Don't sugar coat it. Call it what it really is: gentrification. 2000: creating content and fostering an online community in private was seen as super nerdy. 2022: binge watching TikTok in public and grown-ass adults fighting over Internet Points is "normal." And, yeah, the content is much worse. It's a lot of overly-socialized people taking care to say the things they should say so the great Algorithm gives them more…
What I did about it today is bookmarking some of the websites that were shared, I mean isnt it the same as in any century, now the difference is that you can have free access to good stuff
Everything is money. But! There are subcultures that are hard to monetize though, e.g. furry subculture since it comes with so much pornography. No brand wants to be close to that. At this point, as a furry artist, I feel it's refreshing that this very weird and mostly harmless adult nature keeps the rest of the art also somewhat safe and in the hands of small artists.
Hello fellow furry pornmonger :) It’s fucking GREAT really, furry is poison to megacorps and there’s a ton of room for individual creators to thrive without corporations relentlessly optimizing their cash extraction at huge scales.
It’s poison to mega corps because it doesn’t fit into contemporary “coolness”. Using furries decreases sales and that’s all they care about.
There's a new social media site called Cohost that actually allows stuff like this inside of posts. It lets people, say, recreate Blender's UI or make a Warioware microgame. It's a nice middle ground between the hellscape that is Twitter and the more self-contained DIY sites of Neocities (which is also cool, but never really stuck with me).
I might phrase it, "whatever is embraced by the masses becomes more appealing to the masses." Broadening in appeal is not necessarily worse, although it's surely worse from the perspective of the initial specialized interest group. Yes, the Internet of yesteryear was more interesting to our type of people, but it had no appeal whatsoever to anyone else. The world is better off today with an Internet that billions fin…
Honestly, I think we have a discovery problem. There's plenty of room for both groups. In a way the internet is limitless. A lot of that weirdness still exists, it's just incredibly hard to find.
That weirdness does still exist, whether it's kept up from a long time ago or people making brand-new weird stuff. I got into making a site on Neocities, essentially a modern Geocities equivalent, a while back after a friend told me about it. I didn't end up sticking with it too long, but I found so many gloriously weird personal sites, projects, shrines, zines, and fan pages.
I remember the thousands of interesting and weird pages listed on StumbleUpon - directories of obscure topics, avant garde art projects and detailed field specific blogs - many of them both pretty and thoroughly made. Mind expanding stuff. I feel like today all of that has moved to silos like tiktok and instagram, in extreme short form formats that are easily disposable - so almost no one creates truly great "compila…
I miss old internet stuff to, but in a way I think it’s just morphed. First you have to look past the influencer/marketing cruft trying to pass as authentic but I find real great content is predominantly being created on YT and other video channels. The production value I see some amateur folks take is insane and has to be a massive hobby in of itself.
Also have to just realize the web is now public transport where it used to be exclusive. It’s like flying in 1962 versus 2022
I remember the thousands of interesting and weird pages listed on StumbleUpon - directories of obscure topics, avant garde art projects and detailed field specific blogs - many of them both pretty and thoroughly made. Mind expanding stuff. I feel like today all of that has moved to silos like tiktok and instagram, in extreme short form formats that are easily disposable - so almost no one creates truly great "compila…
Here's a site I like to link whenever this discussion comes up (not associated): https://wiby.me I love hopping in and hitting the "surprise me" every once in a while, and reading some obscure webpage written by an actual person with a passion for a subject. In the past I've seen a site dedicated to the soundtrack for a film series (I can't remember which), not even necessarily streaming the soundtrack or something,…
I clicked "surprise me" and found a page that has a picture of astronauts on the ISS with SPHERES: http://www.madsci.org/
In high school my friends and I were on a team for a robotics/programming competition run by NASA and MIT that involved programming 3d models of these SPHERES to do some action in a virtual space against an opponent. But if you made it to the final round, you got to watch your code get executed by ACTUAL SPHERES on the INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION. We won 2 years in a row, and made it to the final round 3 times (while I was on the team, I think they made it to the final round once the year before I joined). I doubt I'll ever do anything nearly that cool ever again in my actual career now.
Don't sugar coat it. Call it what it really is: gentrification. 2000: creating content and fostering an online community in private was seen as super nerdy. 2022: binge watching TikTok in public and grown-ass adults fighting over Internet Points is "normal." And, yeah, the content is much worse. It's a lot of overly-socialized people taking care to say the things they should say so the great Algorithm gives them more…
Is there no going back though? It doesn't take much to delete your social accounts and it seems like more and more people consider this. At some point you get tired of being a product. And when you create content, at some point you just want to do your thing instead of minmaxing the algorithm.
We don't have to compromise for the huge social platforms or to make money for them.
Everything is money. But! There are subcultures that are hard to monetize though, e.g. furry subculture since it comes with so much pornography. No brand wants to be close to that. At this point, as a furry artist, I feel it's refreshing that this very weird and mostly harmless adult nature keeps the rest of the art also somewhat safe and in the hands of small artists.
Hello fellow furry pornmonger :) It’s fucking GREAT really, furry is poison to megacorps and there’s a ton of room for individual creators to thrive without corporations relentlessly optimizing their cash extraction at huge scales.
The fandom creates such an incredible environment for creators to thrive in. I went to a con near me and a walk through the dealer's den showed the vast variety of creators. Of course, there were artists with prints and merch, but there were also furry musicians with CDs of albums and DJ sets, a woodworker with carvings and laser-cut journals where the pages were magnetic inserts, someone selling fursuit parts like eyes and horns made out of resin, even a small handful of adult businesses (behind a curtain and with staff checking ages, of course). Music, games, books, especially art, it's all by furries, for furries, with the exception of a few mass-market friendly franchises that furries happen to love like Beastars or Zootopia.
So subtle, it flew over my head and is still flying off into the sunset. I genuinly thought it was just someone enjoying collecting rants. (Which, some rants are quite enjoyable to read.)
When I realized I was making a joke it was already too late! In all seriousness I actually did start to collect HN rants I find funny a short while ago. There is something about elaborate rants that just gets me. Similarly I love elaborate, negative (social media) reviews. They are often way too serious and over the top.
So subtle, it flew over my head and is still flying off into the sunset. I genuinly thought it was just someone enjoying collecting rants. (Which, some rants are quite enjoyable to read.)
When I realized I was making a joke it was already too late! In all seriousness I actually did start to collect HN rants I find funny a short while ago. There is something about elaborate rants that just gets me. Similarly I love elaborate, negative (social media) reviews. They are often way too serious and over the top.
What you're talking about (rants that seem like they should be instant classics, which you save for later amusement) are known in chanspeak as 'pasta' (copypasta). There are many, many classic pasta rants (the Navy Seal Pasta being possibly the most well known). Bless you for keeping our culture alive.