
404 Page Not Found - kyledrake
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/404-page-not-found-wagner
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spats1990
I agree broadly and admire in particular the author's application of Frederic
Jameson, but feel I must speak in favour of the Facebook groups function,
which, yes, even though it exists on Facebook, seems to have allowed all kinds
of weird communities to spring up in a way they might not have otherwise. Like
the group "famtastic lomgbois amd where to fimd them", which is dedicated to
long things, and where 'n' is considered a banned glyph because it is short,
and 'm' is long (or as the members would say, LOMG). [Edit: what I mean is
that it's not all groups mocking boomers or digital nonnatives. The infamous
NUMTOTS is another example of a vibrant fb-only community, and it has a whole
series of spinoff groups for different subjects].

Regarding platforms in general, lately I have caught myself thinking of these
platforms (FB and the gram in particular) as essentially shopping malls: fine
if you follow the rules, maybe some pretty things to look at, but a bit
boring. Everybody knows it's more fun to do stuff in the mall that you aren't
really supposed to do, and those are usually the most interesting uses of
these platforms from an analytical standpoint. Like the person who has
obsessively collected all the leaked songs from a rapper's upcoming album,
scraping them off YouTube, then circumvented copyright strikes by hosting them
on Spotify as a "podcast", each 'episode' a song. Then no one who wants to
hear those leaks has to dig around for MP3s or sift through youtube uploads
that are often mislabelled as new releases so that the uploader can try to
increase views. The "podcast" gets taken down every week or so, but always
pops up again.

More "interesting" uses of these platforms: Groups dedicated to tracking the
locations of police DUI checkpoints, people selling drugs through Snapchat,
etc. Air traffic controller meme groups. People find previously unimagined
uses for even the most boring and soulsucky platforms.

~~~
einr
_but feel I must speak in favour of the Facebook groups function, which, yes,
even though it exists on Facebook, seems to have allowed all kinds of weird
communities to spring up in a way they might not have otherwise._

But they probably would have. If not on newsgroups or mailing lists or
webrings or forums, then on a hypothetical, less malicious social media
platform. Somewhere where the data could be preserved, sorted, filtered, and
indexed by search engines.

That there is interesting information on Facebook is an argument against it,
not for it, because Facebook is a prison for data and all its prisoners will
eventually be executed when the warden deems them no longer worthy of life.

~~~
spats1990
>If not on newsgroups or mailing lists or webrings or forums, then on a
hypothetical, less malicious social media platform.

this is the dream, of course. I totally agree. I suppose what I was trying to
express was that I think the specific boring ubiquity of FB is what caused
these groups to grow and flourish. I can imagine an urbanism group growing on
a phpbb board or community of blogs and eventually getting high-traffic and
powerful, with its own set of memes etc, but the hyperniche-ing of groups (the
lomgboi example) seems to be a feature of FB groups because it isn't something
most people would bother to take part in if it weren't already there, in the
mall. FWIW i consider reddit part of the mall too, because apart from the
weirdo small subreddits I find it alienating in a community sense, since I
literally grew up on phpbb boards with avatars and threads, where you were
able to recognise and come to know certain regular posters within a week or
two.

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iamaelephant
Stopped reading this article at the second popover. Why are so many web
authors so willing to compromise their writing with this nonsense?

~~~
C1sc0cat
I only got the one popover (which browser are you using?) and there are plenty
of sites with worse dark patterns.

~~~
mosselman
> there are plenty of sites with worse dark patterns

Great argument...

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bananatron
I also long for the ugly web (for the lack of a better term), and think about
it a lot. I often wonder how much of my ego and/or attachment for being an
individual is the foundation of this sentiment.

As a developer, I even see this echoing through the tech evolution of web
development (inaccessible SPAs which take 4 seconds to load and where you
can't effectively use tabs, a sea of popovers and overlays, etc.).

Surely, there will be niche places where this ideology remains (and those
communities will become stronger, as a result), but maybe the fact that the
ugly web is no longer the only web makes us early internet pioneers feel less
special.

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woofcat
Reading this made me feel really old.

>I’m a digital native, older than most.

>The first time I can remember logging on to the net was around 1998, when I
was five years old.

>the rise of Facebook in early high school, Instagram in late high school

I'd also consider myself a Digital Native, however I'm in my 30's.

~~~
mytailorisrich
I find it amusing that the author wrote an article about how they miss the
internet of the 90s while at the same time acknowledging that they were 5 in
1998...

~~~
mcnichol
Coming here literally to talk about this.

The youthfulness of the article is adorable albeit a little naieve.

Maybe we are getting old. I still feel like a kid and there are many
greybeards that were born of the digital revolution that are "older than
most."

~~~
dreamcompiler
It is funny how people think the Internet started in 1995. I was using the
Arpanet for email in 1980. And my colleagues had been using it for several
years at that time.

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bencollier49
I wonder whether this article will be indexed by search engines.

~~~
pmlnr
I has open graph metadata, works with cURL and is WordPress based. Why
wouldn't it be indexed?

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coleifer
Internet culture is always changing. A devoted core of people is doing
something cool, new people come in who are just there for the scene, finally
(in the cases discussed in the article) business interests co-opt it and it
becomes sterile. This is described in the article geeks, mops, and sociopaths,
if you're interested.

I liken fb to reality TV. Everyone can be a star. Like Warhol said.

Twitter is pushing some weird buttons. I think it attracts narcissists, and
gets people hooked-up on their own chemistry. I've always had a really low
opinion of twitter users.

Missing old shit is death. Just start making the things you care about or are
interested in.

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wyoh
It would have been more interesting without the constant injection of the
author's political opinion: capitalism bad, Marxism good, neoliberalism bad
(not to mention the gratuitous reference to the orange man)

~~~
cyborgx7
Making things sterile doesn't make them more interesting.

~~~
Double_a_92
Nor does embedding immature political statements in them though...

