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Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

jarredsumner.com

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Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#81

Post by kossTKR »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #70
kossTKR wrote: post #9

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…

>I wonder why it wasn't viable. Because for the most part, people making content would rather earn money for their content than not earn money. The silos of TikTok and Instagram and YouTube allow for sufficiently low transaction costs such that this market of advertisers interested in buying attention and content creators interested in buying money can exist. Maybe stumbleupon was too early, but the fact that the app…

An economic explanation makes sense. I wonder if a monetizable ecosystem could exists with longer form content in multiple forms, ie. multimedia, a word that has almost disappeared.

There is Patreon, Substack, Youtube and others that does work, the problem lies in the curation and personalisation that seems to have gone out the window replaced by algos and simple designs with bland and uninspired designs and concepts.

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#82

Post by marginalia_nu »

papito wrote: post #60
marginalia_nu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this rationale sounds true, but it doesn't actually align with my observations. Most of the web's noise content isn't low-effort comments, but low-effort commercial websites: Sometimes "tutorials" for extremely easy tasks padded with a bunch of superfluous instructions, sometimes freebooting other content, other times apparently AI-generated texts that seem legitimate at first glance but don't really make sense…

Yes, absolutely, but it's in the same vein. In the past, to create content you had to go through some things. I still remember being on the phone with Network Solutions for an hour to activate my first domain. They asked for my password... Over the phone.... Now content creation is easy and, yes, automated.

Scraping blogs for content to steal and training language models to produce legit-seeming blog posts is hardly low-entry stuff, surely?

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#84

Post by BbzzbB »

hbn wrote: post #78
kossTKR wrote: post #9

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…

Here's a site I like to link whenever this discussion comes up (not associated): https://wiby.me I love hopping in and hitting the "surprise me" every once in a while, and reading some obscure webpage written by an actual person with a passion for a subject. In the past I've seen a site dedicated to the soundtrack for a film series (I can't remember which), not even necessarily streaming the soundtrack or something,…

In a similar vein, I like Marginala's discover/site hopping mode. The little cards make it easier to get the vibe of more than one site at a time too.

https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#85

Post by notriddle »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #65
kossTKR wrote: post #9

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…

I doubt StumbleUpon would be able to take off in the same form today - it installed a browser toolbar, collected a profile of your interests, and collected your up/downvotes to fed them all to an opaque algorithm that took you to the next random page. Who knows where that data went. Could we come up with a privacy-preserving equivalent to stumbleupon today?

Firefox’s Pocket recommendations took a good approach. The browser downloads a big daily file with “potential recommendations”, then filters it at the client side.

The big downside was that, because it was turned on by default, a whole bunch of people who didn’t actually want it had it foisted upon them, so it got a very bad reputation right out the gate. Right algorithm, bad execution.

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#87

Post by BLKNSLVR »

The availability of fun and weird has redefined both fun and weird.

What's relatively tame and normal by today's standards would have been groundbreaking only a few years ago.

Desensitisation is the issue, not a dearth of fun and weird.

A guilty pleasure of mine are some of those klrdubs YouTube videos. My daughter launches a series of them at me every now and then, and whilst many of them are so-so, a few of them are absolutely spot-on genius. Fun, clever, and weird.

Maybe accessibility contributes towards this desensitisation too? At any time that level of genius is at our fingertips. We're spoilt by the accessibility of the top 0.01% creative talents of humanity.

Maybe we also actively avoid some of the fun and weird because we know we'll get caught in a productivity destroying rabbit hole of fun and weirdness?

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#89

Post by [deleted] »

vannevar wrote: post #29
winternett wrote: post #18

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…

This is yet anther transformer-driven bot, right?

[deleted]

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#90

Post by tb0ne »

javajosh wrote: post #74

God I hate articles like this. If you want to make a myspace clone, then make one. No-one is stopping you. The problem is that people didn't like MySpace. It looked like crap and giving people that level of control made them feel bad. Only a few fearless kids actually made the gloriously crappy content you admire. The other problem is that the Internet is well-settled terrain now, and users have many many options abo…

You make it seem like todays internet monopolies exist because of all the platform there are, they are the most well-designed ones, and they would simply be replaced if a better product came along.

I disagree with that, youtube for example is not the prevalent video platform today because it is better than its competitors. Youtube today is absolutely terrible.

But it does not get replaced, because it is the established platform, and using a competitor is suicide because your content will never get any traction.

So we are stuck with a horribly monopolized web, where the established websites can become very shitty, but you have to stay on them because everyone else is.

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