The eternal September began long before any of the things this post is eulogizing came into existence, things which I also remember fondly. There's still room for creation.
The fun has been optimized out of the Internet
41–50 of 291 posts
Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet
#42Another predictable anti-AI rant.
Maybe it is time for an internet divorce. Permanently cut it in half between those who are ok with AI and those who are not. If it were up to me, I'd never want to hear from the latter group again.
Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet
#43the fun is still there, it's just harder to find because of all the shit burying it
The juice may not be worth the squeeze when there isn't much reward for finding the single golden kernel that has somehow survived the enshittification.
Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet
#44"The Medium Is The Message" - Marshall McLuhan
People aren't nihilist - social media is.
People aren't shallow - dating apps are.
The world isn't shit - late capital is.
But of course, people are also nihilist, shallow and shit; and those same people are hopeful, complex, patient, kind and loving - but the internet rarely brings those stories to you.
Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet
#45I think this is more a consumption problem.
Step 1: Avoid algorithmic feeds of content.
Step 2: Avoid services that tend to collect, highlight, or exhibit AI slop.
Step 3: Read more books.
Step 4: Create more things and then share them on the Internet. This step directly addresses your concerns.
Rephrased: If you're not creating things and sharing it on the Internet, you are part of the problem.
PS: There are a small but healthy collections of RSS feeds with actual humans writing. Discover them at places like:
Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet
#46> 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.
I think there is a difference between "Eternal Summer" (when everyone got full-time internet in their homes which meant more people around), and "corporate capture" (everything on the internet is corporate interest first, end stage capitalism).
Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet
#47> 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.
It’s not like music. The [internet is becoming more commercial and more sloppy over time. It makes sense that people will miss the time they experienced where it was less shitty. This trend has been happening since at least the 80s.
Music becoming more commercial is a widely held complaint. It’s also mostly all the same chord progression so you could say sloppy as well
Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet
#48It's not just the internet, it's digital everything. No more wonder left. Everything that is profitable has been sucked up by oligarchs. Everything that is fun has been done to death. Everything communal gets flooded by assholes or gate-kept by insufferable control freaks.
Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's approaching near impossible. The amount of articles posted to hn that are near AI slop is so high it's almost not worth using anymore.
I mostly hang out in small online communities that essentially become tightly curated by people I am interested in interacting with.
Most of those got absorbed by reddit for me. Reddit has some awesome characteristics. But over the past two years it's becoming more and more bots. You used to be able to make a reddit account without an email, now you can't for obvious reasons.
Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet
#50Yeah definitely feeling it. There are still some nice corners left though.
Fair bit of quality yt channels, some corners of reddit, hn, some niche forums.
Reddit is coming to the end of it's shelf life though. AI creeping in, people peddling things covertly dressed up as organic content...the signal/noise ratio is dropping.
yt still seems ok, though I'm getting a lot of doom & gloom videos lately. Unsure whether that's just my feed that shifted or the platform as a whole. e.g. I watch a lot of economics/geopolitics so lately seeing videos like "why norway/belgium/germany is in trouble"