
I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore - minimaxir
http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-time-on-the-internet-anymore.html
======
gkoberger
I 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
(myself included) want upvotes, retweets and more followers. And now, real
identities are involved, so they have to be professional.

Back when I started using the internet, there were no "celebrities". At most,
there were community leaders, and their "reach" was within the same order of
magnitude of the rest of the community. And to be one of those leaders, you
needed to learn HTML and build a community the hard way. Nobody was trying to
get famous, get more likes, etc. They just talked and made stuff and shared
content and learned.

Sure, maybe it is just an age thing, and nothing has really changed. But I
don't know... I feel like the Internet used to be something special, and now
it feels like flipping through TV channels in your office break room.

~~~
y2bd
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 from
a community perspective, but I’m not super into MMOs.

~~~
frio
This is a thing that's bugged me for a long time: the death of dedicated game
servers. Game servers had to be run by communities, and they were gateways and
feeding grounds _for_ those communities.

However, games don't typically use dedicated servers anymore; they use
matchmaking. You're right -- matchmaking means you gather your friends first.
More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again, and
even if you did, there's nowhere to find them again later. There's no
community to join.

~~~
Ntrails
> More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again,
> and even if you did, there's nowhere to find them again later. There's no
> community to join.

This actually reflects a change I remember WoW making and finding really hard
to accept. They changed the rules for "find a dungeon" such that you didn't
match people on your own server. Which seems great - because now there's no
need to wait 10 mins for a group to accumulate! No spamming in regional chats
to see if anyone is interested. Brilliant non?

Except when you made groups with people on your own server, you bumped into
them again. You were probably a similar level/gear. You might add them as a
friend and then ping them for instances because they were competent
(especially if tank/healer). Heck, if they're in a guild maybe you think it'd
be a cool group of people to play with or vice versa you might try and add
them to your guild.

When every person you meet in game is a "single serving friend" there's no
point making an effort. People will treat those they play with as essentially
NPCs helping towards a quest because why wouldn't you?

I refuse to believe that it made people more engaged (considering the friends
I made were a good chunk of the motivation to keep playing)

~~~
sgt101
I quit WOW at about that time, I played from release, the golden days were TBC
&& WoTLK, but the rot set in when 40 mans were retired. Doing a 40 man and
getting the gear from a 40 man was a defining ambition of guilds, not many
guilds managed to set themselves up to do regular 40 man runs and you had to
ladder up the 40 man content when you did - molten core and on and up. This
pressure and ambition drove really strong social behaviour; act up and you'd
be kicked, and that's your chance of the end game gone. Tolerate idiots in the
guild and risk a split or a leak of defectors. The problem was that the
spreadsheets at Blizzard showed that only about 5% of the players were getting
to experience the end game. So... they went to 25 man, then they opened 25 man
to pickup queues and the drivers for pve guilds faded.

~~~
mathgeek
I readily agree that old school WoW was much more social and fun, but
personally, most of the enjoyment of the game for me was only possible because
I was a 20-something with no spouse, no kids, and no real responsibilities
outside of showing up to work during the day.

Now that I'm a practicing Adult®, I still kinda dream of WoW Classic being
what we all remember the original game being, but I also know that if I got
that involved in planning and running raids now, people who rely on me to be
responsible would suffer. I'm content with being part of the 95% that don't
have that kind of free time to commit to planning before actually playing a
game.

~~~
sgt101
Yes - there's no going back, life changes! It's like Rugby.

I used to enjoy Rugby, but I was 17, if I played Rugby now I would enjoy it.
But I am glad it's available for 17 year olds who want a go.

One thought though, my guild has actually re-awoken in the last few months.
I'm still on the mail list - as apparently was everyone else, and now people
are talking about doing instances and so on. I couldn't have done it until
recently, because I had small children - so as everybody knows, fugetaboutit.
But, if WOW was in TBC state with some interesting new content I'm pretty sure
I would jump in.

------
cityzen
I have been saying I've "reached the end of the internet" for awhile now. I am
44 and have been working on the web since mid 90s. I remember so much cool
stuff from then. Trying to get a 56k modem to work, dealing with the fact that
you couldn't always get online or if you did you could get kicked off at any
time. I remember streaming the Tibetan Freedom Concert with realplayer back in
'98\. The first mp3 i got, napster, rotten.com, the excitement of ordering
from amazon, searching for cracked passwords for photoshop and dreamweaver...
in general just figuring shit out. The internet was a mess back then and even
though it was frustrating as hell, it was exciting.

Now it just seems like every website online is trying to steal and sell your
data. I feel like I have to have a heightened sense of awareness around
anything I do. The internet used to be just barely within reach and now it's
just crammed down your throat all day long. Nothing seems to work and all for
the wrong reasons. Nothing worked back then but that was part of the
experience.... now it's just... blah.

I have fallen into a terrible habit of looking at reddit since I don't use any
social media. I read crap on r/politics before bed and end up being so
frustrated that I have a hard time falling asleep.

Recently I decided to check out a book from the library (House of Leaves, very
interesting so far!) and have been reading before bed and not looking at my
phone at all. I have been able to fall asleep much easier and I actually have
crazy dreams and wake up refreshed. For the first time in years I look forward
to going to bed.

Not sure what to make of all of it. Fortunately I have found lately that I'm
desiring more analog activities (reading, woodworking, hiking) than I have in
a long time. It is nice to be able to use the internet as more of a tool to
augment my activities rather than being THE activity.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" Now it just seems like every website online is trying to steal and sell
your data."_

I remember the days before the Morris Worm, the days before we were all
drowning in malware, before you had to worry about your bank account being
hacked in to, before your personal data stood a good chance of being leaked,
stolen, or held for ransom, before the corporate/government gold rush for
profit, spying, and control. Spam and the occasional troll seemed to be about
the worst one could encounter back then.

Maybe I'm just remembering the past through rose-colored nostalgia glasses,
but it seemed back in those days the internet was a mostly positive place --
or at least not a hostile one where you had to constantly watch your back and
pretend to be who you weren't lest records of your past come back to haunt
you.

Overnight popularity was the best thing and the worst thing to happen the
internet. Perhaps if its growth wasn't so explosive, maybe we could have had
time to deal with all the crap.

Back in those days we used to laugh at how clueless the corporations and
governments were about the net, about how they'd never be able to control it.
Well, now they've got us all by the balls.

Who's laughing now?

~~~
mturmon
Nice comment. I’m thinking that some technologies, if handled carelessly ——
and we have been nothing if not careless —— merely recapitulate existing power
structures.

~~~
spc476
Or that existing power structures figure out how to co-opt technology. Seems
to take about 20 years (telegraphs, telephones, radio, television, cars,
computers ... )

------
foolofatom
I 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,
because even if you really disliked each other you had nowhere else to go
aside from quitting entirely. Nowadays there are so many options that people
don't really commit to communities anymore.

I'm glad this thread was posted. It'll be interesting to read people's
thoughts.

~~~
dchuk
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.

~~~
dchuk
Update: Spent the evening researching software options for the "old school"
style forums, and it seems like Xenforo is a solid choice in terms of active
development, lots of addons/themes, and not crazy expensive. So I think I'll
snag a license and put it on a droplet later this week when my wife is out for
the evening :)

Also think I found a good domain for it that I'll snag tonight as well.

~~~
thirdsun
What's wrong with Discourse? It seems to be a popular choice.

Here are some more ideas: [https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-
selfhosted#social-networ...](https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-
selfhosted#social-networks-and-forums)

Flarum looks like a worthwhile option:
[http://flarum.org/](http://flarum.org/)

~~~
KajMagnus
I like Discourse too. (better than all the others mentioned so far)

There's also Talkyard. It's a bit like Discourse, and has Slack chat features
(maybe nice with informal chat channels?) and StackOverflow like Q&A topics.
I'm developing it. Open source & beta.
[https://www.talkyard.io/forum/](https://www.talkyard.io/forum/)

------
peterwwillis
He's just old. Go to Tumblr, Facebook groups, Instagram. There's thousands of
places to waste your time with vapid, unyielding streams of barely
entertaining content. I recently spent hours going through bad geography
memes. Geography. Memes.

Or you could go old-school. Fark.com is still around, as is SomethingAwful.
Reddit has tons of content. And if you're not at work and looking for a
horrifying thrill ride, 4chan. IRC is just kind of depressing after you've
been away from it for a while... like, a decade later, these same people are
still sitting on these channels every day, all day? Then again, I'm still on
_this_ waste-of-time news feed...

~~~
silveroriole
“Go to Tumblr, Facebook groups, Instagram... Reddit... 4chan” All of those
have one thing in common to me, which is that they’re not meant for holding
conversations on. Facebook pretends to be but if you post more than a couple
of replies they get collapsed up. All those sites are “here’s a picture/video,
make a kneejerk response, move on.” Ok sure that’s optimised for timewasting -
I just want to see content, I don’t want to have to dig through text to get it
- but it’s boring, non-interactive, repetitive timewasting. I think we lost
some magic when you stopped being forced to deal with individuals in
chatrooms/forums/their own personal sites in order to see stuff, even though
it was also really inconvenient.

~~~
viridian
4chan is nothing but conversations. They can span 7 minutes or 7 months
depending on the board and the topic, but they otherwise work exactly like
forums where the order is determined by post bumping. Try hanging out around a
slower board like /lit/ and you'll notice they are essentially forums.

------
fuball63
I'm getting weary reading the constant lament of the "internet" as a massive
entity. These articles take the same form:

\- "ugh social media is terrible, remember forums"

\- "aren't rss feeds great"

\- "remember when sites were HTML based"

\- "back in my day the internet was just me and a few cool people"

The internet is not a monolith. What people are complaining about is the
corporate internet; the parts of the internet that are owned by billion dollar
companies.

Here's the reality:

\- there are more interesting independent blogs now than there were pre-
Facebook/Twitter. Maybe less "per-capita" of total online usage, but there's
still a higher volume

\- every single person is capable of making an online community using cheap
tech, and using corporate social media to promote it; way easier than it was
in the past

\- developers are still "allowed" to make sites in plain HTML/CSS that look
great and load fast

Blockbuster movies are always bad, so people made indie films. Network TV
sitcoms are bad, so people made online series. Pop music is bad, so people
make great music and play in local bars and small venues. If you're tired of
the "internet being bad", its time to put the work in to find (or make!) what
you like, because it's all out there.

~~~
AstralStorm
Independent does not work at all because random websites are no longer
discoverable. In the old days of the internet discoverability was via word of
mouth, portals/aggregators or old "topic rings". You had bulletin boards as
well.

The original reason for e.g. Reddit to exist was to be an aggregator and
recommendation service. However it started handling discussions which it is
not equipped to deal with at all and then went downhill.

A similar aggregator is HN. Again, it is not equipped for discussion. Both are
curated by users which further lowers signal to noise ratio and causes
popularity contest plus short lifespan of valuable content.

Both are essentially RSS feeds with HTML/JS interface, comment and vote
functions.

Forum software is equipped for discussion but requires manual curation to
serve as an aggregator limiting volume. Likewise newer chat software.

Facebook and Twitter are inferior compared to forum software in almost all
cases. They are broadcast media with major limitations that are user curated.

Facebook main reason of existence is remembering and tracking people not
matchmaking or contact - it is not equipped for that well if at all - the chat
handles maybe a few people at most, comments under posts are a total mess.

Nobody really cares about volume. (Unless they sell ads.) Quality is what
matters and it really went down with user curated sites.

For social talk and matchmaking, you need a platform that allows discussion in
the long term. Neither Facebook nor Twitter help with it as a profile or a
post is not a topic.

The old chat survives alongside some bigger forims still, both IRC and newer
platforms like Slack, Discord, Twitch etc. These have a problem with
discoverability because they're rarely indexed.

The major differentiator is again "user curated" vs moderated; broadcast vs
chat.

------
abrookins
Nothing I've found on the internet has yet replaced the sublime excitement I
felt when dialing into a local BBS in a small town in California when I was a
kid.

There were maybe 4-5 people on at a time, but I still remember the total
thrill of chatting with them and imagining who they might be, where in town
they lived, what they looked like. Oh, and how much money I could make in
Tradewars that day.

My biggest question about this feeling of a long-lost treasure has always
been, am I just getting older? Is it just nostalgia for those first
experiences of connection through a network? Because if I liked local BBSes so
much, you'd think I'd like Facebook or Nextdoor ... but no, I strongly don't.
I can't even explain why I don't like them, but it certainly has something to
do with anonymity and imagination. In dial-up BBSes, MUDs, IRC, AIM, ICQ, and
Livejournal, I was always anonymous. I could be whoever I wanted to be,
express myself freely, make friends, and only then choose to reveal my
identity — to individuals. Today, so much of the internet is predicated on
establishing my identity as quickly as possible, and then profiling me --
tracking my behavior, building a chronology of my behavior, showing my
timeline, revealing what I liked or disliked, compiling that data, repackaging
it into a derivative, mining the derivative for value. It's so far beyond fun
that it's exhausting even to describe.

The one thing I am pretty sure about is that this feeling of "I used to do X,
it was so simple and fun, what happened?" can be more than just nostalgia.
That is, I felt this way about something else several years ago -- tabletop
role-playing games. I kept thinking, damn, the guys and I used to have so much
fun playing those games: face to face, low-tech, up all night with our D&D
sheets, laughing and drawing, etc. It seemed like simple nostalgia for
childhood, until I got together some grown-ups and ran some D&D games. And you
know what? Three years later, I’ve made some great friends, deepened existing
friendships, and had a blast.

So I wonder if, for me, what’s missing in my internet is that feeling of a
small community — and local, maybe? — with anonymity at its core. I’m not
really sure and more thought is needed.

~~~
slfnflctd
When Google did that 180 and went from recommending that people use anonymous
user names to attempting to require that they use real world identities,
that's when I knew a sea change was happening on the internet, for the worse.

Anyone who isn't using an anonymous handle on a regular basis somewhere is
missing out on an essential life experience. It's one of the few channels in
the world where we are all intrinsically equal - aside from text skills - and
can bypass surface judgments or historical baggage to just say what we're
actually thinking (or a lot closer to it). I think this is a healthy and even
necessary outlet for a lot of people.

------
ricardobeat
I miss GeoCities/Tripod, and the time where search engines would always return
new, quirky pages for whatever you searched for - no big media publishers or
professional bloggers. Lots of fan-built pages, or just people showcasing
their hobbies.

These days I find myself stuck in a loop of HN, BBC, Reddit, eventually
designernews or YouTube. The latter makes me feel trapped but is still mostly
valuable content, whereas reddit just feels like a massive time sink in the
worst sense.

~~~
krapp
>I miss GeoCities/Tripod, and the time where search engines would always
return new, quirky pages for whatever you searched for - no big media
publishers or professional bloggers. Lots of fan-built pages, or just people
showcasing their hobbies.

Thank Google and SEO for ruining that.

A lot of that old-school and personal content is still out there, (obviously
not on Geocities) though... but the process of discovering content on the web
has been ruthlessly optimized to favor content aggregators and corporate
sites, and as a result, a lot of communities have either moved to those
platforms or just go dark.

------
saboot
Has no one, the author or the comments, thought to ask their teenage kids how
to waste time on the internet? My younger brother seems to be able to do so
all day. I'm also stuck in the reddit/facebook/youtube loop but I have no idea
how to do snapchat/instagram, what youtube celebs are popular, or other things
I'm not even aware of. I remember learning about vine.co after it closed and
apparently that was a huge thing.

~~~
Double_a_92
> snapchat/instagram

Well first you look hot (or at least think you do), then you take
cute/hot/slutty pictures of you.

------
paxys
This entire thread makes me realize that what people are missing isn't the
internet but their own childhood.

~~~
duggan
Agreed; I guess many of us will have a blind spot when it comes to recognizing
our own minds aging, and our memories accreting into a golden history.

Seems to be a part of the human condition.

Time's arrow moves in one direction, the past cannot be reclaimed. The
challenge is to not become bitter about it.

~~~
ShorsHammer
It's a known cognitive bias

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection)

------
dcw303
Looking back over the last twenty years (yes I'm old, like a lot of the you in
this thread), user growth has been responsible for both the Internet's success
and its demise.

I like to to separate content from community, because they have different end
results. There's so much music, video, comics, games, ebooks, etc being
generated now that we are spoilt for choice. That's great for consumers and
not so much for creators, but that's another very large topic for a different
conversation. Let's just say that there's so much great stuff out there, and
the barriers to getting it are very low.

But that low barrier to entry is also what I think has made communities less
fun for me. Not for _everyone_ , but definitely for people who are a little
bit outcast, or who like to challenge the status quo. Kinda like the people
who are drawn to HN. Because online communities are so easy for anyone to
enter, conversations tend to congeal into "popular" points of view. Even when
those points of view are extremes epitomized by types like SJWs or alt-right,
they're still large collections of groupthink. And I find those conversations
boring. This has been well documented as the Eternal September phenomenon and
it has been happening long before I got onto the net in 1995.

The best fun I had in an online community in recent times was the forums and
then the slack channel that came out of the Starfighter CTP games from
'patio11 'tptacek & 'elptacek. It was announced here on HN, so the initial
exposure (in the scheme of the world) was low, and because everyone involved
had to have a common interest of hacking market order books and/or AVR
emulators, it turned out that I had quite a bit in common with the average
participant. Moreso that standard comment threads here, where it's very likely
I'll be arguing with some HN rando who is just looking to score karma so they
can shill their upcoming React e-book.

Good communities are still out there; what makes them good is that they are
hard to get into. We shouldn't give up on the Internet and consider it "done".
We should be casting wider nets to connect with people that we find
interesting.

------
Negative1
I too have experienced cyber-ennui, mindlessly half entering website addresses
into my navbar. Cn-enter. Ha-enter. Fa-enter. Eng-enter. What am I even
reading, I don't really care about the latest drone or how to optimize my
website using Lambda and API gateway, and yet, despite keeping my IDE open so
"there is no excuse", I just can't help but succumb to the mindless ether...

I've thought about this a bit and I feel like anything worth doing requires
hours of my concentration, which I don't usually have. Bite sized chunks of
knowledge 'productivity' feels like an accomplishment, or, at least serves as
a facsimile. The internet is, in some ways, like an artificial sweetener -- it
tastes sweet but never actually satisfies you.

------
scottmf
This is exactly how I've felt for the past few years. Besides Facebook, I
think a large part of it is not being quite as young and open to new things.

E.g. I'm under 30 but I never got into Youtube, I don't even know how to find
good content on it.

~~~
sho
There is an _astonishing_ amount of good content on youtube. In the last 3 or
so years it has blossomed into something of a renaissance and begun to grow
into what I always kind of hoped "citizen content" could be. To my mind it is
the most obviously beneficial of all of those "web 2.0" companies.

Do you like jet engines? Prepare to lose the rest of your day watching
AgentJayZ talking about his job repairing jet engines in such detail I'm
surprised his channel isn't a national security violation. Like teardowns of
tools and sardonic commentary? AvE. Electrical engineering discussions?
EEVBlog. Planes landing? Cargospotter. Interesting shit? Wendover/half as
interesting. Analysis of famous Roman battles? Historia Civilis. 2 hour long
videos of japanese train rides from the cabin? ato5kgyasetaito. I could go
on.. and on.. and on.

I suppose I am letting my tastes show a little here but to me the issue isn't
finding the content, it's knowing when to stop!

~~~
blhack
Love seeing another agentjayz fan here!

Want to spend hours watching somebody repair marine props and shafts on
machine tools? Keith Fenner does excellent, detailed repairs.

Regular car reviews makes incredible car reviews of mostly normal cars (this
_detailed_ review of the PT cruiser is amazing. Watch the WHOLE thing:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c))

Ben Krasnow (on applied science) is an intellectual and engineering treasure.
Watch anything he makes.

Youtube has for sure become one of my favorite websites. There is SO much good
content there.

~~~
sho
> Love seeing another agentjayz fan here!

Honestly his stuff just comes first to mind as "outstanding, fascinating
videos I would _never_ have seen without this platform." Say what you want
about Youtube but they sure have enabled an amazing flourishing of creativity
and sharing.

Will check out your others! RcR though... there really should be a warning.
That is some advanced cynicism. Don't get me wrong, I love them. But your link
is, how should I say, "the deep end"

~~~
sho
If you have 2 minutes to spare it will not be better used than by watching
this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIz3klPET3o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIz3klPET3o)

And if you can't find time in your life for 2 minutes of art.. I don't wanna
be ya

------
scandox
An attempt to summarize everything I'm reading in these comments:

The Internet used to be an escape from the real world. Now the Internet is the
real world.

------
cyberpip
I feel like this problem wouldn't be limited to a person's use of the internet
but would be an indicator of a person's lack of curiosity in general. The
internet, at its most fundamental level, is just information. Saying you don't
know how to "waste time" on the internet is like saying nothing interests you
anymore.

~~~
fardo
>I feel like this problem wouldn't be limited to a person's use of the
internet but would be an indicator of a person's lack of curiosity in general

I don't agree with that idea. When people say "The internet isn't fun
anymore", I don't think this generally is a change in the person so much as
fundamental changes in how the modern internet is experienced.

By analogy, if content on the internet is like a liquid flowing into a
container, then it's predictable that the liquid will ultimately match the
shape of its container. If you change the shape of that container, the
liquid's ultimate shape (and thus the way it is experienced) changes in a
predictable manner.

When people say the internet isn't fun anymore, this isn't a comment about
what's being poured, but the structure in which it's received and presented.

Say what you will about streams of "information": I believe if you switch a
man's wine glass with a dog dish, only a wino would say nothing has changed.

~~~
ergomarky
>I don't think this generally is a change in the person so much as fundamental
changes in how the modern internet is experienced.

It's not a change in the person, it's a shift in perspective due to boredom.
There was a podcast about boredom from freakonomics I believe, and a lot of
people (largely those 40+) simply don't view themselves as bored when all
signs paint a different picture. This is what is happening to a lot of people
(ITT), they are unaware of their boredom which feeds into a lack of curiosity,
and so they keep doing the same routines and feel somewhat claustrophobic.

They could very much break out of that routine, could look for new places to
visit, new sites to sink their fangs into, but they won't because routines are
very comfortable, and heck most of the top 100 alexa sites fulfill nearly
every desire.

When people say the internet isn't fun, it's not about presentation at all.
Yes, Google has a lot of power in where people go, but there are so many
alternative search engines and variety of leads that it really just takes one
good afternoon being the excited curious cat you were as a teen.

~~~
oblio
It's also amusing to portray the internet as being some small entity. It's
basically infinite at this point and it supports a million different
interests, way more than it did in the 90's. Back then the whole internet
population was in the millions and it was mostly geeks. Now it's in the _b_
illions and it covers everyone. So there's a ton of normies, but if you don't
like what they're going, there's still at least the same amount of geeks
available, probably more.

As you said, you just have to go looking for the weird and interesting places
:)

------
hitchhiker999
Great! We're all old here it seems (I'm 42), a few of us joined back in the
90s...

It started as a great human experiment, such fun. It became co-opted by
commercial enterprise. The two largest gateways into the experience are now
Google and Facebook. Really, what did we expect would happen? Probably best to
take it back now.

~~~
krapp
> Probably best to take it back now.

Why? The internet isn't for us, it shouldn't be a quirky clique only for the
technorati, it should to be for _everyone._

"Normal" using the internet for mainstream, banal and commercial content that
doesn't appeal to us is more or less the culmination of the dream. The world
has been liberated (at least in part) and connected.

Let's please at least take a moment to appreciate what's been gained for
humanity as a whole as we mourn the loss of our own cultural relevance in the
greater scheme.

~~~
drb91
> Let's please at least take a moment to appreciate what's been gained for
> humanity as a whole

The ability to interact faster? It’s a big wash: positive and negative.

It’s hard to see the internet as objectively good for humanity.

~~~
jcoffland
> It’s hard to see the internet as objectively good for humanity.

You could say the same about the automobile.

~~~
drb91
Definitely agree.

------
silveroriole
I think we’re missing out on the weird and the unique. Reddit/Twitter does
have massive streams of content, but they’re all pretty homogenous, and both
sites have their own pretty homogenous etiquette rules. Back then every site
was an amateur attempt with a bizarre design and a community of obsessive
weirdos because only obsessive weirdos were posting online, and posting
without learning the unspoken rules and celebrities of the community would get
you destroyed. Messing with the rules and winding up the ‘big name posters’
could be hilarious, because it actually affected the community.

Now ‘content’ is pretty much just memes. Memes are ‘weird’ but they’re
homogenised, structured weird. They (well, image macros - we didn’t have the
word meme then) were mostly banned on SA because they encouraged such crappy
low effort repetitive content. Now the timewasting internet is 99% that.

SA used to be amazing but over time they’ve banned or devalued more and more
of what I thought was worthwhile about the site (effortposts, obsessive
stalkers who would dig up incredible things about other posters, the
absolutely crap but bigname fiction posters, anyone who doesn’t talk like
they’re posting on Twitter) and now GBS is literally just discussing Reddit
content.

~~~
jcoffland
> Reddit/Twitter does have massive streams of content, but they’re all pretty
> homogenous

Reddit is anything but homogenous. It has many a dark and quirky corner.
Twitter on the other hand.

------
cylinder
This has been happening to me and I was just about to post an Ask HN about it.

I'm sure part of it has to do with me just being older but I'm going to the
same few sites over and over and there really is no magic to the internet
anymore. The 90s felt like you were part of a wild west frontier.

~~~
askafriend
What if the novelty of the internet just wore off for you?

Just like the novelty of flying in the sky in a metal cage propelled by giant
jet engines to far away lands has probably worn off.

Everything is magical, but even magic becomes mundane after a while.

Relevant:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8LaT5Iiwo4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8LaT5Iiwo4)

------
xnodeza
I'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?

~~~
bkul_
I got the impression that MUDs evolved into MMORPGs. But I have thought for a
while that a text-based MUD with a lot of modern polish might be a good idea.

------
Aliyekta
I used to have a plethora of offline materials on my pc to delve into, if the
internet was down or someone had to use the phone line; nowadays internet’s
been shoved down our throats in many aspects that once there’s a network
outage, the offline laptop seems useless, unfortunately for the wrong
reasons...

PS: I think we’re all trying to relive bulletin boards days here in the
comment section of HN.

------
carcrash
21 year old here, I also do not enjoy the internet these days as much as I
used to 5+ years ago. Everything seems dumbed down, which is a common trend
with just about everything these days.

I do not use social media, I browse one car related forum, and a Chan site. I
mostly lurk these sites and rarely have input, but that's more of a 'me'
issue.

The community feeling just isn't there anymore. We've done a complete 180 from
a few years back, my first online friends were from Xbox Live and I met these
people in Halo 3 lobbies. When I played WoW during Wrath I played on a very
low population server which annoyed me back in the day but I realise now that
the memories I have are because of the small community, same goes for the
private servers I played. All the friends I have now I have known for years or
met them through other friends.

Maybe I'm just barking up the wrong tree and I need to develop new skills,
hobbies, and find new friends.

------
strkek
There'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".

~~~
dannyw
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.

------
brain5ide
So summing up the distinct ideas on this topic: \- lacking of community feel
is a good point \- people being older and less excitable another great point
\- the late stage of S curve and early adopters being overwhelmed by the
scumbags is also good point \- the change to identity-first internet is also
interesting

Did I miss something? I also feel some structural misalignment of perception
vs. reality. The old adage is You can't trust anything on the internet but I
notice that even if I still conform to that, I somehow end up trusting the
internet as a whole - that together with the hive mind I would be able to
arrive at a conclusion. It's just not true anymore. I know it's false to
categorize internet as a singular entity, but I think that's what hapened on
the emotional-euristic-type-1 level of decisions and it needs to go. This may
be a derivative of earlier points, but may also be a whole separate point.

------
8bitsrule
_worse, the fun things they had supplanted were never coming back. Forums were
depopulated; blogs were shut down._

I get what he's saying. In the beginning the net opened the doors to self-
expression. Lots of people had fun playing around, exploring, lots of new
toys. Then conventions and concentrations arrived, and it BLEW UP. There's
still a lot of personal, fun stuff out there, but it's harder to find.

As of 2015, PER DAY: 50,000 new -Wordpress- websites; ~ 3 million new posts.
Good luck digging through THAT slush pile.
[https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/wordpress-
statistics...](https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/wordpress-statistics/)

I find new, interesting websites by pouring through aggregators and topical
forums (still out there). Takes time.

------
hprotagonist
I waste time on IRC. The old internet didn't exactly leave so much as it
retreated to its primordial media.

Fark, SA, and friends are still around. Slashdot is gutted.

------
hugh4life
I don't have this problem. My problem is that I'm so good at finding
interesting live internet drama and stories that I get extremely bored with
most fictional forms. The only fictional books and movies I have any desire to
consume are the books and movies I wish I had read or watched when I was much
younger.

------
bullen
I think media is moving from Movies and later TV Series (none are good since 1
year back) to now become MMOs. Just the MMOs we have are really bad still.
Follow the lineage of WoW, then PUBG; and extrapolate.

The internet will become MMOs; hell, life will become MMOs. MMOs are virtual
reality more than VR itself could be if it tried real hard (yes, I'm looking
at you Nevell).

Edit: Maybe streaming of MMOs is where the mass audience kicks in, though in
the long run everyone will jack in.

------
nanomonkey
The author hasn't come across the decentralized web (ie scuttlebutt or dat).
That's where I've found all the personalized interesting content.

~~~
slagfart
pls help me get online, nerd

Seriouspost: Agree with all that’s been said. Corporations have turned the web
into an unpalatable wasteland. The prospect of someone finding out my name and
job has taken all the joy out of calling someone a fuckhead online. I want to
find it again.

I will start searching, but the good communities I’ve found have been invite
only.

~~~
lancewiggs
Did your joy of calling someone else something bad remove the joy for everyone
else?

~~~
slagfart
In a small enough community, the Boy Who Cried Wolf remains a pertinent tale.

If you had the reputation as a decent and polite poster, the sudden use of a
vile cuss, judiciously applied, yielded far greater aggregate results than
someone who used them all the time. At the very least, you would save it for
someone who really did deserve it.

Perhaps the sanding off of the web’s edges is simply a product of its size.
Maybe we should go back to Usenet.

------
thallukrish
I feel you brought out the critical point very well. There is the internet
sucks the vacuum from our lives like FB, Twitter or blogs, News...while there
is a whole lot of utilitarian needs fulfilled on the other side...And, yes, I
have felt the same, the fun part has diminished except following News and
occasionally some brilliant links..

------
skbohra123
I think it's the age factor. No one makes friends in their 30s and no one is
excited to find new things as they get older. If you ask younger people, they
can tell you a 1000 ways to waste time on internet, be it instagram, snapchat
or other such apps which grown-ups don't even know about.

You are just getting older.

~~~
erikb
While we all love the same things that excited us earlier in our life we also
know what will disappoint us again. Even after 5 minutes I can tell a lot of
things that I won't like in a relationship. The other person is not a blank
white board anymore, because the other person is not so different from all the
other people I met before. The new stuff is also often just a reiteration of
something that has already been there, which means it's not new and not
exciting.

------
recluse00
This guy seems to have not spent any time on Youtube, Reddit, wikipedia etc.
It's easier than ever before to get trapped in curiosity vortexes of various
kinds.

~~~
InfiniteBeing
Yeah, it probably has been counter productive for me.

------
sreejithr
I'd like for millennials to comment on this.

~~~
kipchak
Mid 90s here, to me there's something to it. To me the shift became noticeable
around 2008, with it at least feeling like a good portion of my time online is
spent on a smaller number of less exciting sites. Perhaps I simply burnt out
early though.

On forums getting to know the groups members and it's in-jokes has the
advantage of giving interactions a sense of scale or place, in that you
roughly know who the people you're talking to are and have a degree of rapport
or common interests, while still being pseudonymous and the freedom that
brings is I think part of what made them appealing and special. Forums can
also become somewhat clique-ey and insular if new blood isn't rotated through,
or can die out if the topic is too narrow to keep them active.

More content stream based social media (Instagram, Facebook, Reddit for the
most part) has less of a focus around specific topics and discussing them and
more presenting content and reacting to it. This results in people both
tailoring what they make to generate hits, and interactions with other users
being rather fleeting if you're not already connected to them, as the pool of
people you're interacting with is often too large and unfocused to see those
people again.

I'd say there are some exceptions though, such as subreddits that stay in a
sweet spot of user numbers or Discord channels and Twitch channels for
example. Additionally 4Chan is somewhat of a blend of the content stream and a
forum system.

Part of the reason it's going this way is that the content stream approach is
better-suited to advertisement and appealing to larger audiences. In school a
surprising number of people would browse through the front page of Reddit
never going into subreddits or commenting for example. I would guess Lurkers
like that make up a good portion of users now, and I think advertisers and
site builders will tailor to them.

In general a slight shift from the internet being a space for collaboration
between people to a place for companies to sell things seems to have happened.
A small example is game maps, servers and skins going from being things people
made and shared with each other to something companies sell.

------
billybolton
I think the internet is much better than what it was before. Discord and
Telegram are just so much better than what we had when I was in high school.
4chan, reddit, Digg etc suck.

------
grub2
In the recent 5 years, there has been a renaissance of "cyberspace" as in the
early science fiction, the cyberpunk culture, and aesthetics and a nostalgia
of 1980s in general, as shown in vaporwave [0] arts and independent/DIY music.
In many works, the imagery of cyberspace was used heavily, and themes included
Usenet the Eternal September, Sci-Fi themed hacking and cracking, early BBS
and imageboard subculture, lots of memes, etc. And recently there is also an
upsurge of cyberpunk-related fictions, games (e.g. VA-11 HALL-A [1]), TV
series, etc.

The reason sure includes the economic recession and political failures of the
present days, but the death of the early Internet culture and the promises of
"cyberspace" being a cutting-edge, cool and fun place has failed in a future
that never comes, is definitely an important cause.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave)
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-11_HALL-A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-11_HALL-A)

------
two2two
If the internet were a bar that got boring, then you’d find a new bar.

Too bad there isn’t a new internet, separate from the old, to explore and
rebuild freely.

------
happycube
As a 42 year old, I read that article and think "thirtysomething old man yells
at cloud!" \- there are _tons_ of diversions out there of all sorts.

OTOH, I live out near Santa Barbara, and downtown SB is nowhere _near_ as good
as what it was before 2006 or so. It had Borders+B&N, good thrift stores, some
random shops, etc. Pretty much all of that's gone now.

------
jbluecreek
I also find myself lacking ideas for places to explore. I usually wastes time
like this:

\- Do I know of a youtube channel I like and want to watch: mps-youtube [1]

\- Do I want to get youtube content randomly/reddit-recommended: reddytt [2]

\- Do I just want some images and gifs, not whole videos: redditp [3]

\- Do I want to explore twitch, but do not know of a streamer I like: ryck [4]

[2] and [4] are my own tools for a more optimised time-wasting (I apologise if
self-plugging is considered bad behaviour).

[1] [https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube](https://github.com/mps-
youtube/mps-youtube)

[2]
[https://github.com/johanbluecreek/reddytt](https://github.com/johanbluecreek/reddytt)

[3]
[https://github.com/ubershmekel/redditp](https://github.com/ubershmekel/redditp)

[4] (early stages of development)
[https://github.com/johanbluecreek/ryck](https://github.com/johanbluecreek/ryck)

------
harperlee
Ironically, I think at least part of it is due to less amateur content, in
turn due to the dominance of mobile phones, that enable you to easily interact
casually and superficially with content, but create a myriad of minor, subtle
cues not to create content, just to consume it.

In a PC, in the "olden internet days" that the article misses, you _had_ to be
in front of the PC. It was an activity on itself. But creating content was
easier. You had a bigger screen, a slower connection, you saved funny memes in
a folder in the Desktop. When bored, in was mentally and physically easier to
alt-tab into amateurish internet than to get up to do something else. So lots
of people ended up losing time interactively, in front of a hundred keys
asking to be pressed.

Whereas today, most of the users interact through a mobile phone with one
thumb, on 5 minute intervals, in a micropause throughout the day (and possibly
even during a conversation). Small screen real estate, maxed out app, no hint
to alt-tab, painful to create content (you have to tap in onscreen keyboard
that eats up half of your screen, you have to add the second thumb and lean
over the minuscule screen, you have to go to another app to navigate a folder
to upload a meme, etc). Everything takes more effort, needs to be more
conscious. And when the user mostly consumes, the whole UX evolves towards
that, making it easier to consume and more difficult to create, in a viscious
cicle.

(I'm typing this on my mobile and it is a pain. I only see about 20 typed
words, even moving the cursor back to noher word is a minor pain, etc. I just
want to get it done, and I have already thought a couple of times whether it
makes more sense to kill the comment mid-redaction and keep on browsing HN)

Edit: and of course people keep using laptops an pcs, but the existence of
mobile phone users change the dynamics of every content community a lot.

------
abledon
Kids can see the f __*in cosmos on their phones these days. hookup with 20+
chicks with tinder before their 20th birthday. I tell ya, by the time the next
generation is 50 years old they wont want to live, the suicide rates will be
high, nothing to live for... seen it all done it all lol.

~~~
torstenvl
Hookups and stargazing apps are not the sum total of human existence. It makes
me deeply sad that anyone could even fathom having nothing to live for after
such a shallow facsimile of experiencing life. There are so many amazing
experiences in the world that even someone with no commitments and scads of
money could barely scratch the surface of they lived a hundred years.

------
kowdermeister
Let me help you with that:
[http://www.theuselessweb.com](http://www.theuselessweb.com)

If you ever find yourself staring at a blinking cursor, then lean back, close
your eyes and imagine something. Just something you enjoy doing.

Type it into Google, DDG or
[https://neocities.org/browse](https://neocities.org/browse)

Profit... well not exactly, but hours can easily fly by.

I'm more like this guy (
[http://littlefun.org/posts/Why_I_am_reading_about_advanced_n...](http://littlefun.org/posts/Why_I_am_reading_about_advanced_nuclear_theory)
), I guess we all have our problems :)

------
rrickardt
Maybe it is time to explore deep/dark web. It is more like nineties on the
Internet.

~~~
silveroriole
Funnily enough I recently watched a YouTube video of a guy exploring the “deep
web”. Went on for ages about how you need to use a VM and proxy and Tor
browser for your safety! ...and when he finally started, he was just going to
sites we would have considered the bog standard of shock sites in the 00s,
more tame than goatse. He even started from an aggregator site that listed all
of them conveniently for him. Deep!

------
heisnotanalien
I remember when I'd read genuinely thoughtful posts on Livejournal. There
would be no stupid memes, no instagram style selfies, no ad spam, just people
in my city or from across the world, reflecting on their life.

------
cyberferret
I can really identify with the author of the article. I used to be able to
successfully distract myself from 'real work' a lot years ago, but lately,
most of the internet is just plain boring to me, or even extremely hostile.

I used to hang around several guitar forums which took up a TON of time, but I
closed my account on all of them years ago when hostility and snarkiness
accelerated to dizzying highs. It just stopped being a fun hangout. Twitter
and most social media is now just a cesspool of antagonism. Most interesting
news articles are now behind paywalls or layered under a ton of ads.

The only thing that takes up some of my online time now is watching chess game
analytics on Youtube - but I NEVER scroll down to the comments on Youtube any
more because I value my sanity.

Other than that, I find that I spend those minutes between long
downloads/uploads or compile time actually turning around in my home office
and picking up a real guitar and playing for a few minutes. I am starting to
enjoy the offline tools around me nowadays far more than online distractions.

~~~
InfiniteBeing
THWAP

------
sunyatax
A friend sent this thread my way. Our team's spent the past two and a half
years designing a new breed of social media that is reintroducing authenticity
and genuine relationships back into how we communicate online. Our goal is to
transcend the unhealthy norms of existing platforms through intentional
design, distributed technology and a nonprofit approach. Feel free to check us
out here and hope to see you on the waitlist :) www.junto.love

------
ehonda
>What happened is that the internet stopped being something you went to in
order to separate from the real world — from your job and your work and your
obligations and responsibilities.

It seems we (or many of us) spend all our time on the internet, it no longer
feels like a place to escape reality. Even when you are away from your desk,
you are still connected to the internet through your phone. It doesn't have
the same wonder it used to.

------
iKlsR
Had a like experience and got a premium subscription to a manga service and
haven't looked back, every week I start a few new ones. These are often
surprisingly well written (of the last dozen or so, 4 of the authors had at
least a degree in some field and the knowledge showed in the writing). Might
not be everyone's thing but getting something interesting to read was the
solution for me.

------
pmlnr
I'm struggling to find genuinely fun content since the death of Flash. I truly
miss sites like z0r.de.

In general, I completely agree with the article.

------
doctorraags
God i miss bash.org

~~~
flyinghamster
It's still around, and lately there's actually new stuff on it.

------
Clubber
>And then, one day, I think in 2013, Twitter and Facebook were not really very
fun anymore.

For me, the internet stopped being fun after the Snowden revelations. Not only
did it stop being fun, it became subconsciously repulsive I think. This was
around that time.

------
hyperpallium
Internet is now TV.

------
peterburkimsher
My guilty pleasure is 9gag. It's blocked in the office (thankfully), so I
spend way too much time on it when I'm not at work. I used to read a lot of
webcomics (XKCD, Joy of Tech, Pon and Zi, QuestionableContent, Poorly Drawn
Lines, The Brads) and user-generated art (DeviantArt). 9gag lowered the
barriers to entry and made it easy for images to become viral. It's also now
transitioned into auto-playing videos instead of static pictures, which is
killing comics :(.

My boss asked me to watch the CS231n lectures and learn TensorFlow, but he
didn't give me a dataset. So I downloaded the history of the 9gag hot page,
over 60k images. I'm also interested in learning languages, and I find that
comics with dialogues are a great way to learn how to talk to people. I then
wrote my own image viewer to let me tag pictures as a comic/not comic.

So now I'm still wasting time looking at memes, but I can pass it off as
"productive" work, training a machine learning model to find dialogues for
language learning.

~~~
roboyoshi
That sounds awesome and now I want to know how it performs. Is the dialogue
like 2 teenagers communicating purely with memes? Also I'd love to get my
hands on those 60k images.

~~~
peterburkimsher
Right now I'm still just sorting out the comics (with dialogue) from memes
(without). If I transcribe them, I could build a chatbot like you describe.
I'd rather just hand them over to friends who could translate them.

HowardInterprets has translated some comics from Chinese to English, and when
one of those reached 9gag, I got my inspiration to use this with my tutor for
weekly Mandarin class.

[https://www.facebook.com/pg/Howardinterprets/photos](https://www.facebook.com/pg/Howardinterprets/photos)

Do you have a server that can receive 7.12 GB? I like Mega.nz but it makes
free users wait 5 hours after 2 GB. Make contact if you need the data; you
should be find my email address without much difficulty.

------
captainbland
"printed guitar tabs that would turn out to be wildly incorrect"

These still exist. Plus now you can load them into Tux Guitar to figure out
how incorrect they are without even bothering to learn them.

------
ducttape12
The internet used to be a place to communicate, now it's just a place to mine
attention for ads through click bait, poorly written articles.

------
Gootch
I think I might actually now know how rural folk perceive the big city...

------
el3ctron
twitter, facebook, instagram and whatsapp are destroying the good internet,
long life to sources with rss support!

------
FrankyHollywood
try this :)

[http://thecodinglove.com/](http://thecodinglove.com/)

------
susam
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is still around and that's one of the few places on
the Internet where I still see tightly knit communities with old Internet
buddies from the early 2000s. I am quite happy that IRC is less popular than
the world wide web. As a consequence of it being less popular, it has not
become riddled with ads, political influence, and addictive content popping up
every few minutes, like the web has become. Some IRC channels can be unusually
quiet with nothing more than phatic expressions exchanged occasionally for
days before any engaging conversation comes up. Yet these channels maintain a
tight sense of community.

Among some of the active channels I have found due to my interests, I find the
Freenode ##python and ##math to be very good quality channels. There is a
#not-math channel which is good fun. Then there is #not-not-math too. I have
been an operator of the ##algorithms channel for over 10 years now, and
although I participate rarely in this channel these days, the channel
continues to have good quality discussions by other operators and members of
the channel. By the way, my nick is "spal" on Freenode.

These days, there are web gateways to IRC, that make it easy to connect to IRC
networks without having to install a new client. For example, there is
[https://webchat.freenode.net/](https://webchat.freenode.net/) which is a
bland but decent interface to connect to the Freenode IRC network. Note that
the "unaffiliated" cloaks are not honoured while connecting via the web
gateway. Using a proper IRC client like WeeChat or HexChat provides a better
experience than the web gateway. Pidgin supports IRC too.

~~~
eswat
I’ve had this idea once or twice of developing an always-active IRC web client
to help the newer generation of users join networks and channels that they’d
most identify with. Mostly in an effort to get more people in these said
channels and keeping discussions flowing.

Given what a more accessible Internet has done in general, I’m not sure if the
IRC idea would be better or worse…

