Internet is now TV.
I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
71–80 of 340 posts
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#72I think a lot of people here are missing the point. Yeah, there's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel like a community... it feels more like watching reruns on TBS. I remember making actual friends on message boards. Friends I eventually met in the real world. I don't think relationships like that are really formed anymore. Most of social media now is a broadcast, not a conversation. People (m…
This is pretty much how I felt as a long-time TF2 player super excited for Overwatch to come out, and then very sad once I realized what kind of game it was. You grab your friends and play Overwatch, while you play TF2 and meet your friends. And also a parallel, TF2 obviously still exists, but all of the servers I used to play on are gone now. Haven’t found anything else quite yet. FFXIV actually was super enjoyable…
The smallness and novelty of the internet made it more of a community. If you played TF2 in 2008, I would say the interests of each player is more homogenous and compatible compared to Overwatch in 2018.
I think this is one factor at play. The other is the shift from desktop to mobile, from community participation to content creation or consumption - almost mutually exclusive.
Finally, deprioritization of the identity (Reddit, Hacker News, many forums, even Medium to some extent) doesn't help either.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#73I think the internet is less fun now -- I can't decide if its from maturation of technology or maturation of people though. (Has anyone else felt like things became less fun as they got older?) I felt a greater sense of community 10 years ago when I mostly used IRC and PHP BBs. The communities were smaller, and it was fun even if you disliked people. Flame wars and trolling were mostly for the audience's amusement, b…
I often fondly look back at my initial online gaming memories, where games like Runescape and the early Halo series offered a huge online community feel. As Runescape/Halo series developed and time went on the feelings of the games changed, and people in Runescape were more focused on efficient Exp gaining or competitive playing in Halo. I have yet to experience the same kind of online communities that were present on online gaming in 2006ish
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#74There's definitely something about forums that can't be found in social networks. I don't know what that is, but I know it's very unlikely that I'll have as much fun as in those days. Not sure if it's because I was a teenager back then and perceived the internet differently, but nowadays everything looks way too "serious".
Forums are pseudonymous. You could be yourself, or express a part of your identity, without it following around the rest of you on the internet. They're also more homogenous and focused in terms of their users than a big social network with their giant node graph.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#75I think a lot of people here are missing the point. Yeah, there's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel like a community... it feels more like watching reruns on TBS. I remember making actual friends on message boards. Friends I eventually met in the real world. I don't think relationships like that are really formed anymore. Most of social media now is a broadcast, not a conversation. People (m…
I suggest reddit, there are enough weird ones hiding here or there
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#76I've often wondered what happened to those hours spent trawling for interesting stuff on the web. I spend more time than is probably healthy on YouTube now, but that's just a second TV via iPad while the wife watches shows on Netflix. I think that it was the newness of the experience back then. Nascent technology is always more fun, as are novel experiences. Now, the net permeates our lives. We work on it, we play on it, we order things for our lives on it, we book our entertainment on it, and we carry it around in our pockets. You're no longer part of a community of people learning things and sharing newness. You're part of a collective engine of "doing things" that everyone is plugged into 24/7, where broadcast is fully enabled and the simple joy of just figuring what you're doing and where you're going on the Internet is gone.
Also, at 39, my opinion on on the state of the Internet is irrelevant. Damn kids. Back in our day, things were much better ;)
Edited to mention MUDs. I can't seem to find many these days. Still a thing?
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#77The author hasn't come across the decentralized web (ie scuttlebutt or dat). That's where I've found all the personalized interesting content.
Can you expand a bit more on this? How do you find content on these decentralized services?
Scuttlebutt is a gossip protocol, so you are essentially connected to content through friends of friends. I started by downloading Patchwork, one of SSB's clients, and going to local hackerspaces and following whomever was on the network. After that I could branch out and find other people that seemed interesting. After awhile you're pretty much connected to the whole ecosystem and you have to start pruning connections to keep the content at sane levels.
Dat and IPFS is similar in that you get Beaker Browser and then slowly start building up a community of people you know that create content for it.
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#78Earlier 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.
> Why don’t we just start a forum for the HN crowd? So HN doesn't count?
HN is quite different from forums because of the temporal nature of the content, the voting, and the threaded comments. Forums can foster very long running discussions, HN isn't really meant for that.
Also, there are all the components of user profiles/messaging/signatures/etc that HN completely omits (which is totally fine, but something forums are known for that HN probably will never have).
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is important to curate it, but I applaud the idea. I would say; only allow people with over a certain karma score on HN (>1000)? That way you benefit from the quite strict moderation here. But indeed I remember the days on vBulletin forums; all my remarks against ‘you cannot make friends over 30’ that I uttered here come from there: most my current friends and one of my best friends I met on forums. It jus…
Now it sounds more like an elitist club. Weren’t most of forums free for all?
most, but one of the best ("most influential on internet culture", maybe?) had a 10$ entry fee
Re: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m going to try and fire something up this week. I’ll do some research on software for it, I’m fine spending money on xenforo or vbulletin but it looks like there are quite a few options out there. I’ll announce it here when it’s ready!
I think it is important to curate it, but I applaud the idea. I would say; only allow people with over a certain karma score on HN (>1000)? That way you benefit from the quite strict moderation here. But indeed I remember the days on vBulletin forums; all my remarks against ‘you cannot make friends over 30’ that I uttered here come from there: most my current friends and one of my best friends I met on forums. It jus…
I think to kick things off it will be best to allow anyone to sign up and potentially lock it down in the future if things get out of hand. Usually forums have features like limiting new thread creation to users with enough karma/comments, so that can help a bit in keeping quality up.