parts that someone is motivated to pay to get you to look at. That's essentially Google's business model.
Another related problem is the pathological economy of kickbacks that has developed on the internet. Early on,it made some sense to offer a small finders fee for referring traffic that bought something---you were connecting someone with a service they needed but couldn't easily find online since the search engines were not very good. Now it would be trivially easy to find almost any online service if those services weren't deliberately obfuscated by a jungle of middlemen trying to be the one that snags the referral fee.
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#177Just look at one of the best platforms for "fun and weird" - YouTube. The algorithm aggressively promotes freshness (things posted in the past few hours for certain queries!) and 10+ minute long videos. Every algorithm change directly impacts what creators, create, because no one wants to put in a whole lot of work for something to never be seen. If, for example, the ideal format for a joke or video is 3 minutes, tha…
The internet has changed from communities of interest to communities of people who commoditize social interaction within those interests. On the surface they seem fairly close to actual communities but they incentivize different things which changes how the community operates and personally I think they don't provide many of the healthy benefits of communities while cultivating some pretty unhealthy behavior loops.
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#178This sales pitch doesn't impress me. The internet isn't fun or weird any longer because corporations have taken over, and most normies aren't going to bother to learn how to build and operate their own websites. Just like most normies aren't going to bother to become their own sysadmins so they can run GNU/Linux on their PCs. Most people are fine with the Web being what it is today: QVC with a comments section.
But the internet was already taken over by corporations during the time this article reminisces about, wasn't it? MySpace was owned by a corporation, but allowed massive customization including custom CSS anyway. Youtube also allowed way more customization in the past (remember the old profile pages?), all those small local social networks that often allowed straight custom HTML died when Facebook expanded worldwide,…
Not exclusively taken over, no. It was more balanced between the corporate and the non-commercial.
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#179When I was a teenager I came up with several technical and nontechnical websites, zines with programming and reverse engineering tutorials, interviews, and just plain fucking around. And everyone else around me was pretty much the same. There were multiple "scenes", we formed deep relations on IRC, even though almost none knew my real name or how I looked. I still meet some of those people online (few even in real life) more than 20 years later.
Nowadays, I don't put anything too valuable on the web. Because why should I do anything for free, right? I don't live at the expense of my parents anymore, and society does not provide me with means to survive if I spend my time doing all that and "share". Now, since I'm unemployed and basically unemployable (no linkedin/facebook/whatever, disagree with gov policies re. covid and the society that accepts and promotes them hence don't get out much, won't consider working for unethical companies that track people for any purpose whatsoever (there are so many of those), introversion, etc.), I continue to do what I always did, write code, come up with theories that sometimes lead to personal projects, etc. But I definitely won't put these up on the web.
Nowadays, I don't put anything too nonconforming on the web. There are still people doing stuff "for free". They get money from something or somewhere else. But nowadays it's mostly boring as shit. Why? Because nowadays people learn to abide by the dystopia's unwritten dicta: conform, obey, self-censor, follow, like, share. When you can no longer post anonymously, when everything you say is on a permanent record, when everything around you is moderated to Hell. When every movement is tracked, your best bet is to move along in the direction of the herd. If you don't, you will be disappeared from the relevant environment. Such a society can't be fun and weird; it actively discourages fun and weird.
Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
#180> The internet added, but the internet stopped being one.
Wow, well stated. I particularly miss just seeing more original content written by people's personal experiences. Now, it seems like any Google search results in bloat-ware sites with a ton of journalistic fluff around a few data points that came out on a news wire.
I personally have some hope in the Gemini protocol returning some value to this space. It doesn't quite fit the "internet as a canvas" model, being text based with only links to images, but I think there is a lot of potential to bring more interesting content to the forefront again.