Ask HN: Has anyone else just gotten bored of the Internet?
I don't know whether it's age, faster connection speeds, or work. But I just don't feel like the internet is exciting and interesting anymore. Maybe it's social media as a whole that bores me, but even blogs and websites seem full of useless information to me now, and playing games or watching silly videos just doesn't excite me anymore.
I ask this question here on HN, but I suspect that people who are bored with the internet may not be on the internet to share their opinion anyway. That said, HN community has been very diverse, and maybe you are in my stage where you're bored with the internet, yet you lurk on HN still, in which case, I'd appreciate your 2 cents on the causes of this.
Honestly, I'm also a bit worried that this might indicate an unknown depression. I'm 28 and shouldn't feel like this now.
44 comments
[ 0.14 ms ] story [ 89.1 ms ] threadAlso, you should probably limit the time you spend randomly browsing for the internet. It is just like TV or video-game: this makes your brain tired in a strange 'addictive boredom' if you are half-passive in front of it for too long.
I wonder if we will see a rebirth of self-platforming and curation through bootstrapped means.
That is one area I am looking at seriously these days.
What if people could run their own search engines?
It's a means to an end, not the end in itself.
Maybe wrong expectation? Why should the “internet” be exciting?
I am on the internet +20years. And I only spend ~40min om two websites a day. (Hackernews included). The rest of the time I spent building the “internet” (personal websites and solutions).
The internet should/could be an extension of the exciting things you do. Not the other way around if you ask me. The internet is boring, it is a tool.
(1) In the beginning, the first result was the official API docs.
(2) Then stackoverflow became the crucial crutch and soared into the results, but the official docs would still be on the first page.
(3) Now you get a random mixture of superficial incomplete 1-page clickbait pseudo-tutorials, apparently written by a bot, or someone trying to learn the language, which do not answer your question. The official API docs can be hard to find.
From experience, at some point many went from say 10-20 spam for every 1 comment with every 10th comment really being worth something to something like 200 spam for 1 comment and nothing really worth reading. Writing good comments use to be a viable method to advertise your own website. The link sat under your username and the content you commented on was related to your own site. If the comment was good enough people would naturally look for more of your writings.
Then came the "comments are spam" paradigm and it all went down hill from there.
But on the up side, the fast rate of change does mean it can be something entirely different tomorrow. All it takes is one or more good ideas.
(I just had one: turn downloaded yt videos into torrents and use the yt url to find the magnet. Independent users can download build and revive the same torrents)
The Internet may have told you everything.
For you, the Internet is complete, as in The Nine Billion Names of God complete. Time for you to wait for the stars to wink out, one by one.
Or maybe you are full of whatever the Internet has given you and can’t take in anymore. Step away from the device and take a break. Talk to someone IRL and...
If you have time to chatter, read books.
If you have time to read, walk into mountain, desert and ocean.
If you have time to walk, sing songs and dance.
If you have time to dance, sit quietly, you happy lucky idiot.
(Nanak Sakaki)
I think the internet tells me things that are profitable to those telling me those things. And it is caught up in the loop of things like ad dollars, lifestyle biz etc.
That is why it is boring. If people created stuff based on passion instead of profit, it would become interesting again
For a few years now whenever I come up with an idea about new software project I find someone already did it and shared on public Git repo. Internet is definitely saturating.
I miss my 90s unplugged days with Turbo Pascal and programming books.
Am I getting fed up that it's an uphill battle supposedly with no end in sight? Slowly. But bored? Nope.
The Internet is the real Buddha of the 21st Century.
A perfect detached sovereign apparatus.
Unmoving, it rests on a billion routers and servers. Purest actuality and purest potentiality.
It is the embodiment of cosmic knowledge, and the human share in these,
The highest accomplishment of the human race, and the distraction from its ultimate happiness.
The triumph of technical rationality and its dissolution into chaos, frivolity and despair.
Its repose and its irony are endless.
It is the same to the Internet how it fulfills its mission, whether sitting idle or curing cancer or spreading an influencer video.
For it, the change of conditioned states does not count.
As with a Buddha, all there is to say is said by its mere existence.
The Internet is not a bit more evil than reality, and not a hair more destructive than we are.
The Internet is already completely incarnate, while we in comparison are still divided.
In the face of such an instrument, great listening is called for.
For have you actually ever listened to the Internet? The whirring of a billion fans, the ethereal hum of its photons and electrons? Fallen asleep to the gentle shush of packets making their appointed rounds? You’ll wake up a different person...
But perhaps your ear is deaf to the cosmic moan of the Universe straining to observe and understand itself through the Internet.
Then realize the Internet requires from us neither struggle nor resignation but the experience of ourselves.
We are the Internet.
Including me.
How dare you call me boring...
[this is a parody-ish paraphrase of a passage “the atomic bomb is the real Buddha of the West.” I remember it having been in a German book written in the 1960s, but by whom I cannot say. It was in a collection of quotations “Sunbeams” by Sy Safransky, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley 1990.]
Used to be, everyday there was at least 5 or more interesting stories that just got me excited about something new to try or learn.
Now, I’ve become so complacent with relying on sources like HN that I can’t find things on my own anymore.
Google does suck now. It’s mostly marketing.
Websites like Lifehacker used have fun information, now it just “hey buy this deal” shit.
Reddit sucks. I don’t find that fun at all, I miss digg.com but that sucks now too.
The Internet used to be full of fun things like diggnation. Even MySpace was better than Facebook.
Ugh. All the shitty things have taken over.
When I was a kid, the first time I walked into a video store, it blew my mind. I spent every weekend for years binge-watching 3, 4, 5 rented movies. Now, I haven't actually watched a movie in years. I think that although there are new movies coming out, the patterns are fundamentally the same and so movies have gotten boring. After you've seen Apocalypse Now, Evil Dead, and Blade Runner, the Wire, Caddyshack, Oldboy, No Country, Night of the Living Dead, Y Tu Mama Tambien, and on-and-on-and-on, you've seen damn near most of the plot variations that can conceivably be constructed. So, new stuff just looks the same as the old stuff and it's not so exciting.
Same with the internet. I discovered 90% of what I still think is cool by the time I was 13. I picked the low-hanging fruit. So, now I'm at the point where I go deep on things. It's not sexy, but it is pretty rewarding. Used to think Magic-1 was awesome, well now Ben Eater's 8-bit-kit is half-assembled on a table in my living room. Used to think rock climbing was cool, but now I have to put in weekend after weekend at JTree moving over granite. Used to think Fravia was cool, well now it's time to construct my own web-crawlers. Used to think metalcasting and the Lindsay Catalog was fascinating, but now it's time to build actual internal combustion engines from scratch. Used to listen to the old Defcon DVDs on a pre-iPod mp3 player, but the time came to actually work through Erickson's AOE.
I think it's a natural evolution of life. When you're young you make a shallow pass and find what really resonates with you. When you get older, you spend more time digging down deep into those things and it's not as exciting as it once was, but there is a satisfaction from getting good at those things.
An alternate approach is to try viewing the internet through the lens of cannabis. I've had many nights in life where smoking some pot and watching YouTube has segued into a late-night coding session implementing something fun in Python that's been kicking around in the back of my head for a while. Pot has a way of helping you see things you've seen a million times in a completely new light. Some people love it, some people hate it. YMMV.
Most people seem to hit this point in life and just have kids to keep stuff interesting when things start to get boring. They take up a lot of time, teach you a lot of stuff, and suck up a ton of time.
I completely agree. I used to read only non fiction books. I have started reading fantasy fiction books a year or two ago and the thing that blew my mind is that these books have stories! Not the Nth variation of the same pattern that exists in every Hollywood movie but something I had never encountered before. I had given up on novelty years ago. That is really refreshing.
the internet has gone critical mass, and when that happens, things go to shit. think pop music.
also, the media and other corporations are to blame. information is basically free. so how do you make your information valuable? you flood the sources with shitty information. ex; Ramit Sethi: "i give 98% of my content away for free and i charge a lot for that 2%" [not picking on him, it's just the business model adopted by the internet.] also, go check out the super cuts of media outlets. compilations of the exact, basically word for word, reporting coming out of these places. talk about gigantically redundant production budgets...
social media is definitely a bore. since when did we ever want to hear the inner thoughts of billions of people? can't help but feel sorry for Professor Xavier.
the gems though... DO NOT TELL ANYONE ABOUT HACKER NEWS!
I used to complain a lot about the "here are the top X" so-called blog posts. But when you want information about a topic that you don't know anything about and for which you have absolutely no will to invest time in they are all you need to know.
Or take reddit. You want to learn about a topic. Go to its subreddit. Sort posts by top with timeframe = all time and after half an hour reading the top posts you know pretty much all you need to know about the topic (mundane topics obviously. Scientific topics excluded).
I could go on and on. It becomes hard to find a hidden gem on the internet becomes gems are not hidden anymore but exposed.
A huge percentage of the Internet is the same information, repeated over and over again. This is especially apparent on film websites; they call it aggregation but it’s really just a nicer way to say regurgitation.
https://medium.com/@tonyszhou/postmortem-1b338537fabc
I will simply say: you aren't alone and I don't think it indicates depression. The early Internet was immensely creative, mostly because no one cared. It was a free space for experimentation. In the past ±15 years, corporations and other larger entities have homogenized everything.
It's important to remember that we're still only in the very early stages of computer networking technology, a.k.a the Internet. Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440 and it took over 70 years for its first serious society-wide impact (The Reformation.) The Internet of 2050 isn't going to look anything like it does today.