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

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

#311

Post by memco »

arca_vorago wrote: post #52
JimboOmega wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know either but I have absolutely had the same experience. Although for me the heyday of IRC was 20 years ago, and even then (in the late 90s) it felt dated and quaint. People at that time were moving on from ICQ to AIM, and IRC was the old, weird place you went to get anime DivX videos in particular. I do think the maturation of "troll culture" has really devalued a lot of the Internet. Virtually any event o…

IRC is still alive and well, and honestly since so many have forgotten about it has become a much more tight knit community, depending on which ones you frequent... people should really try it out. Don't forget your cloaks! The real time nature, and the kind of people that hang out there, make it very worth it. I frequently get direct access to a dev on irc... you don't get that on twitter or a bug report.

I didn't get into IRC much until about 5 years ago where one of the frameworks I was using was just starting to pick up steam. The dev and several experienced users would hang out in there and would help answer questions. Now, I look for IRC channels as a primary source of support for coding questions and I'm slightly put off when I see a community or project doesn't have an IRC channel. I don't hang out in there as much as I used to, but it's a great place to meet people and learn, even today.

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

#312

Post by dchuk »

CalRobert wrote: post #284
dchuk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve actually been thinking about this recently, as I was also a heavy forum user back in the day. Why don’t we just start a forum for the HN crowd? Not a new interpretation of the forum model or anything like that, literally any instance of vbulletin or phpbb or something comparable and “traditional”. If people are genuinely interested in this, I would be up for spinning something up over the weekend.

Is there anywhere we can see this progress? I suppose I'll see this comment of mine when I look in HN (I do often) but would love to know when anything is up and running. BTW, I'd strongly, strongly discourage vBulletin.

I'll reply to everyone here when it's online, and will post a Show HN. Hopefully it will get some traction.

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

#313

Post by occamsrazorwit »

cityzen wrote: post #252
senorjazz wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you and am of a similar age and experience. But how much of the above is because "we were young"?

I don't think much, to be honest. In fact I think the excitement of the 90's and the advent of the internet acted as sort of a fountain of youth for people that didn't want to go the corporate route. I have been an independent consultant for 20 years and have never had to buy into the corporate life because of the freedom the internet gave me coupled with my desire to learn and understand it and share that with peopl…

That sounds like the type of complaints that the older generation have had about the younger generation for centuries. "Kids these days aren't doing things for the right reasons anymore" is a common sentiment that has been traced back to literally ancient times.

"Our youth have an insatiable desire for wealth; they have bad manners and atrocious customs..." - Plato

I feel like it's more likely that the older generation gets jaded (as happens to all generations). Facebook, Google, and other massive multinational corporations may be modern-day ills, but they don't represent some new, soulless trend (remember trust-busting around 1900?). They're just old perspectives on a new industry.

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

#314

Post by occamsrazorwit »

silveroriole wrote: post #145
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #28

He's just old. Go to Tumblr, Facebook groups, Instagram. There's thousands of places to waste your time with vapid, unyielding streams of barely entertaining content. I recently spent hours going through bad geography memes. Geography. Memes. Or you could go old-school. Fark.com is still around, as is SomethingAwful. Reddit has tons of content. And if you're not at work and looking for a horrifying thrill ride, 4chan…

“Go to Tumblr, Facebook groups, Instagram... Reddit... 4chan” All of those have one thing in common to me, which is that they’re not meant for holding conversations on. Facebook pretends to be but if you post more than a couple of replies they get collapsed up. All those sites are “here’s a picture/video, make a kneejerk response, move on.” Ok sure that’s optimised for timewasting - I just want to see content, I don’…

"but if you post more than a couple of replies they get collapsed up"

Forums do the same thing, just with pagination instead of collapsing. Newcomers to a thread or FB post aren't going to read through the last 40 pages of comments, but the option to do so is still available.

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

#315

Post by krapp »

drb91 wrote: post #246
krapp wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probably best to take it back now. Why? The internet isn't for us, it shouldn't be a quirky clique only for the technorati, it should to be for everyone. "Normal" using the internet for mainstream, banal and commercial content that doesn't appeal to us is more or less the culmination of the dream. The world has been liberated (at least in part) and connected. Let's please at least take a moment to appreciate what's…

> Let's please at least take a moment to appreciate what's been gained for humanity as a whole The ability to interact faster? It’s a big wash: positive and negative. It’s hard to see the internet as objectively good for humanity.

It's a lot more than the ability to interact faster.

Prior to the internet, the paradigms for mass communication were the telephone and paper mail. Either slow, or expensive, over long distances. Mass media was entirely centralized and corporate owned, and information meant finding physical references at a library.

Now, mass communication is nearly instantaneous and multi-paradigm (text, images, video, documents, whatever) and pretty much free, or at least no longer priced as a function of distance. My Australian in-laws Skype almost daily with my family, something which would have been, at least, prohibitively expensive before the internet, and wouldn't have involved video at all.

Mass media is dying out to web content. Instead of subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, and whatever is on television, we have literally more content than is possible to read, watch and listen to, on every conceivable topic, professional, amateur and archival. And thanks to the internet, media is no longer tied to physicality. You can watch movies without a DVD, play games without a cartridge, etc.

I would argue that the internet has been more revolutionary in terms of the way the common person accesses and harnesses information than the printing press. The mere fact that an ordinary person can publish to the web, as opposed to, say, printing out flyers or a zine or being lucky enough to write for a mass-print publication, has been transformative.

I don't really see that as a "wash." There have been some negative effects, and damage to privacy and personal liberty (as one could argue there are with any form of mass communication) but I struggle to think how the negatives would equal, much less exceed, the positives.

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

#316

Post by zafiro17 »

noyesno wrote: post #189
dchuk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve actually been thinking about this recently, as I was also a heavy forum user back in the day. Why don’t we just start a forum for the HN crowd? Not a new interpretation of the forum model or anything like that, literally any instance of vbulletin or phpbb or something comparable and “traditional”. If people are genuinely interested in this, I would be up for spinning something up over the weekend.

How about creating an Usenet newsgroup for HN?

In a way, it exists: visit comp.misc where a small group of devoted usenet fans discuss HN-type things, and where a fair number of HN stories have been linked and discussed. Visit misc.news.internet.discuss for non-computer tech discussion (and some fluff), and visit sci.misc for science articles and discussion. Among those three newsgroups you have the sum total of HN and Slashdot, and a nice crowd of Usenetters.

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

#317

Post by Izkata »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #237
apatters wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely changed and it happened slowly so we didn't notice at first. In the 90s and the early aughts the social fabric of the Internet was comprised of a number of small communities, each of which had a distinct membership and culture. By the 2010's the big players had come along and supplanted these Internet communities. Facebook talks all the time about its "community" but it's more like a theme park which…

> All the big social networks employ this model of throwing everyone into the same arena but humans aren't wired to feel at home in that environment, so we get all these weird side effects like social media causing depression, loneliness, and the angst expressed by this writer. That is an amazingly good point - its very easy to be lost and lonely in a crowd.

Mayhaps not perfectly applicable, but your last line reminded me of this:

> Sheridan: Once during the war, my fighter was disabled. I sat there, radio out, power out, for eight hours, which seemed like eight years. I didn't think I'd ever see another living being. Well, I was rescued, obviously, but.. I'll never forget that.. feeling of helplessness. I, I never thought there could be anything worse than being all alone in the night.

> Delenn: But there is. Being all alone in a crowd. You feel cut off from your people, from your government. You even begin to doubt yourself. I understand it so well, that it cuts to my heart.

-Babylon 5 2x14, There All the Honor Lies, 1995

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

#320

Post by slagfart »

twic wrote: post #239
frio wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a thing that's bugged me for a long time: the death of dedicated game servers. Game servers had to be run by communities, and they were gateways and feeding grounds for those communities. However, games don't typically use dedicated servers anymore; they use matchmaking. You're right -- matchmaking means you gather your friends first. More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again, a…

I miss this so much . I used to play TF2 on a server that ran a single, somewhat obscure, map. Lots of randoms would drop by to try the map; some would stay and become regulars, some wouldn't. I did. The same regulars would be there every week, many of them every day. Some players were good, some not so good, nobody took it too seriously - we tried hard, but nobody got salty. There was the odd feud, but no griefing.…

I used to run a TF2 server that ran some stupid hack I found that played shitty music nonstop (GBS.fm) through a widget that loaded on the welcome screen. Lots of people hated it, but everyone kept coming back for how fun the vibe was.

So fun. I miss it too.

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