41–50 of 283 posts
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…
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, that either gets disappeared from public view or becomes part of a longer video.
The real answer, in my opinion, is that current recommendation engines prioritize profit rather than quality or innovation. Or perhaps their evaluation metrics are so bad that their goal is misunderstood. Or perhaps those who stand to profit have become too adept at gaming algorithms (or human psychology e.g. lewd thumbnails) that they degrade results.
...or perhaps we all suffer from nostalgia and forget how terrible the results were of yesteryear.
Who knows, all I know is I feel disappointed in what the internet has become. Even this thread is really just an ad, hijacking our biases and climbing the HN ranks accordingly.
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…
most people are boring/normal by definition and the internet is now mainstream. The internet used to be filled with a pretty weird subset of the general population but now that is drowned out by the masses. The old school internet still exists to some degree but you are going to have to look harder to find where the weird people are at and most the people claiming they want the "weird" internet back would probably co…
That doesn't explain MySpace, though. Extremely mainstream/mass-oriented, but still fun and weird, while it lasted.
I think it's a wide-scale effect of everyone scrambling in trying to make Internet money to fund themselves through our current tough and uncertain times but finding out that a lot of the Web 3.0 stuff and the Gig economy was undercover "scammy A.F.". Many people do not have savings now because of crypto, stock manipulation, and NFT schemes... There is a lot of heavy stuff going on around the world right now, and man…
"Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?!?" Turns post into an advertisement
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.
One thing I love about the greater furry community is that a LOT of art gets aggregated to a certain site, which I am sure you are aware of, that puts high value on proper sourcing/tagging. (And still respects the wishes of the creators)
Maybe unrelated: Do you think furry commissions are so expensive because so many furries are wealthy, or do furries pursue wealth to pay for commissions?
We were children discovering a new world, all over again. It was full of wonder and magic.
Now - any idiot can whip out their phone and write anything they want, in a few seconds, and create "content". And THEN we all have to process that shit.
There 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.