251–260 of 317 posts
The Old Internet was much smaller. Much, much smaller. I don't think it can scale.
I'm conflicted about this, my gut agrees with you but I don't want to because I'd like to hold on to the idea that it's possible to include and bring value to everyone.
The internet does bring value to everyone, and that's exactly what people are complaining about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
4chan is outright fantastic in some aspects. /g/ is actually quite useful and friendly, especially the DPT (Daily Programming Thread), more-so if you're a beginner. /trv/ (travel) is just good and perfectly slow where you won't feel pressure to keep up with a thread because it will still be there tomorrow. /fit/ has good information and really encapsulates what happens when the internet meets bro-gym culture. Compare…
Yeah 4chan is great but it differs from reddit in a fundamental way. You can have a normal thread where someone will casually drop the N word or other slur and it will just sit there, maybe not even acknowledged but also not downvoted or deleted. That alone is enough to turn people off immediately. They need that sense of retributive justice for a wrong they see in the universe. You're right that reddit can be just a…
Well, there is no way to downvote. Point-based systems usually turn out bad if the community is too big. Just check big subreddit like the defaults, posts get too catering to group-think. Not having downvotes or even upvotes, means that you have to deal with crap posts.
For some people 4chan has "upvotes", what they call "(you)"s, basically a reply, people post too much bad content just trying to provoke a reaction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah 4chan is great but it differs from reddit in a fundamental way. You can have a normal thread where someone will casually drop the N word or other slur and it will just sit there, maybe not even acknowledged but also not downvoted or deleted. That alone is enough to turn people off immediately. They need that sense of retributive justice for a wrong they see in the universe. You're right that reddit can be just a…
>but also not downvoted Well, there is no way to downvote. Point-based systems usually turn out bad if the community is too big. Just check big subreddit like the defaults, posts get too catering to group-think. Not having downvotes or even upvotes, means that you have to deal with crap posts. For some people 4chan has "upvotes", what they call "(you)"s, basically a reply, people post too much bad content just trying…
If I still had an imageboard, it would never implement a feature like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
4chan is outright fantastic in some aspects. /g/ is actually quite useful and friendly, especially the DPT (Daily Programming Thread), more-so if you're a beginner. /trv/ (travel) is just good and perfectly slow where you won't feel pressure to keep up with a thread because it will still be there tomorrow. /fit/ has good information and really encapsulates what happens when the internet meets bro-gym culture. Compare…
As a long time user of /g/ I must say that it is more and more frequently the case that threads which focus around gender, race or other controversial items, which users do not consider it a requirement to know anything about to speak on them, massively outstrip genuine threads like DPT. They're usually not removed by mods either.
This means that creating inflammatory posts, sometimes is the only way to get attention, or worse, when you actually want information and you post in a way that would get attention otherwise it would be ignored.
Identity politics usually gives plenty of reactions. Just like calling something bad gets more reactions that call something good. Want opinion on something you want o buy? start a thread calling it shit, and wonder why there are so many bad threads there.
I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.) I think the old internet w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but also not downvoted Well, there is no way to downvote. Point-based systems usually turn out bad if the community is too big. Just check big subreddit like the defaults, posts get too catering to group-think. Not having downvotes or even upvotes, means that you have to deal with crap posts. For some people 4chan has "upvotes", what they call "(you)"s, basically a reply, people post too much bad content just trying…
The introduction of the "(You)" feature arguably changed the spirit of 4chan, since now people know that when they get a reply their comment will get more attention because the list of replies is listed on the comment itself. I don't think there was enough pushback against its introduction a few years ago. If I still had an imageboard, it would never implement a feature like that.
Of course, people could still get it from extensions, but not everybody uses them.
Still, the provoking nature on 4chan would still remain even without (you)s as it's the quickest way to get answers.
I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.) I think the old internet w…
Maybe the old internet is still there but hidden behind the 100th search result page. I often times wish search result were ranked by how genuine the page seems to be, measured by the ratio of content over ads. Indeed, the less advertisement on a page and the more likely it is written by an actual human being with something to say. Sadly, I suspect ranking to works exactly the opposite.
I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.) I think the old internet w…
Rose colored glasses. "The old" internet still exists, it's only that there are many orders of magnitude more content available online today than in the old era. The idea that corporate dominance and filtering is hiding content is false, in fact, the opposite is true, today's search engines are better than ever before at finding whatever you're looking for, what has changed is that search habits have become much more…
IMO this is empathically not true.
Not necessarily because Google has gotten worse -- although I will argue that in some ways it has, especially by deleting or ignoring search terms that I explicitely include in my query while freely adding others that are only vaguely connected -- but because people have gotten better at gaming the system on an immense scale. Search for basic information on a topic and more often than not everything is an ad-ridden Wordpress site with lots of big pictures and ten paragraphs of SEO-optimizing fluff (because Google likes lots of text to harvest keywords from) before the actual information. Google has utterly failed at de-prioritizing all this useless nonsense, probably because they make money from ranking it high.
I have to work much harder now than ten years ago at getting Google to return useful information.