
This isn't fun anymore (2017) - colinhb
http://www.therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/338-This-isnt-fun-anymore.html
======
bransonf
Can I just take a moment to say how much I appreciate Hacker News?

In an internet filled with advertising, tracking, toxicity and trolls, HN is a
relief.

The design is simple, fast and functional. The community does a tremendous job
of legislating itself. The content is incredibly valuable.

Hacker News reminds me of the internet I grew up loving, not the thing it has
become.

~~~
exergy
Yep.

Much as I rail against the overly pedantic nature of many, _many_ comments
here, this place is a veritable treasure trove compared to Reddit.

On Reddit, _every single fucking thread_ gets derailed by shitty puns,
basement-tier humour or a one-liner with all the nuance of a tweet. Doesn't
matter how sombre a topic, some dickhead is going to make an oh-so-clever quip
and legions of fellow dickheads will line up to suck his dick and upvote it to
the top.

Even when there are substantive comments, the replies to those comments rarely
make for useful reading.

"Take my upvote and fuck off"

"Nice"

"Mom's spaghetti"

"/r/Suicidebywords" on a comment about dick sizes

... and on and on

Not to mention the fact that Reddit's recent algorithms upvote the shittiest
content to the front page to begin with. I mean, /r/dankmemes? /r/memeeconomy?
/r/wholesome memes? Fuck outta here with that shit.

There are exceptions, of course. /r/financialindependence comes to mind. But
overall, it's become an out of control shitshow that I visit ever less
frequently.

So yeah, thank god for HN.

~~~
rimliu
Reddit is way more enjoyable than HN. On reddit you can have serious
discussions and you can have fun. HN is trying too hard to be serious. It may
be interesting, but rarely it is fun.

~~~
exergy
Couldn't disagree more. If I want fun, I'd watch some comedian on YouTube, way
higher quality. If I wanted serious discussion, Reddit has too much noise for
the signal that it does offer.

The Reddit of today is about posting the "funniest" screenshots from Twitter,
things like blackpeopletwitter, whitepeopletwitter, murderedbywords and so on.

~~~
krapp
>The Reddit of today is about posting the "funniest" screenshots from Twitter,
things like blackpeopletwitter, whitepeopletwitter, murderedbywords and so on.

It's easy to say that Reddit has no discussions of merit when only using
examples of subreddits which have no intent to have discussions of merit, and
focus primarily on memes and light-hearted content. But it's purposely
disingenuous to do so. That's usually what people seem to do.

But compare the quality of discussion between Hacker News and the programming
subreddits from which stories are usually reposted, or the heavily moderated
expert subs like /r/askahistorian, and see if HN really still stands head and
shoulders above the rest in terms of quality. In my experience, with the minor
exception that HN is allergic to any sort of humor, the experience is about
the same.

~~~
exergy
Yeah I know. People bring up r/science and the history subreddits all the
time. And you're right, they do stick to the topic. The trouble is that
they're both very siloed. If you don't like those topics all the time, you
have to go elsewhere. Hence my comment on signal to noise.

Totally agree about the no humour thing on HN though.

~~~
krapp
Hacker News tries to be siloed, it's just that the silo is vaguely defined and
subjective ("anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity.")

------
ncmncm
I have no experience with what this guy is talking about.

Maybe "They" are tracking me just as assiduously as him, and desperately
trying to get their ads projected onto my retinas, but I never see any online
ads at all. Hence, I never see targeted ads.

If I were ever to turn off UMatrix, I probably would be shocked. But why would
I do that?

So my main complaint about The Web These Days is that everything works badly,
when it works at all. Amazon search can never bring up what I want to buy,
even when I know it exactly. Ebay, likewise. Google cannot find anything that
might be vaguely connected to a Product they would rather I were searching for
instead.

Google Maps was going all to hell until recently, but appears to have
recovered, some, and arrested the slide.

~~~
Ill_ban_myself
There's one big difference here, I'd bet. Do you have children? Or a spouse?
Because as assiduously as you can corral your own content for pesky ads there
will be devices, services, and platforms that your children or your spouse use
that will leak into your life.

The day your child asks you why youtube keeps giving him ads for diabetes
medication and you have to face your still unresolved feelings about your
mother's death and explain that he'll probably one day have to have daily
injections and a few toes amputated and maybe deal with kidney failure is the
day you'll probably feel the same as the author of this article.

~~~
satyrnein
I pay YouTube not so I don't see ads, but so my kids don't see ads.

~~~
Ill_ban_myself
Family requires compromise and, like diplomacy, cannot effectively function
with unlimited transparency.

------
MrEldritch
> "If people like me can't be sure our home life won't leak onto the sidebars
> of corporate presentation, or the recommendations of software our kids are
> using, we'll stop using it entirely."

What a fucking joke. You and I both know there's no escape, here; we're
trapped here forever, and things will always only get worse and they will
never get better, and there isn't a god-damned thing we can do about it.

~~~
loopz
You can start improving and reap what you sow in your next incarnation.

------
joe_the_user
The web isn't as much fun in many ways but seeing the jacket I looked at four
years ago and rejected, appear over and over and over again since then,
actually gives me much more of a chuckle than today's grim headlines.

~~~
d-d
Email me your details.

I must set the jacket free.

~~~
symplee
[https://giphy.com/gifs/wgcm7vctFPlfO/html5](https://giphy.com/gifs/wgcm7vctFPlfO/html5)

[https://giphy.com/gifs/sMoT7sVhwBebC/html5](https://giphy.com/gifs/sMoT7sVhwBebC/html5)

------
s9w
The listening part is what is really the most mind-blowing. I routinely get
mobile ads about things I only talked about with others and never typed
anywhere. Google can deny as much as they want: They listen to every single
word

~~~
nineteen999
I run a microphone blocker on my phone for these purposes.

Before that I used to wonder whether they were listening in; or it were merely
coincidence and our brain just connects the dots where it shouldn't.

~~~
stallmanite
So did you notice an effect after blocking the microphone? Did the ads seeved
to you change as a result?

~~~
nineteen999
Not really. And I can't say that I have formed an opinion either way yet. It's
more of an experiment than anything else. I tend to not really browse much on
my mobile anyway.

------
d-d
The internet used to be a paradise of sorts. Sure, there was the occasional
troll, affiliate link or Viagra ad in your inbox; but that was the spice of
the 'net. Today it's all spice, no curry.

------
jimbob45
Y'all been to Newgrounds recently? It's still incredibly fresh and creative,
just like it was back in the day. In fact, you yourself can contribute to it
with tools that make it easier than ever!

I'm beginning to think people just never liked the old web to begin with
because they had to put real thought into contributing.

------
charlesism
I think of the Internet today as being in the “gathering” stage. All our data
is just being slurped up, hanging around on the servers of a few dozen
companies. It’s alarming, to be sure, but just you wait! A few years from now
- when computers are faster and storage is cheaper - we’ll enter the
“disseminating” stage.

That’s the stage we’ll enter as soon as an entire internet’s worth of content
becomes easily transferable.

That’s when all your private information from 2019 (your medical history,
gmail messages, bank details, your search and browsing and shopping history,
your private photos, etc) will leak to the public.

It’s just a question of time because any morsel of data only needs to leak
once to be henceforth online forever. It will be a complete nightmare.

------
axaxs
I used to dream of switching out roots and making a new internet, but that
seems like it'd never work. What about a TLD instead, with the simple tenent
that no advertising or tracking was allowed, ever? Doing so would get your
domain sinkholed. Something like that done right, with some free or ultra
cheap tier for honest users, I could see attracting users. And more users
maybe more companies would want to join in. I don't know, I'm just thinking
out loud. I share the sentiments of the author, and find the modern web gross.
Outside of maybe 4 or 5 websites(this one included), I don't use it much
anymore. And this isn't just an old man hating change, it's objectively much
different, and all worse.

~~~
drdaeman
> Doing so would get your domain sinkholed

Is there any party out there trusted to wield this much power to decide what's
"advertising" or "tracking"? Given that modern technology is all about running
programs on the Internet. And assuming this could grow into something big, and
won't just wither or die like myriad of networks that were out there.

.nojs/.nocookie TLDs could be a fun idea, though. Doesn't need any trusted
third party to govern, just a bit of browser vendors cooperation (so, a slim
chance).

~~~
t0astbread
Why nojs/nocookie? Advertisers will still find their ways and it'll cut off a
large chunk of legitimate developers.

~~~
drdaeman
Why not? The web of late '90s (as I remember it) worked just fine without
those. Ability to serve only documents but not programs, and inability to
persist any identifiers would mean that both website developers and visitors
would know that website cannot be disruptive, and would serve content (or
nothing of substance at all).

I expect that advertisers won't go there because it contradicts modern beliefs
in targeted advertising and how behavioral data obtained by tracking is worth
everything.

And it's virtually impossible to distinguish between paid-for "native"
advertising and honest product recommendation.

------
ThrowawayR2
While I don't disagree with the rant, I note that the latest post on this
gentleman's blog is today (December 10. 2019).

Not using the internet isn't a real option anymore.

~~~
yellowapple
There's a difference between publishing to the Web and consuming published
content on the Web. These complaints are about the state of the latter, as
effected by less-than-benign actors doing the former. One can do the former
without doing the latter (see also: Richard Stallman, who last I checked still
doesn't use a web browser of any sort, yet somehow still maintains his own
blog).

~~~
BlueTemplar
Huh, is there no FLOSS, Stallman-compatible browser?

~~~
krapp
There's no Stallman-compatible internet for him to use it on[0]. He goes
through great pains to avoid identifying himself by accessing the internet
directly, and to avoid interacting in any way with non-free content.

    
    
        "...I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, 
        aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. 
        I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a 
        program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) 
        that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. 
    
        Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see 
        the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, 
        then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, 
        which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation)."
    

[0][https://stallman.org/stallman-
computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)

~~~
BlueTemplar
Thanks, but this very quote names a browser that he uses?

~~~
krapp
Fair enough, he "uses" a web browser, for very limited definitions of use.

His beliefs about the inherently non-free nature of the web and his fears
about surveillance still make it infeasible for him to consume the web
directly, unless it's with someone else's browser.

~~~
BlueTemplar
I'm pretty much boycotting Facebook/Twitter(/Discord), and seriously thinking
about boycotting YouTube/Reddit - am I not using the Web (or the Internet -
those are not the same...) ?

------
proxybop
I need to get rid of my Alexa cuz I know it’s listening but it’s such a
convenient timer

~~~
boring_twenties
If simply switching things on/off on a timer is your killer feature, and not
the voice activation, you can just use the free Home Assistant software.

~~~
proxybop
I use my voice to set the timer :/ That's pretty much all me and the spouse
do...would get a HomePod but they're so expensive

------
baked_ziti
Don't use the web on your phone.

