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The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

muddy.jprs.me

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Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#221

Post by TFNA »

moffkalast wrote: post #200
the__alchemist wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur! Explore the big, bold world outside the internet. Or, on the internet, stop spending your valuable time on bottom-feeder content like medium articles, facebook, twitter/bluesky, rant blogs, news websites etc.

The big, bold world outside the internet is arguably far more locked down, enshittified and regulated than the online world. I mean look at cities, removing parks, benches, trying to make it impossible to even stand without paying for existing. The countryside is all bought up, every inch of grass owned and people itching to tell you to get the fuck off their property. Can't do anything anywhere anymore. You'd have t…

> The countryside is all bought up, every inch of grass owned and people itching to tell you to get the fuck off their property.

You’re missing out if you think that. People come from all over the world to hike, bikepack, or van-dwell American wilderness. Since Covid there has been a big boom in ”weekender” routes that Americans can do in their own neck of the woods. And if there’s so much reward in the USA, think about what rewards await in other countries that have even less of a culture of territorialness and privatization.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#222

Post by knowaveragejoe »

jwr wrote: post #22

No, it's not! If you don't like the super-monetized over-optimized AI-generated walled garden we've-got-you-hooked experience — just don't participate in it and do your own thing. Start your own blog. Without ads, not to be "monetized", just for the fun of it. Write for yourself, not for "engagement". Do your thing.

I think this cynicism is more borne out of a despair for the average person stuck in all that. They often don't know that there's something else, that you can just Do Things.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#223

Post by uncircle »

mjhay wrote: post #108
ModernMech wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thrift and vintage stores have been pivoting to the premium consumer as well.

WTF is the premium consumer of a thrift store?

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#224

Post by yifanl »

tristor wrote: post #117
yifanl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realizing that the average CS graduate can't expect to make 100k on a career of centering divs has been more disruptive to the the American psyche than 9/11.

It's not that the average CS grad can't expect to make 100k, it's that when that was the case 100k was a meaningful amount, now the same purchasing power requires 235k and almost nobody is making 235k in any job role, career pursuit, or field of study. Those that are making 235k aren't experiencing the same lifestyle because they don't exist in the same context, they exist in a context where they're surrounded by dep…

I wasn't joking, just trying to compact my thoughts. The lifestyle and abundance we sold the last generation of university students turned out to be wholly out of reach for all but the luckiest and most well-connected, and that disillusion is why we feel so much like crap, even when we point out we're still objectively far ahead of the global average.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#225

Post by uncircle »

Melatonic wrote: post #180
the__alchemist wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur! Explore the big, bold world outside the internet. Or, on the internet, stop spending your valuable time on bottom-feeder content like medium articles, facebook, twitter/bluesky, rant blogs, news websites etc.

Kagi Small Web !!

It’s all mostly American tech blogs. I mean, it’s a nice initiative, but it’s less diverse than Hacker News.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#226

Post by munksbeer »

threepts wrote: post #99
jonas21 wrote: 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.

Hahaha this hits home too hard, back in early 2000s people would moan all the time whenever they spotted a hint of autotune, in 2026 its the industry standard. I think its really speaks on the incredible ability of people to be able to be stuck in the past rather than new technology being "bad".

This is an amazing comment. I'm old. I was born in the 70s, grew up in the 80s and 90s and miss those times so much. But that is because I was young, immortal, the world was mine to discover.

In 20 years people will be missing the 2020s too. It is just human nature to complain.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#227

Post by packetlost »

DarkNova6 wrote: post #91
munificent wrote: post #53

I have a pet theory that much of what we're seeing culturally is that the 90s and early 2000s (at least in the US) was a window of time that offered a sense of safety and surplus. 9/11 was extremely culturally disruptive, but aside from that, for many in the US, it felt like there was "enough to go around". That environment breeds a lot of creativity, innovation, whimsy, and doing things for their own sake. But that…

The whole structure has changed. We are not even in the web 2.0 anymore and regressed to a client-server model where what we see is dictated from central platforms with little interaction between actual users. This was not a natural evolution of the web but the consequence of low-tech people accessing the web passively via a tiny touchscreen.

There are pockets of this on the internet, but you really have to go out of your way to find it

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#228

Post by energy123 »

clickety_clack wrote: post #157
munificent wrote: post #53

I have a pet theory that much of what we're seeing culturally is that the 90s and early 2000s (at least in the US) was a window of time that offered a sense of safety and surplus. 9/11 was extremely culturally disruptive, but aside from that, for many in the US, it felt like there was "enough to go around". That environment breeds a lot of creativity, innovation, whimsy, and doing things for their own sake. But that…

If you feel that way then you have to question what it is that you’re doing that puts you in a place where you are made to feel that way. Many people (most that I know) don’t feel that way. It may be the online communities that you are in or the news you consume, and the great news about that is that is stuff that is not only optional; you choose to consume it. You can just stop consuming it.

It's significantly an Anglosphere thing. Look at the recent world happiness survey and all the English-speaking countries are taking a nose dive in relative ranking versus other countries. Meanwhile world GDP is increasing.

I have a handful of idiosyncratic hypotheses, that I view as stacking on top of the more general cause of inflation and inequality:

- Western hegemony is weakening. Russia is attacking, China is gaining in strength, and many former backwaters are gaining ground. This creates uncertainty. In 1991, the US was the supreme undisputed hegemon.

- Global Social media is significantly English, and the US is the center of the now globalized culture wars, so there's no linguistic barriers to the resulting pathologies. The online world feels borderless and chaotic.

- There is now sectarian strife within English-speaking countries due to different moral tribes (some of those tribes being recent immigrants) living in the same country when there wasn't before. This is a new phenomenon in living memory in the Anglosphere.

- Russia and Iran are running cognitive warfare and other operations to destabilize social cohesion in the Anglosphere. Examples: (i) online - Gucifer, Internet Research Agency, (ii) real world - paying local gangsters to attack minorities.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#229

Post by prewett »

tristor wrote: post #117
yifanl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realizing that the average CS graduate can't expect to make 100k on a career of centering divs has been more disruptive to the the American psyche than 9/11.

It's not that the average CS grad can't expect to make 100k, it's that when that was the case 100k was a meaningful amount, now the same purchasing power requires 235k and almost nobody is making 235k in any job role, career pursuit, or field of study. Those that are making 235k aren't experiencing the same lifestyle because they don't exist in the same context, they exist in a context where they're surrounded by dep…

This sounds like a bit of romance for the past, and if any software developers are thinking about "grinding misery", it wasn't any better in the past. My salary as a junior developer in the early 2000s was about $60k, on average. I met someone who had given up a $100k networking job (to do church ministry), and I remember $100k feeling like a number that was just not ever going to be in the realm of possibility for me. Now all the numbers have gone up, but the relatively percentages are about the same. (Except commercial rent, that is a terrible value in my area, but housing prices are reasonable.)

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#230

Post by stronglikedan »

dividefuel wrote: post #186

My take is the shift to mobile is what really caused the biggest change in the Internet. By the mid/late 2000s, the UX for surfing the Web was mostly pretty good. Navigating to another site was as easy as typing in its URL or issuing a quick search. Navigating the Web on mobile is much more difficult -- even 15+ years later simple things like browser tabs are a nuisance on mobile. Typing URLs is still a pain. Etc. Th…

> Navigating the Web on mobile is much more difficult

I tried a foldable phone thinking it would solve my issues with mobile interactivity, and learned that it's not the small screen that hinders me. It's the terrible mobile input methods in general, particularly surrounding text manipulation and entry. I didn't keep the phone since it didn't solve my seemingly unsolvable problem after all.

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