I think that as the author notes, we have gone. And I think it’s because we grew up. We don’t have the spare time like we used to, which, inevitably means we don’t access same sites, depriving them of visitors and relevant revenue.
We’ve gone, but replacement never came. They got stuck on twitter, discord, tiktok, twitch, snapchat.
Websites are difficult to build for the average Joe. Having a personal website doesn’t seem to be cool anymore. The number of followers on platform xyz seems to be the thing today. Lets hope the trend dies out and personal websites become cool again.
It's like saying, I hope the new pop music trends that all the kids are listening to dies out, and 80s rock becomes cool again. It just isn't gonna happen.
A lot of people here are still thinking with a pre-internet mindset, where because pop culture was mediated by the distribution of physical media or broadcasts at specific times, awareness of certain genres of music and pop-cultural touchstones was strictly gatekept by time, and trends were distinctly linear and generational.
But now all of that is discoverable at the same time. "the kids these days" aren't limited to what's trendy now, and it isn't more difficult to find 80's music than it is the latest tik-tok. And faux-nostalgia (neostalgia?) seems to be a constant pop human culture (indeed, much of it is manufactured by the corporations that control pop culture.) There are whole genres of new music like vaporwave and aesthetic movements that incorporate (at least a vague idea of) the 80s. People watch old shows from the 80s and 90s on Youtube. They look back on a time they never participated in as if it were a golden age of low-tech simplicity.
Of course, the general rule is things become cool again after 20 years to now I guess that would be... the millennium?
As far as personal websites go, the biggest reason the aren't likely to make a comeback is simply that hand-coding HTML and running a webserver has no utility for most people. Even considering all of the negatives of social media and centralization (which, let's be honest, is the fault of many of the people now complaining that the web is no longer cool) the model of software as a service allows people to publish to the web far more easily.
And who knows? "the kids these days" are as aware of the dangers of social media as anyone, that's why they won't be caught dead on Facebook or Twitter, they're all on Discord now or wherever. Maybe personal websites will catch on too just because of retro nostalgia as well.
I just don't think the idea that we don't have spare time is true. People prove that they have time to spend ample amounts of time on the big social apps. The truth is that it is much easier to check out and scroll mindlessly for an hour or two, versus finding meaningful creations on the web.
Website is great if you want to publish a document. Collect information in one place. Most of the daily stuff is just human communication better served by forums, tweets, images, news, e-mails, chats, tik toks etc. These natively work better in apps or app like sites where the information comes and goes gets lost or never even gets discovered. If we worry about the information siloing up we should build communication web thats not owned by big corps. It’s like the open source side stopped building the protocol after web 1.0 was finished and left all the emergent use cases for start ups to solve.
I'm not sure it's true exactly - OSS had email as one type of messaging, and IRC as another. The problem is that email lacks instant-ness (and for a long time you couldn't send larger files as attachments), and IRC lacks, or lacked, rich functionality.
Messaging seems to just require more hardware, so the significance of whether the software is OSS or not is reduced.
I'd say IRC is a good example of one of the flaws of FOSS culture - the tendency to get cemented on the first working minimum viable solution, but then become too ossified to ever improve on it. IRC was great for its time, but it doesn't have remotely the minimum set of features the average person expected of a messenger solution 10 years ago. After the initial success of FOSS in chat protocols, almost all of the improvements came from commercial software, and it was too difficult to coordinate introduction of new features across all the implementations
And a lot of this is not even technical, but the cultural issue of scorning anyone asking for those features and claiming those use cases are just for teenagers. Real men just use plain ASCII and no multimedia apparently. Only after its lunch was soundly eaten did we finally get IRCv3, way too late, and still with little support. The reason a lot of younger developers are using Slack and Discord isn't because they're stupid kids, but because their requirements aren't met otherwise, and they're not going to constrain themselves to 90s tech out of stubbornness (to be clear I'm not accusing you of that attitude! I'm commenting on others I've seen many times over the years)
Eh, evolving a protocol is a difficult political issue.
In a business selling software, if you're willing to take some sales loss/mad customers, you can just say in software 2.0, you're going to protocol 2.0.
On the open web/OSS the rest of the world can tell you to screw off... or they can just not upgrade and your software that's a step ahead breaks. Then you also have commercial interests that shove FOSS/1.0 on some device and want to change users to upgrade the firmware so users stay on the old stuff forever.
Commercial software tended to get more features because the software was based on monopolies they had full control of.
I feel this, but likely because I am a software engineer and PC tinkerer from the '90's.
Everything that get's created, gets commercialized and swallowed up by whatever product roadmap that commercial entity has. The soul of the internet, from my point of view, can be simply stated as "connection."
Where do we go when we want to connect further and wider than our feet can take us? The internet. What is the point of connection? To share who we are through a wide variety of means: games, text, images, music, voice, etc.
The internet as a protocol supports that endeavor, but the layers that were built on top of the internet started swallowing up human attention. Now there are a few large leaders who have built application layers on top of the web, and that's where people go for their connection. This very website is one of them.
Recent developments with ActivityPub and mastodon are promising. Personally, I'd just like to find my way back to a universal protocol for connection. At the root of it, there's a need for infrastructure which will always cost money. I think that's the main hurdle that needs overcoming.
Not only has the content become fairly centralized, many of the sites that you might go to find things like...recipes, or guides, or direction on something...are absolutely littered with ads. It is no trivial task to scroll through these metaphorical garbage cans looking for that one tidbit of information that will help you, mobile especially. And to some degree, I get it. The incentives that got is to today are all pointed towards an ad based world, so part of me just laments the feeling of seeing more of these kinds of blogs.
You're missing the forest for the trees. I don't want to download a bunch of crap so that I can avoid seeing other crap. Eventually the providers will find a way around the crap I installed with more crap, you get the idea.
It is the world we live in, dominated by advertising at every nook and cranny that is disturbing.
In general, yes. But I've been using uBlock origin on my PC for years now and recently started using it on Firefox for Android as well (they support addons now) and I don't really recall any time where ads slipped through.
Of course excessive advertising and counter measures are always a cat and mouse game but this is once instance where I can blissfully ignore it as a user very easily.
So you don't like seeing ads, but don't want to use freely-available tools that will remove them from websites? Digital ads are the easiest ads to remove from one's life
recipes are the worst, I've resorted to just printing them out on physical paper, stapling them, and keeping the good ones in a manilla folder. lol it works surprisingly well actually, that folder is a very fast MRU cache or in reverse order an LRU cache.
I have been feeling this quite acutely for several years now, but it does seem like it’s been accelerating. In my head I’ve been blaming LLMs—appification was already driving content into silos, but the locks came out quickly this past year as the silos realized they were giving away very valuable data for free. I guess the sad part for me is that the internet mostly feels like a waste of time at this point—everything is designed and optimized to maximize “engagement” (ie monopolizing your attention) and that’s not well-aligned with being _useful_. Cookie banners, paywalls, spam—everywhere. Mobile sites are practically unusable—half page banner ad at the top, video ad auto playing underneath it, ad network drawer sliding up from the bottom, interstitial ads in the content itself, a popup over the page asking you to sign up for an account, a chat bot in the corner, and a “continue reading” fold mid page. It’s just…not fun anymore.
I wonder what it will be like in a few years. How much worse can it get? Will the web be a desolate wasteland with a few social media pages people "flee" to, while the more tech savvy will start using alternative platforms again, like Gemini, IRC, etc.?
In the worst case I could see content platforms start competing on those terms and a resulting winner-take-all consolidation to the point that “the internet” becomes synonymous with WinnerPlatform. (This has already happened to some degree with things like government offices making official announcements exclusively on closed platforms like X or Facebook.) There will always be nerds and hackers who have small personal sites, but the internet would be falling short of its potential if, for example, you needed a Facebook account to participate in government.
Yes. Although you can block a lot of stuff (I run a pi-hole and put my connection through it via a VPN when I'm on the road), the bigger issue is really the content itself is being warped by what you describe too. Take Threads, to which I've recently moved in preference to Xitter. It's quite clear that whether conscious or not, a large section of people on there are playing for followers, making stupid controversial statements to get attention because that's how things work now.
You should set your browser to always open pages in Reader View. Especially on mobile. If needed, you can easily turn it off for specific pages. This blocks all crap and leaves you with the text and images only.
Cookie banners aren't designed to optimize engagement, they're forced on websites by the EU.
Paywalls aren't designed to optimize engagement, they kill it! Paywalls slaughter almost all your traffic and kill social media virality dead, but they can still work out better than trying to fight ad blocking.
Spam, well, most spam is short. They want to get your attention and bring you to their shop. It's not really about doomscrolling from there on.
So if you're complaining about both ads and paywalls then really you just want content made by volunteers for free. But as Wikipedia has shown, that can work great for a short time until the normies get exhausted and move on, leaving behind the truly crazy fanatics to stay in charge. It's not necessarily better.
Obviously an imperfect analogy - but the article reminded me of an older acquaintance, describing how the world he lived in became so shriveled and monotonous, as he descended into alcoholism.
I think you touch on something correct. It's not that the websites are gone. It's because the used to be readers has been caught in echo chambers and new trends and can't seem to understand that they are the ones who changed.
Apps themselves have undergone a similar transformation. It's OK to have an app for everything but instead today we sort of have a more common format: "login and we let you download the For You page in what looks like an app".
For some reason, websites are also trying to be apps, instead of being websites and it feels like both are a side effect of of what the OP describes as the need for the few to maximise revenue on their content.
I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there. I just can‘t find them anymore. SEO dominates literally every search I try. I also tried Bing, DuckDuckGo, you.com and many more - same result.
I think a search engine that excludes every website with google analytics, ad networks and amazon affiliate links would be great. Anyone know of such a thing?
Have you tried Kagi? It's subscription and doesn't really do what you suggest, but it's results are good, you can prioritise and block specific sites and they have a project called Kagi Small Web: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
Been trying Kagi for a few months now. Sadly, I don't notice much difference from Google.
For example, this past weekend I tried to work on learning some WebGPU stuff. The search results were filled with WebGL, WGPU, Three.js, Babylon, etc. stuff. The page might have contained "WebGPU" in a sidebar or something similar, but weren't about WebGPU at all.
What a magnificent search engine, love it. It brings back those wandering days of link clicking reading about people and their passions. No stupid “and here’s where you sign up” and annoying things like that.
Easy enough. Added a toggle for showing results that are <2 years old. May need to tune it a bit I guess (maybe 5 years).
Dunno if it's actually useful, we'll have to see. I'm not one to shy away from feature creep though, and a lot of people are requesting these sorts of things...
I can only imagine of Google faced the full firehose of their search traffic at your blog that most people would go broke paying their web bill.
This said, I do think the bigger issue is we have pretty much 2 big search engines so there is no real competition in the market. And that those search engines are also ad companies and have a vested interest in showing ads.
I wonder if Google could build some custom variants of their search. That way they can use their underlying tech but reskin it to bias towards different things - eg favor local results, or scholarly, short form, or video/audio/text. Apply a lens or filter to results so we aren't all being served the same bland concoction of links.
Sure AI could do this on a personal level but communities are built around shared experiences so we might see some major labelled variants emerge that shape new communities.
Each could even have an internal product owner trying to beat the others. Its a simulation of competition which might drive some innovation from Google once again (assuming no real competition is breaking through that market domination anytime soon)
The internet is the way it is largely because of Google's algorithm and people shaping their content to appease it. If they allowed several to exist, we could have several internets also existing without the need for a new walled garden.
As for your first question, they do that with local search.
But, also as an answer to your first question, no, there is no money in this that will show up on the next quarters income sheet.
As it is, the biggest way to deal with Google is regulations of breaking up search engines and ad networks. As long as Google controls the money making on the internet they'll be near unbeatable.
There are other problems as well. Popularity based rankings feed into themselves over time, creating the sort of extreme pareto distribution in popularity we see today where like a solid dozen of enormous websites get almost all of the traffic.
Yeah, this has been my thesis from the beginning, and the Marginalia search engine is basically constructed to verify this hypothesis. It's easy to dismiss such a notion when it's just words. It's much harder to brush off a more tangible demonstration.
That's an excellent idea, sounds like it might be possible (ironically) as a chrome extension? Someone should make it but more importantly someone should come up with a good name for it ;)
Yeah, I think it's noteworthy that the times in history we view as high water marks in terms of personal websites are also the times in history we had really good aggregators/navigation tools for personal websites. I think in absolute terms we aren't significantly worse off than in the '90s when "surfing the web" was so big there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.
On the flip side, it doesn't matter how many great websites there are if you can't find them. If we want a thriving ecosystem of smaller and more personal websites, then it needs discovery tools.
My efforts with Marginalia Search, wiby.me, ooh.directory, neocities; it's all a decent start, but I think we can do even better.
You're (maybe) inadvertently on to something there,
> there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.
1. (1) pastime, interest, pursuit -- (a diversion that occupies
one's time and thoughts (usually pleasantly);
I think what some of us are nostalgic for is when the "Web" was a way
to pass the time. For many it was a cultural curiosity first, then an
entertainment source. At some point it pivoted to being work. It
turned into filing taxes, shopping for insurance, and a place for
maintaining a "professional profile". From what I see of social media
a great many people make it into "work" of a kind. In this
metamorphosis we somehow made the silly web serious and the serious
web silly. Now nobody knows the difference and so the headspace of
"passtime" has itself sort of vanished.
https://wilby.me/ does that. But back in the day all the "interesting, non-commercial websites" would be listed in a curated web directory arranged by subject, and we're still missing that. There is an emerging practice of niche subject-specific "awesome-lists" but these are no substitute.
I think Web 3 is more the TikTok and other mass content tools. Still dependent on their parties, but it's shifted to more access to rich content and more access, rather than the curated pinhole view of "posts", especially when it comes to live feeds.
I would really like web3 to go back to distributed networks. Fediverse and all that. I guess cryptocurrencies fit in there too; I guess web3 would have its light and dark side. But decentralisation would be a nice theme.
TikTok isn't really fundamentally different from the stuff we consider web2, is it?
(I actually think imposing these artificial "generations" on web evolution is silly, but if we're going to do it, I'd prefer to use it to steer it towards something positive.)
I think Web N isn't about the actual tech being used, it's about the way the tech is being used and how it interacts with the real world and our society. Web 1 was HTML informational web sites, maybe some chat rooms and games here and there but not much affect on the real world. Web 2 was/is the "web app" where you can transact various business online, and group into communities and stuff and which is well integrated into our lives. Web 3, I think, is currently being formed and I have no idea what it is, but whomever can figure that out will be the first nrillionaire or whatever. The tech itself is just all the same if/else statements in a different order.
It's interesting because, at the time of Web 2, it was not only the "social media" proposition the only one, but also AJAX as well as more Javascript-driven websites (with more interaction potential). It was also the time of widgets and iframes, where all kinds of interesting 3rd party integrations appeared, like the bookmarklets (remember Yahoo Pipes, netvibes, RSS?). Unfortunately, the seed of advertising pretty much killed the rest over time.
This exactly. And getting content from third party sites dynamically. The classic example was having a Google Maps thing on your site where you'd show your, or even yet another party's data on a map. There was increasing amounts of data becoming available, apis opening up, governments releasing data sets. Combining all of that into something interesting, that was the real promise of web 2.0.
And then everybody started using that to add trackers and push ads.
The advent of the smartphone and touchscreen is essentially the defining characteristic of Web 2.0 and we haven't really approached Web 3.0+ in any meaningful way, in my experience. However, I am not a computer architecture/hw guru, yet I still expect the future to be pleasantly surprising despite this, erm, rather unnecessarily difficult time.
The big hurdle is that for some reason people think that video content cannot be decentralized and that building off-platform brands tend to be a lot harder then playing the algorithm for most professional creators.
Web3 as a brand is probably dead having been tarnished by association with the cryptoscam community, but there is some hint that the zeitgeists is for both creators and consumers wanting a more direct relationship that can only really come via more decentralization of control.
>TikTok isn't really fundamentally different from the stuff we consider web2, is it?
Yes, it is. It's only superficially similar (technically "user-generated" content). It's a qualitative difference. The fundamental difference is human-curated vs algorithmic. You go on youtube or instagram or tiktok and all you see is what the algorithm pushes: usually the shittiest most junk content imaginable. It's a qualitative difference from having your blogs and following links and etc.
The other main difference is of course that it's now all commercial. Everything everywhere, be it a google search for "best blender" to a youtube frontpage, is trying to sell you stuff or to make you click on ads. It contaminates everything.
Isn't TikTok solidly Web 2? It does not do any revolutionary. Maybe 2.3, but certainly it is pretty much same as for example Youtube. Just done bit differently.
There was a difference between hosted blogs, forums etc before and the new 'social-fied' ones we have now. It's not revolutionary, but it's a big enough change from 2 when that started to warrant some different tag imho. Blogs on blogger etc you still discovered yourself, now it's just an endless stream of garbage I don't care about (even though 'it knows me') with ads 'sprinkled' (hosed) in there on most platforms.
I'm not sure how people forgot this but Web 2.0 wasn't about Facebook etc as they are today. It was about content creation and blogging and social media was just a way to blog and create content.
Web 2.0 was all about networks and sharing. Heck, one of the biggest ideas at the time was "mashups". If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) got its start there. Yahoo! Pipes was a thing. Websites would freely provide RSS feeds you could not only subscribe to in your Reader but also use to create your own news feed in your dashboard that also showed you the latest issue of your favorite webcomic, the weather forecast and a stock ticker. Everything was beta. Most of it was free. Much of it could be fed into other things. Scraping was for hobbyists, not startups.
If anything, the walled gardens were Web 2.1. When companies realized that keeping data inside the platform rather than sharing it makes it easier to monetize.
I think if we're going with version numbers it also makes sense to describe the dot-com bubble as Web 1.0 as the biggest change that led to it was the massive increase in the number of people with Internet access making the Web commercially interesting (or viable). What some HNers fondly remember as the old Web is either the late pre-Web 2.0 days with webrings, Geocities and personal hobby websites (the latter eventually being supplanted by blogs, tumblr, livejournal and so on) or the pre-Web 1.0 days when most websites were hyperspecific hobby projects written by technophiles and hosted on Internet connected potatos or their university's web server.
Yes, but I'd describe it more like Web 2.5 is basically the gross-weaponization of gossip as a glorified get-rich-quick pyramid scheme. There is little-to-no reason for this mode of thinking in 2024 and beyond, if we are to realize anything resembling actual human potential.
Until a more equitable society exists, we will likely not see a legitimate Web 3.0+, in my estimation.
Full disclosure: I'm a cusper Xillenial who thinks Elon Musk is an idiot and hopes he can find some actual value somewhere hidden in the depths of his colossal failures, plural.
I think Web 3 is already here; it is your browser that has millions of LOC and that is more powerful then ever before. There are hundreds and thousands of useful browser extensions and I think we should build around that ecosystem. Mix powerful web browser and its extension ecosystem with DeFi and other decentralized solutions and we should get some interesting use cases and apps.
Web 4.0, since this nomenclature is nothing but hype and BS anyway, will be the web completely ruined by AI content. And unfortunately that web is already here.
Web 3.0: back to independent websites but adding federation and detailed, subject-specific semantic markup (as provided by the schema.org standards, supported by the major search engines) to aid in discoverability.
No one seems to remember the original web 3.0 was the semantic web from almost 20 years ago. It in part enabled the news feed aggregation of modern social media.
Also https://indieblog.page/ to randomly jump to a post from any of the mentioned personal blogs from that post plus many many more. (close to 3500 personal blogs)
I don't see the TikTokization of the world as necessarily bad - it creates a world of fast publishing with first-class tools, no nerd gatekeeping required.
The problem with having a platform like that is the obvious incentive for rent-seeking.
In the short term user interests align with platform interests because this creates a rapidly growing user base, but in the long term it's contrary to the platform's best interest to act in the users' best interest, as a large number of users alone does not translate to profit, so what happens is what's happened to Facebook, Reddit, Twitter; basically any mature social media platform still around. They turn themselves to poison.
I share the author's feelings on the old web, but I think this misses a fundamental point about younger people: they don't really read as the default anymore, in the sense of reading longform blog posts/articles/newspapers. You could blame this on the impatience of youth, but I think it's actually more of a fundamental shift of media formats. Websites-as-default have gone away because browsing the web (i.e. reading stuff on websites) has largely gone away for most people.
It's easy to forget that reading text is in no way "natural" to the human experience, it's just an old, reliable technology. Video, which functions as a proxy to in-person presence and speech, is dramatically more appealing to the average person than the abstract symbol system that is writing and reading.
It would not surprise me at all if a century from now, video is the default format, with text-first things like transcripts redesigned to minimize the downsides of video and replicate the benefits of text.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to communicate here, but: the average person likes watching/listening to other people talk. Maybe the über cyborg AI gods of the future will communicate directly with mental models, but for everyone else, the only thing that is better than video is probably a hologram, which is basically the same thing taken to the next level.
As sad as it is, video is already a preferred and main content format for most people. It always was. The closer to reality, the more engaging [EDIT: and easier to digest] the content. We had some text renaissance due to technical limitations, but that's over already. Beginner programmers now routinely shun written content in favor of video - how contradictory is that? But that's how it is right now.
Writing as a mode of communication requires effort on both the creator and consumer sides. That effort has many positive side effects, which is why some people still favor it [EDIT: and will favor it for a long time in the future, until something genuinely better shows up]. The problem is that, no matter what, effort is still effort, and people generally don't like to exhaust themselves. Gyms would be chock-full, and we'd have no obesity problem if it weren't so.
Your "century from now" estimate is extremely optimistic, to the point of being completely divorced from reality. If I had to bet, I'd say we will lose most textual content from mainstream consumption in the next 5 to 10 years. My guess is that writing will become the equivalent of today's HTML and JavaScript: a source code to be interpreted by the machine to produce a visual representation that people will consume. It'll disappear into the background and will only be touched by professionals.
I wouldn't be surprised if we just had a AI "assistant", or "friend". That would explain things for you if they need explaining. Like who to vote for, or what brand of stimulant to buy. The "friend" that vibes with you best would be the one you trust the most. Assuming corporations would be interested to cater to a bunch of unemployables that is.
I'm slightly alarmed by this, not just because of the decline of literacy and the slower speed of transmission, but the stronger charisma effects through voice seem to me to be a driver of problems. That seems to be why there are so many terrible influencer cult leaders.
Part of me has the same concerns, as I love books and think reading is critical. However, I also realize that reading and books are a technology that has developed through history, like anything else, and that a yet-unseen format of the future (that incorporates video, text, audio, etc.) may be more effective than reading. I don't actually think reading is a great way of communication, it's more just evolutionarily fit compared to speech.
" I don't actually think reading is a great way of communication, it's more just evolutionarily fit compared to speech."
This is a very baffling thing to say. Its like saying "I don't think fish gills are an effective form of breathing for fish, but it just happened to evolve like that." Reading and writing is an amazing way to communicate things that need to span time. Street signs, postcards, books, literally everything around you that is man made likely has some form of writing on it.
Reading/writing obviously has limitations...like it is difficult to interpret tone in many of these HN comments...but that is hardly a nail in the coffin of the form of communication.
My point is that the average person doesn’t actually like to read and would rather watch a video or listen to audio. The number of hours spent scrolling TikTok or YouTube absolutely dwarfs the number of hours people spend reading books for pleasure. This is…basic sociological knowledge about contemporary society and really not a controversial thing to say at all. People read much less today than they used to.
Writing is more durable than it is desirable, and as its durability is matched by video and digital devices, I expect its presence to lessen.
Why the strawman? Your claim of the average person not liking to read and what we are actually discussing of reading/writing being a good form of communication are two different things.
Plenty of people like lots of bad things because we have monkey brains, stop thinking that just because a group likes something, it is good. I watch the behavior day in and day out...people watch HOURS of content per day, and at the end they have synthesized almost none of it. A majority of social video and audio is just a way for people to entertain themselves and a buffer against being alone with their thoughts. I wholeheartedly agree that audio and video can be great learning and communication tools. To say that is what is happening on a majority of social media is extremely misguided.
I am describing what I see as a societal shift and commenting on it. You are making this (and your other comment) into some moralistic activist argument, which is entirely missing the point and frankly just uninteresting. As I said, it’s not about what is better, it’s what ends up being used by people that drives culture.
Adding to that: the critique of writing has a long history going back all the way to Plato. This is not a new topic.
What is uninteresting is your weak spine in succumbing to "societal inertia", without considering what is possibly good or bad, just what is. You clearly don't know what you're describing because you're just flip flopping between 2 things. Just read your comments back in a couple of hours and you'll understand.
Like I actually can't understand how your argument is: "people are watching more videos, therefore reading is bad". Did you even think that through?
You really don’t seem to understand that one can observe things separately from passing judgment on them. It’s a basic principle of science. I don’t know why you seem to have such a hard time understanding this, but judging by your hostile remarks in every comment, you just want to argue.
And in case this isn’t already crystal clear (and apparently it isn’t for you): I like books. I like reading. I have studied the history of the printing press and the book much, much more you have, I assure you. I find the transition of technology fascinating and think the internet and video is a similar revolution to the printing press. That is what my comment is about, not your puerile attempt to make me seem like I don’t like reading.
And here we are, the HN consumers, reading(!) the comments. No videos or pictures.
I mention this to support your comment, that there are people who like to read, and learn from reading, but it requires more time, more involvement, and more imagination. We are a minority?
Few have that luxury, and inclination - it turns out, so the massive onslaught of easy, entertainment.
One music video can have 500 million viewers. I don't know how many viewers of HN there are, but, I doubt it's a million.
It is interesting to see where (and how) the information flow goes from here on.
For sure, I love HN and love reading. But if we’re honest here, it’s a niche thing. A random TikTok video gets more views than a link that’s on the HN front page all day.
I don't know where you get that idea from. But humans has been reading for thousands of years. And on a cognitive level reading is superior to video or sound. Tons of evidence has been based on that premise.
It has nothing to do with young people and a sudden change in human patience. If your young ones are impatient of they read something is disturbing them, but it's definitely not human evolution.
Reading as a mass culture phenomenon is absolutely not thousands of years old and mass literacy didn't exist in a lot of places a mere century or two ago. Even today, you'd be surprised at how most people have very basic literacy skills.
And on a cognitive level reading is superior to video or sound.
I'm pretty skeptical of that claim, but even if it's true, it doesn't really matter if reading is better than watching a video if people prefer to watch videos.
I also specifically said it's not an issue of impatience, but rather a fundamental shifting of media formats.
Why would it not matter? You think just because a mass group prefers one thing, it will have good outcomes? Will/are your kids glued to screens 24/7 because others prefer it? Seems like you may be a lost cause already.
And maybe mass literacy hasn't been around for millenia, but written form of communication and story telling certainly has.
It wouldn't matter because society is already orienting itself towards a screen-first world. Parents that force their kids to read books and not use screens are almost certainly a minority.
Seems like you may be a lost cause already.
Not sure what this is supposed to mean. I'm describing what I perceive to be a societal shift, not my personal thoughts on whether I think it's good or bad.
It literally matters that people fight that urge. It almost never takes a majority to turn the tide of a movement(and I am not advocating for any extremes). There needs to be some kind of balance. If a parent is "forcing" their child to read books or to be curious about the world, something has gone awry earlier on. I know plenty of parent who limit screen time, let their kids play outside, and do so themselves, but that is all anecdotal and does not represent the average experience.
I guess it "wouldn't matter" if in 50 years everyone is just a mush brain on their couch scrolling TikTok getting fed through a brain tube. Yeah...hard to see how it "wouldn't matter".
It is just that video content generate so much more monetization. At least compared to work done. Thus most relevant content is generated as video instead of text. And those generating text are struggling with revenue sources.
Maybe not books. But let's ask would they prefer video to check ingredients in a recipe or a textual article? Or maybe video instead of wikipedia page to verify some facts...
Similar things go to many things that would clearly be superior as text, but there simply isn't that much money in something user will quickly skim over. Instead of forced pre-roll adds and sponsorships.
If you're a new creator and don't have family with good media connections, then YouTube is pretty much the only way that you can actually get paid for what you make. Regardless of medium.
Anybody tell me what are the other realistic options?
> they don't really read as the default anymore, in the sense of reading longform blog posts/articles/newspapers
Did they ever? I grew up with newspapers, but adults back then were saying much the same then just with books as their example of "things kids don't read these days"[0], to the extent that my mum decided she ought to bribe me to read more[1]. But I also remember reading some claim that most people back then were reading just the headlines of newspapers, and if they were particularly engaged by that, perhaps the first/last paragraphs too.
[0] right before Harry Potter came out.
[1] I can't remember exactly how much any more, but I got at least a few week's worth of pocket money from the New Testament.
I am the "they" in the case of last generations' "kids these days".
What "kids these days" do and don't do has always been a subject of parental concern, but the reality is that people aren't a homogenous group, and being an adult makes you more aware of people who grow up differently than you did.
Just as my mum was concerned about my reading habits (she probably saw a headline about it), so too are you concerned about the current generation's.
My generation was all over the place, and so is today's. The top readers of my generation read widely, most adults when I was a kid didn't read more than the headline; The top readers of the current generation read widely, most adults today don't read more than the headline… and even here, we get comments where people clearly comment without having read the link.
Link and everyone can look, but I sure 'ain't gonna search for this "reliable data" and then try to figure out if what I find is or isn't, in fact, reliable.
> There is an episode of Star Trek where a character is for plot reasons trapped in a shrinking parallel universe. As time passes, people she knows one by one just vanish and she is the only one who seems to notice. Eventually it gets to an absurd point. She asks if it really makes sense if a ship made for a thousand people would have a crew of a few people, and everyone just sort of like shrugs and looks at her like she’s crazy. That’s basically what the last decade of the Internet. It feels like it’s shrinking. Like parts of it are vanishing.
It feels like the web grew up into an bitter old fart who takes everything way to seriously.
What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name and people did not give that much care to their long term reputations and the fall from that more or less started with facebooks real name policy, or rather when facebook stopped being an glorified phonebook and started being an content platform.
That culture of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" gave rise to an atmosphere of fun that seems to be entirely missing today as everyone is too focused on the hustle of monetization and avoiding controversy to just do silly things.
Add to that that for some reason every large enterprise organization seems to have forgotten how to actually manage and use their own websites preferring instead to blast out using the new "everything for everyone" platforms.
> What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name
It seems that the society at large wants this. 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world. Reddit's reputation is improving hand in hand with the tightening of their content policies.
Their reputations are mediated by news sources, though. It's hard to know what's real and what's the result of 500 news articles gradually shading in emotional responses over these websites most people know little about.
> 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world.
That's because without any particular individuals to point the finger to, they just blame the monolith of "anonymous individuals".
People have always feared the unknown, and the obvious coping mechanism is to aggregate it into some tangible form, whether it's the Boogeyman, Baba Yaga, the Devil, Anonymous, or any other villain, to be used as a scapegoat.
But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.) The Alfred E. Neuman shtick of disaffected bemusement was stale even when Mad was published on dead trees.
But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being neither clever nor insightful here.
No, in the comment you've originally replied to I have clearly stated a possible explanation of why 4chan has a bad reputation. Please refrain from pointless "no u" comments, and attack my arguments instead.
> But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.)
4chan is not an entity onto itself - it is composed of many individuals, that was the whole point of my post. But because you don't know the identity of those individuals, you just consider them a monolith and put collective blame onto them.
Additionaly, the official rule 3. of 4chan states:
You will not post any of the following outside /b/:
[...]
b. Racism
[...]
> But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being neither clever nor insightful here.
On /b/, all legal (in the US) content is permitted. It serves as a sort of containment board for the degenerates to shitpost, leaving other boards alone. Nobody takes any content from /b/ seriously, and the nickname for /b/ users is "/b/tards".
In fact, /b/ is just a small part of 4chan, one that most users actually loathe, but which seems to be the most highlighted in public consciousness. Probably due to its complete lack of censorship, which seems to be frowned upon in this day and age.
You are technically correct if we take the literal interpretation of my words, however, the literal interpretation is not the intended one. The intended interpretation is that no reasonable person takes /b/ seriously.
Perhaps you have some kind of impairment that prevents you from understanding subtleties of informal speech, but I think it's more likely you're just taking a piss.
> I take it seriously
Then you should check out the text under the title on /b/ :)
The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.
The question, "What evidence would change your mind?" is perfectly reasonable.
It's a proxy for "Does your response to this topic involve trapped-priors?" Most people aren't willing to reveal or acknowledge they have trapped-priors and so it jumps to the end of the conversation where they simply leave. It's saves my time discussing topics by avoiding interactions with close-minded people.
On the rest of 4chan outside of /b/, you'll find lots of racist comments. Particularly on /pol/, but there are plenty even ignoring that board. You can report particular posts for breaking the "racism outside of /b/" rule, but it's very hit-or-miss whether the rule is enforced.
Strictly speaking, “That is idiotic” does apply to the argument, as written in the quote. It’s not a personal insult, it’s a characterization of the quality of the argument.
I suppose the rules are trying to say that you should avoid such characterizations, but that’s a dubious rule.
Would it be ok to praise the quality of the argument? If so, it should be ok to criticize it as well. Not all arguments are as clear cut as 1+1=2, and there are other criteria by which arguments can be evaluated.
It’s a claim about the nature of an argument. Do you believe it’s not possible for an argument to be idiotic?
> Why would the former imply the latter?
Because restricting speech that’s critical leads to a degradation of the quality of dialog.
Idiotic arguments exist. So do spurious arguments, disingenuous arguments, bad arguments, pointless arguments, dishonest arguments, and so on. Which of those adjectives would you like to ban when discussing the quality of an argument?
> It's a claim about the nature of an argument. Do you believe it's not possible for an argument to be idiotic?
No, I believe that an argument is either valid or invalid. Any other characteristic is meaningless in pursuit of truth.
Consider the meaning of the term "idiotic": something that only an idiot would say. Therefore, "that is idiotic" means "that is something that only an idiot would say", which in turn implies that the person saying it is an idiot.
> Idiotic arguments exist. So do spurious arguments, disingenuous arguments, bad arguments, pointless arguments, dishonest arguments, and so on. Which of those adjectives would you like to ban when discussing the quality of an argument?
The only one I'd like to ban is "idiotic", since it's the only one that insults the person. "Dishonest" is a little tricky, since it's hard to prove someone's intentions or honesty, but depending on the context it might be okay. All the other adjectives are only describing the quality of the argument, without insulting the person - and while meaningless by themselves (what does "bad argument" mean?), I'd consider them fine to be used, as long as further elaboration is included.
Some examples of other adjectives I'd ban are "retarded", "stupid", "foolish", "lazy", "malicious", since they all insult a person or imply bad motivations, without providing any information.
Dude, you need to take a hard look at yourself. Looking at your last comments, it seems that you've been drinking your own kool-aid and truly believe you have the objective truth about everything. It's either that or you're a keyboard warrior in desperate need for an ego boost.
If all you know about 4chan is /b/ and /pol/ then your opinion is valid, but there are lots of other boards there. In any case I find it useful to see at times what the most opinionated people are really thinking when there are no filters and rules to silence them. Like Isaac Asimov said: "Any book worth banning is a book worth reading." And at times "the worst kind of people" there are spot on in their obsessions. I 100% agree with them that child and human trafficking is a big issue in this world and some of the most powerful people are definitely involved.
> what the most opinionated people are really thinking when there are no filters and rules to silence them
I'm not sure what "most opinionated" would mean or how'd you determine relative levels, but I would bet whatever metric you chose wouldn't find the most opinionated people on 4chan. Also just because people say things online doesn't mean they actually hold that opinion.
> I 100% agree with them that child and human trafficking is a big issue in this world and some of the most powerful people are definitely involved
Oh, ok, you weren't actually responding to the parent comment at all.
The thing is, everyone already knew that child and human trafficking is a big issue in this world. No one needed to wade through the cesspool to find that out. But 4chan doesn't actually give a damn about the kids. They got obsessed with phantom sex cults under pizzerias and decoding gematria in emails because they wanted to undermine Hillary Clinton's election and because they got completely washed by actual non-ironic nazis who believe all "leftists" in power (IE the Democratic Party) are pedophiles because they equate LGBT with pedophilia and, by extension, Democratic support for the former with a likely predilection for the other.
And then they came up with QAnon, not out of any sincere concern for "the children," but just as a shitpost that took off because it was too on the nose, and now legitimate efforts to curb child abuse are being hamstrung by this insane obsession they've bred into the zeitgeist to see trans people as "groomers" and secret pedo conspiracies everywhere.
And yet, even though they'll gladly take credit for it, none of them saw Epstein coming. Sure, one anon posted about Epstein's death before it hit the news. That's about all they can legitimately take credit for, but overall they've done more harm than good.
I think communities attract types of folks unless they become uber popular (like reddit) to the point they can attract everyone. 4chan was interesting when I found it, but I quickly found it became mostly toilet humor at its best, and was often (i.e. every time I opened it) full of racism and sexism. It was a safe place for immature folks to shout whatever they wanted and not care who it affected -- though of course anyone affected likely ditched the cesspool anyways. Yet, as I watched one of my friends continue to use it, I don't think it was pure coincidence that their own verbiage became increasingly vulgar and desensitized. As some of my friends matured as they grew up, I found he went the opposite direction (at least in online messaging).
> It was a safe place for immature folks to shout whatever they wanted and not care who it affected
It is sad that the popularity of internet has reached such proportions that people are no longer responsible for what they read by their own choice, but rather people seem to be responsible for what they write, regardless of the fact that anyone can choose not to read it.
Internet posts are just text, yet people act as if we're forcing others to read what we write. Imagine if writing books that make other people feel bad was banned - what a culture would that be.
"Internet posts are just text, yet people act as if we're forcing others to read what we write. Imagine if writing books that make other people feel bad was banned - what a culture would that be."
Between death threats and insults directed at real people - and a fictionary book, there is usually a difference, even though books can be bad as well, if they are directed against certain people (e.g. Mein Kampf).
Arguably, there have been a good number of wars (ostensibly) over books (in particular religious texts seem to do the trick), whereas we are yet to declare war over any form of web content.
People tried the latter a number of times already. Then the activism at US unis happened; first, about a decade or a bit more ago, lefties not only stuffed books with trigger warnings, but fought (and in a few cases successfully) for books to be banned from universities because they made them feel "unwell".
Then, as if copying them, right-wingers tried the same in recent years.
It's a shit culture, that's what.
But those are platforms, for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds rather then people sharing spaces on a single platform.
There was always an underground of filth(even in the pre-internet days) but unless you sought it out you werent actually exposed to it back in the pre-platform days.
It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).
>It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).
This is so true; on every internet forum or community, there are different moderators, rules and values for the community and on the Facebook for example there is only Facebook and its TOS. You are in the mercy of the Facebook when it comes to the content moderation and setting rules and values for the community.
Facebook has user-run groups, so there are at least 3 levels of moderation/rules there:
1. National law
2. Facebook TOS
3. Group rules
But the legislative power, to to speak, at the group level is quite weak. They can further restrict according to some values, which is fine as it is. Freedom of association. They can't control the UI.
>for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds
Eh this kind of discounts how the entire world has changed between now and then.
At one point online was something disconnected from who you were as in IRL identity. Really very few people posted back then (think tens of millions verses billions across the world). When you hung your modem up, that the online world and the real world were disconnected.
That seperated world no longer exists for any number of reasons caused by any number of actors. The real world affects the internet and the internet affects the real world, these are no longer separate entities, but things that are intertwined by billions of connected devices and sensors almost everywhere.
Quite often in the past middle sized sites got blasted by DOS attacks, and if your own small forum got a DOS/DDOS you could suffer some problems. Now, you don't even need an attacker to DOS most small sites, it's pretty damned easy to get search engines trying to index your site to take it off line, or for just random bots to be 99% of your traffic. People moved to big sites to avoid having to be said system administrators from all the crap that moved into the net.
It's simply that platforms are more convenient. Most bloggers never got a comment that wasn't spam, but platforms make it easier to find an audience. Platforms (if they're big enough) make it easier to find content relevant to your interests than webrings or link aggregators ever did. Most people don't want to learn how to hand-code HTML and run a server just to express themselves or communicate on the web. Curation is also a plus, but framing that as "wanting censorship" is disingenuous. What people want is stability and predictability.
It also doesn't really lead to a blandification of content. The quality of content on the web now is higher than its ever been. The value gained by being able to publish nearly effortlessly to the web without being a tech nerd is outweighed by the value lost in not being able to put a skull playing a trumpet in a site header.
In my eyes, reddit is the same trash it's always been.
Yes, you can find decent specialized subs here and there but, even then, you have to weed through the trash to get a decent response and keep a thick skin from those who are only there to put you down to make them feel better about themselves.
From 2006 when I joined until maybe just after Obama (2009 or 2010, not sure? maybe as late as 2011) it was the best ever. Like HN on roids. Better than Slashdot that came before it, which was already a junk site by that point, larger than K5. Then it ate every internet forum ever, and turned into this weird authoritarian pervert Myspace thing.
Now it's not even a website, but a phone app. I hesitate to click on reddit links unless they're old.* prefixed.
If you have a Reddit account, you can opt out of the New Reddit design, so Old Reddit is displayed without the link needing to be prefixed with "old.*".
This is an issue of connectivity. Some cultures cannot survive exposure to the world-at-large, and 4chan was one of them.
I'm not sure I want to be part of "society at large", although I admit it doesn't seem optional. The establishment of the monoculture has gotten rid of a lot of good in the world (just try finding somewhere to visit without a mcdonalds).
>Reddit's reputation is improving hand in hand with the tightening of their content policies.
What? Reddit has gone from interesting and nerdy, to circle-jerk, to an insane aslyum. At least for anything remotely political (and political things will often invade hobby subs). I used to use it all day every day, and now I use X instead. Almost entirely 100% -> 0% | 0% -> 100%.
The web of today has evolved to a product placement platform. It's optimised for finding quick up-to-date reviews of the next laptop you're considering buying. Old content becomes irrelevant and flows to the sewage pipe into oblivion. Social media users are building their "personal brand" and value proposition to their next employer/business partner.
I've just finished reading Yanis Varoufakis' "Technofeudalism" and it was a much better read than I expected. I'm still unsure if his central thesis will materialise but he does make good points on how Big Tech basically transformed "Internet One" (the one we fondly remember from the 90s-early 2000s) into a internet of fiefdoms, where each Big Tech have tried to corner their own land to extract rent from.
It's the exact feeling I get from the internet today, we have lost the interesting content being put out in a decentralised manner, the quirky websites, the passionate community ones for product reviews (like DPReview), everything has become commercialised, lots of blogs are just fronts for some brand/company/individual trying to peddle their own brand through visibility.
I think this is a consequence of elite takeover of the internet. The culture you describe still exists, but it's largely found in places considered unsavory and uncouth by mainstream organizations.
I‘ve always considered it to be exactly the other way round: in the old days of yore, the Internet was dominated by a certain kind of elite, and then the Endless September happened and commercialization followed.
It was dominated by an academic and intellectual elite somewhat detached from real world politics and economics, and was replaced by that political and economic elite.
I'd say there's been (at least) three overlapping generations: The academics (.edu email addresses), the geeky amateurs (dial-up internet), and the app users (the social media crowd).
Not trying to denigrate the third generation there, it's just that for them it's a mature product, like a TV or a car. They feel no need to tinker with what BigCorp is selling them.
If I have to fit them to the model (which tbh I don't think bears close inspection) they're the vanguard of Generation 3. AOL was the first of the walled gardens. A proto-FaceGramTok.
Instead of overlapping generations, there's a gap of a whole generation of 'mainstream' internet users between the geeky amateurs/dial-up internet which arguably ceases being the dominant usecase already in mid-1990s before the dot.com boom starts due to this generation, and the app users which get seriously started only from around 2010.
Those users were large numbers of mainstream non-geeky people, but they used websites on desktop computers, not through the walled garden of facebook on a phone.
Wasn't the internet solely the domain of the (techno) elite for a very long time? It's the masses that have wrecked what we had, the the "new" elite profiting off of them. Maybe the societal gains outweigh what we lost, but if you were part of the original elite 20+ years ago, you're now in a much worse place.
I wouldn’t consider academics and technologists to be the “elite” in a societal sense. I’m talking about the people that go to Ivy League schools and make up positions in top companies and government organizations.
For example: the New York Times ran an editorial in the 90s about how the internet would have a similar effect to fax machines. They are an elite organization and didn’t care about the internet much then. Now, twenty five years later, they do care a lot about what’s on the internet.
It’s like my options are go by an anonymous handle like CoolJeff9586 and be ignored or use my real name and risk cementing away any future prospects because I said Justin Bieber should die back in 2011…
Who would’ve thought using legal fucking names online would be bad
Not so sure it's all doom and gloom for "old internet". I still find plenty of spaces that feel like they're created purely for the love it it, there is just many orders of magnitude more crap you need to sift through. The people writing about interesting things compete with people who write as a form of personal branding, and these people aggressively measure engagement (You know the type).
I remember reading one of these blogs, and saw something like "You have an obligation to advertise your content to potential users", the very idea of which is genuinely insane. Imagine trying to run a banner ad linking to your blog. But, those are the people who will play the SEO game, and they're the people you'll find in the first 2 pages of search.
I agree with you but the fact that there is no good blog search engine out there shows you the state of the web that we are in right now. Nobody cares anymore for blogs and personal websites, everything is commercialized to the point that SEO is name of the game of the web today.
Kagi small web and Marginalia do a pretty good job. Even the regular Kagi search delivers smaller blogs in my results frequently that end up being very useful to resolve what I had searched for.
Last time I searched on Google for some decent blog search engine I couldn't find one. People say Google Custom Search is good, you can also see Marginalia and Kagi getting mentioned a lot. I didn't try neither of them, well except Marginalia but I think Marginalia prefers text only search results but modern blogs are not text only. There was good HN blog search project[0] but it is dead now.
I think most probably blog search engine wouldn't be viable as a commercial product but some hobbyist can definitely pull it off. Good example is listennotes.com a hobbyist search engine for podcasts.
I had a decent idea for a blog search engine, I will try to pull it off if time and health serve me.
One of the magic bits of the earlier web(s) is that it was all new, participation involved an element of non-replicable self-selection, and the parasites hadn't had enough time to adapt and colonize it.
I'm not even sure if it's will be possible to have a community of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" in the future. It'll probably get swamped with AI generated garbage, like the crochet groups posted about a week or so ago. The human participants will get overwhelmed trying to figure out what's fake.
Honestly, like many kinds of forest, what the Web probably needs is a good burning, controlled or otherwise.
Yep -- early adopters saw it as just another way to communicate between humans, and didn't aggressively push the envelop on how much anonymity+reach could be abused. Gradually, that envelop got expanded and now we have well-capitalized influence operations (including advertisement) solely focused on exploiting the internet as much as possible for financial+political gain.
The same was true of Usenet, and of the internet in general before Eternal September. Usenet was absolutely glorious - until the spammers moved in. Then it became a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with killfiles, until the tide of spam turned it into a cesspool.
The basic problem: make it easy and cheap to participate, and the scam artists will inevitably gravitate to it, and eventually choke the life out of it. Add enough friction to discourage the spammers, and you drive away real users as well.
Older forums are still around, or the fediverse. If you're participating on them, you're part of the solution.
One of the last remaining remnants of this is the pirating community. Their work on cracking, emulation, system hacking and anonymity is such a wonderful place to make friends, push technology and just have fun. They still have that old school humour which made the internet so cool.
I'd say that video game modding and hacking communities have a similar vibe to them, as do fan created content sites and communities in general.
Probably in all causes because being unable to legally make money from your activities scares away folks that just want to cash in on the latest grift, and don't care a single damn about quality.
X (formerly twitter) has been-re-spicified. Which is exactly why so many people are mad at Musk and writing daily hitpieces on him, and his companies, including X.
Freedom is really just the right to do or say the "wrong" thing, which is the "spicy" stuff, IMHO. To me they're one and the same. No spice indicates a lack of freedom of speech.
On the other hand, in Usenet days, a lot of people were coming in from fairly elite institutions (whether academia or companies) and they were absolutely using their True Names and institutional associations. There was a bifurcation between this and people who participated under handles that weren't obviously linked to discoverable account (which was more associated with BBSs early on).
Smartphones are what you put into them. You don't have to spend every waking minute scrolling.
IMO, the unpleasantness of mobile web usage does a great job of discouraging me from walking around with my face buried in my phone. For me, the phone is more of a multi-purpose tool: camera, alarm clock, timer, calendar, weather radar, hotspot for my laptop, navigator, music player, etc. - and I don't care much to use it for random surfing. At most, I might look up something while I'm shopping.
Still, that single phone replaces a whole slew of single-purpose devices. Does it replace them perfectly? No, not at all, but my pockets only have so much room.
the pseudo-anonymous amateur communties still exist. but they're private and invite-only, because a public community that allows anonymous posting becomes a cesspit of toxic behaviour, or else requires so much content moderation that the only feasible way to do it is automated recommendation algorithms. (invite-only phpbb forums of old still exist, but the modern equivalent invite-only community is the group chat)
without the threat of "we'll kick you out and you'll never be able to get back in", these sort of communities don't work. there's just too many assholes on the internet now.
Social-media ate the traffic. A 10 minute video of someone typing on you-tube will capture more views than a well formatted website. Thus, people just started gleaning other peoples static content into low-effort media. These days there are bots that automate this process to make garbage content.
Perhaps you meant to ask "why has the signal-to-noise ratio dropped on the modern web?"...
Related reading: Picked up a copy of a book called "We Got Blog: How weblogs are changing our culture" in the university library a few days ago, published in 2002. An nostalgic and interesting, albeit rather random, semi-curated collection of blog posts from prominent, mainly US, bloggers. Tells the story of Blogger too.
Meh. Something like textsfromlastnight has probably been replaced by a subreddit, and I like it better that way - no custom CSS to get in the way of me reading it (the same reason that Facebook won out over MySpace, IMO - you don't actually want all of your friends' pages to look different, you want the design to be something bland that gets out of the way). Yes, these things used to be their own websites and now they're largely not. But usually you wanted the content, not the website, and that's easier than ever to get at.
> the same reason that Facebook won out over MySpace, IMO - you don't actually want all of your friends' pages to look different, you want the design to be something bland that gets out of the way
100%. I had the exact same impression at the time.
Yeah, I also like the idea of linkposts. I read some bloggers who make regular linkposts with a bit of personal flavor, and it's one of the nicest things about the web today.
Another maybe related question is, where have all the social networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life on the internet and other people read it. But now it seems everyone's trying to craft their online presence to maximize attention. For example Instagram is no longer a social network, it's a self-promotion network. Getting likes is not socializing.
>Another maybe related question is, where have all the social networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life on the internet and other people read it.
That fell out of favor when too many people's lives or relationships or employment were ruined by this. People are more savvy now and know the risks of posting their personal info on the internet for the world to see.
I think it's just numbers. Us internet users used to be a minority, and in a very short time a huge influx of new users came online through apps.
So relatively if you look at the numbers no one is using websites anymore, but I'd be willing to bet that some of us old internet users still use the internet much as we used to.
The websites I still visit are mostly old message boards.
And of course I visit a lot of blogs but they're always linked from a message board. I don't subscribe to any blogs but that's just personal preference, I never did before either.
You're still part of a minority now. Namely the few people that remember what the internet used to be like and still browse it like they used to.
For a large part of users, the internet is not websites, message boards or blogs. It's the four or five content aggregation pages that they got started on, because those invest huge sums of money into keeping people on their platforms. (And into SEO to lead them back to their platforms, should they dare to venture out).
I think the author is very well aware that message boards and blogs still exist. They just don't have a prominent spot in today's internet world anymore. And you bet if any of them dares to produce quality content, it will be ripped and regurgitated ad nauseam on content aggregators like TikTok and Reddit.
i think it was a mistake for most sites to disable comments. You just gave away your audience to facebook and tiktok. people are selfish, they like to give feedback and rant about anything. BigTech definitely nudged them away from that and into their garden. Yeah, spam does not scale, but you 'd have to deal with that, things that scale get eaten.
The OP's blog would get a lot more engagement if it had a comment form underneat
>i think it was a mistake for most sites to disable comments.
It was not a mistake at all, and you stated exactly why. Spam.
Not just spam.
Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam.
A never ending torrent of shit. An ocean of it.
And that's before the mean spirited comments, trolls, outright illegal posts and more. Oh, and if you post anything really controversial, might as well get behind cloudflare now before you get blasted off the internet.
406 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadWe’ve gone.
Websites are difficult to build for the average Joe. Having a personal website doesn’t seem to be cool anymore. The number of followers on platform xyz seems to be the thing today. Lets hope the trend dies out and personal websites become cool again.
A lot of people here are still thinking with a pre-internet mindset, where because pop culture was mediated by the distribution of physical media or broadcasts at specific times, awareness of certain genres of music and pop-cultural touchstones was strictly gatekept by time, and trends were distinctly linear and generational.
But now all of that is discoverable at the same time. "the kids these days" aren't limited to what's trendy now, and it isn't more difficult to find 80's music than it is the latest tik-tok. And faux-nostalgia (neostalgia?) seems to be a constant pop human culture (indeed, much of it is manufactured by the corporations that control pop culture.) There are whole genres of new music like vaporwave and aesthetic movements that incorporate (at least a vague idea of) the 80s. People watch old shows from the 80s and 90s on Youtube. They look back on a time they never participated in as if it were a golden age of low-tech simplicity.
Of course, the general rule is things become cool again after 20 years to now I guess that would be... the millennium?
As far as personal websites go, the biggest reason the aren't likely to make a comeback is simply that hand-coding HTML and running a webserver has no utility for most people. Even considering all of the negatives of social media and centralization (which, let's be honest, is the fault of many of the people now complaining that the web is no longer cool) the model of software as a service allows people to publish to the web far more easily.
And who knows? "the kids these days" are as aware of the dangers of social media as anyone, that's why they won't be caught dead on Facebook or Twitter, they're all on Discord now or wherever. Maybe personal websites will catch on too just because of retro nostalgia as well.
Interesting take
Messaging seems to just require more hardware, so the significance of whether the software is OSS or not is reduced.
And a lot of this is not even technical, but the cultural issue of scorning anyone asking for those features and claiming those use cases are just for teenagers. Real men just use plain ASCII and no multimedia apparently. Only after its lunch was soundly eaten did we finally get IRCv3, way too late, and still with little support. The reason a lot of younger developers are using Slack and Discord isn't because they're stupid kids, but because their requirements aren't met otherwise, and they're not going to constrain themselves to 90s tech out of stubbornness (to be clear I'm not accusing you of that attitude! I'm commenting on others I've seen many times over the years)
In a business selling software, if you're willing to take some sales loss/mad customers, you can just say in software 2.0, you're going to protocol 2.0.
On the open web/OSS the rest of the world can tell you to screw off... or they can just not upgrade and your software that's a step ahead breaks. Then you also have commercial interests that shove FOSS/1.0 on some device and want to change users to upgrade the firmware so users stay on the old stuff forever.
Commercial software tended to get more features because the software was based on monopolies they had full control of.
What monopolies?
Everything that get's created, gets commercialized and swallowed up by whatever product roadmap that commercial entity has. The soul of the internet, from my point of view, can be simply stated as "connection."
Where do we go when we want to connect further and wider than our feet can take us? The internet. What is the point of connection? To share who we are through a wide variety of means: games, text, images, music, voice, etc.
The internet as a protocol supports that endeavor, but the layers that were built on top of the internet started swallowing up human attention. Now there are a few large leaders who have built application layers on top of the web, and that's where people go for their connection. This very website is one of them.
Recent developments with ActivityPub and mastodon are promising. Personally, I'd just like to find my way back to a universal protocol for connection. At the root of it, there's a need for infrastructure which will always cost money. I think that's the main hurdle that needs overcoming.
/rant
It is the world we live in, dominated by advertising at every nook and cranny that is disturbing.
Of course excessive advertising and counter measures are always a cat and mouse game but this is once instance where I can blissfully ignore it as a user very easily.
Everything online reads like a magazine.
If you want to make it permanent for that domain, you click the Reader icon -> Web page settings -> Disable automatic reader view.
Paywalls aren't designed to optimize engagement, they kill it! Paywalls slaughter almost all your traffic and kill social media virality dead, but they can still work out better than trying to fight ad blocking.
Spam, well, most spam is short. They want to get your attention and bring you to their shop. It's not really about doomscrolling from there on.
So if you're complaining about both ads and paywalls then really you just want content made by volunteers for free. But as Wikipedia has shown, that can work great for a short time until the normies get exhausted and move on, leaving behind the truly crazy fanatics to stay in charge. It's not necessarily better.
For some reason, websites are also trying to be apps, instead of being websites and it feels like both are a side effect of of what the OP describes as the need for the few to maximise revenue on their content.
For example, this past weekend I tried to work on learning some WebGPU stuff. The search results were filled with WebGL, WGPU, Three.js, Babylon, etc. stuff. The page might have contained "WebGPU" in a sidebar or something similar, but weren't about WebGPU at all.
It gets mentioned here on HN quite a lot.
Dunno if it's actually useful, we'll have to see. I'm not one to shy away from feature creep though, and a lot of people are requesting these sorts of things...
This said, I do think the bigger issue is we have pretty much 2 big search engines so there is no real competition in the market. And that those search engines are also ad companies and have a vested interest in showing ads.
Sure AI could do this on a personal level but communities are built around shared experiences so we might see some major labelled variants emerge that shape new communities.
Each could even have an internal product owner trying to beat the others. Its a simulation of competition which might drive some innovation from Google once again (assuming no real competition is breaking through that market domination anytime soon)
The internet is the way it is largely because of Google's algorithm and people shaping their content to appease it. If they allowed several to exist, we could have several internets also existing without the need for a new walled garden.
But, also as an answer to your first question, no, there is no money in this that will show up on the next quarters income sheet.
As it is, the biggest way to deal with Google is regulations of breaking up search engines and ad networks. As long as Google controls the money making on the internet they'll be near unbeatable.
Surely there are more than ever. Just difficult to find, as you say.
On the flip side, it doesn't matter how many great websites there are if you can't find them. If we want a thriving ecosystem of smaller and more personal websites, then it needs discovery tools.
My efforts with Marginalia Search, wiby.me, ooh.directory, neocities; it's all a decent start, but I think we can do even better.
> there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.
I think what some of us are nostalgic for is when the "Web" was a way to pass the time. For many it was a cultural curiosity first, then an entertainment source. At some point it pivoted to being work. It turned into filing taxes, shopping for insurance, and a place for maintaining a "professional profile". From what I see of social media a great many people make it into "work" of a kind. In this metamorphosis we somehow made the silly web serious and the serious web silly. Now nobody knows the difference and so the headspace of "passtime" has itself sort of vanished.https://wmw.thran.uk
* Web 1.0: independent websites, self-maintained, hard
* Web 2.0: hosted platforms like blogs and social networks, easy, but rely on providers
* Web 3.0: promise to free users from the platform providers but are mostly crypto scam currently.
I think Web 3 is more the TikTok and other mass content tools. Still dependent on their parties, but it's shifted to more access to rich content and more access, rather than the curated pinhole view of "posts", especially when it comes to live feeds.
TikTok isn't really fundamentally different from the stuff we consider web2, is it?
(I actually think imposing these artificial "generations" on web evolution is silly, but if we're going to do it, I'd prefer to use it to steer it towards something positive.)
And then everybody started using that to add trackers and push ads.
Web3 as a brand is probably dead having been tarnished by association with the cryptoscam community, but there is some hint that the zeitgeists is for both creators and consumers wanting a more direct relationship that can only really come via more decentralization of control.
Yes, it is. It's only superficially similar (technically "user-generated" content). It's a qualitative difference. The fundamental difference is human-curated vs algorithmic. You go on youtube or instagram or tiktok and all you see is what the algorithm pushes: usually the shittiest most junk content imaginable. It's a qualitative difference from having your blogs and following links and etc.
The other main difference is of course that it's now all commercial. Everything everywhere, be it a google search for "best blender" to a youtube frontpage, is trying to sell you stuff or to make you click on ads. It contaminates everything.
Web 2.0 was all about networks and sharing. Heck, one of the biggest ideas at the time was "mashups". If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) got its start there. Yahoo! Pipes was a thing. Websites would freely provide RSS feeds you could not only subscribe to in your Reader but also use to create your own news feed in your dashboard that also showed you the latest issue of your favorite webcomic, the weather forecast and a stock ticker. Everything was beta. Most of it was free. Much of it could be fed into other things. Scraping was for hobbyists, not startups.
If anything, the walled gardens were Web 2.1. When companies realized that keeping data inside the platform rather than sharing it makes it easier to monetize.
I think if we're going with version numbers it also makes sense to describe the dot-com bubble as Web 1.0 as the biggest change that led to it was the massive increase in the number of people with Internet access making the Web commercially interesting (or viable). What some HNers fondly remember as the old Web is either the late pre-Web 2.0 days with webrings, Geocities and personal hobby websites (the latter eventually being supplanted by blogs, tumblr, livejournal and so on) or the pre-Web 1.0 days when most websites were hyperspecific hobby projects written by technophiles and hosted on Internet connected potatos or their university's web server.
Until a more equitable society exists, we will likely not see a legitimate Web 3.0+, in my estimation.
Full disclosure: I'm a cusper Xillenial who thinks Elon Musk is an idiot and hopes he can find some actual value somewhere hidden in the depths of his colossal failures, plural.
But it's been talked about this way a lot. Think of the ... in Rust posts but replace it with ... on the blockchain.
Btw where are the ... in Rust posts? They've been replaced by ... with AI?
Then Web 3.0 was coined by a bunch of crypto grifters who tried to inherit credibility by extending the x.0 numbering scheme.
It's all rather meaningless. See also: Industry 4.0.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081 (1014 points | 6 months ago | 1960 comments)
“What blogs did you post to in the last month?”
In the short term user interests align with platform interests because this creates a rapidly growing user base, but in the long term it's contrary to the platform's best interest to act in the users' best interest, as a large number of users alone does not translate to profit, so what happens is what's happened to Facebook, Reddit, Twitter; basically any mature social media platform still around. They turn themselves to poison.
It's easy to forget that reading text is in no way "natural" to the human experience, it's just an old, reliable technology. Video, which functions as a proxy to in-person presence and speech, is dramatically more appealing to the average person than the abstract symbol system that is writing and reading.
It would not surprise me at all if a century from now, video is the default format, with text-first things like transcripts redesigned to minimize the downsides of video and replicate the benefits of text.
Writing as a mode of communication requires effort on both the creator and consumer sides. That effort has many positive side effects, which is why some people still favor it [EDIT: and will favor it for a long time in the future, until something genuinely better shows up]. The problem is that, no matter what, effort is still effort, and people generally don't like to exhaust themselves. Gyms would be chock-full, and we'd have no obesity problem if it weren't so.
Your "century from now" estimate is extremely optimistic, to the point of being completely divorced from reality. If I had to bet, I'd say we will lose most textual content from mainstream consumption in the next 5 to 10 years. My guess is that writing will become the equivalent of today's HTML and JavaScript: a source code to be interpreted by the machine to produce a visual representation that people will consume. It'll disappear into the background and will only be touched by professionals.
This is a very baffling thing to say. Its like saying "I don't think fish gills are an effective form of breathing for fish, but it just happened to evolve like that." Reading and writing is an amazing way to communicate things that need to span time. Street signs, postcards, books, literally everything around you that is man made likely has some form of writing on it.
Reading/writing obviously has limitations...like it is difficult to interpret tone in many of these HN comments...but that is hardly a nail in the coffin of the form of communication.
Writing is more durable than it is desirable, and as its durability is matched by video and digital devices, I expect its presence to lessen.
Plenty of people like lots of bad things because we have monkey brains, stop thinking that just because a group likes something, it is good. I watch the behavior day in and day out...people watch HOURS of content per day, and at the end they have synthesized almost none of it. A majority of social video and audio is just a way for people to entertain themselves and a buffer against being alone with their thoughts. I wholeheartedly agree that audio and video can be great learning and communication tools. To say that is what is happening on a majority of social media is extremely misguided.
Adding to that: the critique of writing has a long history going back all the way to Plato. This is not a new topic.
Like I actually can't understand how your argument is: "people are watching more videos, therefore reading is bad". Did you even think that through?
And in case this isn’t already crystal clear (and apparently it isn’t for you): I like books. I like reading. I have studied the history of the printing press and the book much, much more you have, I assure you. I find the transition of technology fascinating and think the internet and video is a similar revolution to the printing press. That is what my comment is about, not your puerile attempt to make me seem like I don’t like reading.
It has nothing to do with young people and a sudden change in human patience. If your young ones are impatient of they read something is disturbing them, but it's definitely not human evolution.
And on a cognitive level reading is superior to video or sound.
I'm pretty skeptical of that claim, but even if it's true, it doesn't really matter if reading is better than watching a video if people prefer to watch videos.
I also specifically said it's not an issue of impatience, but rather a fundamental shifting of media formats.
And maybe mass literacy hasn't been around for millenia, but written form of communication and story telling certainly has.
Seems like you may be a lost cause already.
Not sure what this is supposed to mean. I'm describing what I perceive to be a societal shift, not my personal thoughts on whether I think it's good or bad.
I guess it "wouldn't matter" if in 50 years everyone is just a mush brain on their couch scrolling TikTok getting fed through a brain tube. Yeah...hard to see how it "wouldn't matter".
It is just that video content generate so much more monetization. At least compared to work done. Thus most relevant content is generated as video instead of text. And those generating text are struggling with revenue sources.
Similar things go to many things that would clearly be superior as text, but there simply isn't that much money in something user will quickly skim over. Instead of forced pre-roll adds and sponsorships.
Anybody tell me what are the other realistic options?
Did they ever? I grew up with newspapers, but adults back then were saying much the same then just with books as their example of "things kids don't read these days"[0], to the extent that my mum decided she ought to bribe me to read more[1]. But I also remember reading some claim that most people back then were reading just the headlines of newspapers, and if they were particularly engaged by that, perhaps the first/last paragraphs too.
[0] right before Harry Potter came out.
[1] I can't remember exactly how much any more, but I got at least a few week's worth of pocket money from the New Testament.
What "kids these days" do and don't do has always been a subject of parental concern, but the reality is that people aren't a homogenous group, and being an adult makes you more aware of people who grow up differently than you did.
Just as my mum was concerned about my reading habits (she probably saw a headline about it), so too are you concerned about the current generation's.
My generation was all over the place, and so is today's. The top readers of my generation read widely, most adults when I was a kid didn't read more than the headline; The top readers of the current generation read widely, most adults today don't read more than the headline… and even here, we get comments where people clearly comment without having read the link.
Link and everyone can look, but I sure 'ain't gonna search for this "reliable data" and then try to figure out if what I find is or isn't, in fact, reliable.
> There is an episode of Star Trek where a character is for plot reasons trapped in a shrinking parallel universe. As time passes, people she knows one by one just vanish and she is the only one who seems to notice. Eventually it gets to an absurd point. She asks if it really makes sense if a ship made for a thousand people would have a crew of a few people, and everyone just sort of like shrugs and looks at her like she’s crazy. That’s basically what the last decade of the Internet. It feels like it’s shrinking. Like parts of it are vanishing.
What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name and people did not give that much care to their long term reputations and the fall from that more or less started with facebooks real name policy, or rather when facebook stopped being an glorified phonebook and started being an content platform.
That culture of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" gave rise to an atmosphere of fun that seems to be entirely missing today as everyone is too focused on the hustle of monetization and avoiding controversy to just do silly things.
Add to that that for some reason every large enterprise organization seems to have forgotten how to actually manage and use their own websites preferring instead to blast out using the new "everything for everyone" platforms.
It seems that the society at large wants this. 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world. Reddit's reputation is improving hand in hand with the tightening of their content policies.
That's because without any particular individuals to point the finger to, they just blame the monolith of "anonymous individuals".
People have always feared the unknown, and the obvious coping mechanism is to aggregate it into some tangible form, whether it's the Boogeyman, Baba Yaga, the Devil, Anonymous, or any other villain, to be used as a scapegoat.
See? I can also make claims without any arguments whatsoever.
But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.) The Alfred E. Neuman shtick of disaffected bemusement was stale even when Mad was published on dead trees.
But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being neither clever nor insightful here.
No, in the comment you've originally replied to I have clearly stated a possible explanation of why 4chan has a bad reputation. Please refrain from pointless "no u" comments, and attack my arguments instead.
> But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.)
4chan is not an entity onto itself - it is composed of many individuals, that was the whole point of my post. But because you don't know the identity of those individuals, you just consider them a monolith and put collective blame onto them.
Additionaly, the official rule 3. of 4chan states:
> But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being neither clever nor insightful here.Please refrain from personal insults. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
On /b/, all legal (in the US) content is permitted. It serves as a sort of containment board for the degenerates to shitpost, leaving other boards alone. Nobody takes any content from /b/ seriously, and the nickname for /b/ users is "/b/tards".
In fact, /b/ is just a small part of 4chan, one that most users actually loathe, but which seems to be the most highlighted in public consciousness. Probably due to its complete lack of censorship, which seems to be frowned upon in this day and age.
That's a bold claim. It requires a single counter-example to disprove. I take it seriously, so your statement is empirically wrong. Please retract it.
Perhaps you have some kind of impairment that prevents you from understanding subtleties of informal speech, but I think it's more likely you're just taking a piss.
> I take it seriously
Then you should check out the text under the title on /b/ :)
What evidence would it take to change your mind?
EDIT: you changed your reply to make it less obnoxious, but I won't come back to this discussion regardless.
What are you trying to achieve here, exactly? Did something trigger you to start behaving in this way?
It's a proxy for "Does your response to this topic involve trapped-priors?" Most people aren't willing to reveal or acknowledge they have trapped-priors and so it jumps to the end of the conversation where they simply leave. It's saves my time discussing topics by avoiding interactions with close-minded people.
It, like every other community, has an aggregate identity built from the contributions of the individuals within the community.
> Additionaly, the official rule 3. of 4chan states [racism is only allowed in /b/]
If you honestly believe that /b/ is the only place on 4chan where you will find racist sentiment you need to have your head examined.
I suppose the rules are trying to say that you should avoid such characterizations, but that’s a dubious rule.
Would it be ok to praise the quality of the argument? If so, it should be ok to criticize it as well. Not all arguments are as clear cut as 1+1=2, and there are other criteria by which arguments can be evaluated.
> Would it be ok to praise the quality of the argument? If so, it should be ok to criticize it as well.
Why would the former imply the latter? It is ok to give gifts to people, but not to steal from them.
It’s a claim about the nature of an argument. Do you believe it’s not possible for an argument to be idiotic?
> Why would the former imply the latter?
Because restricting speech that’s critical leads to a degradation of the quality of dialog.
Idiotic arguments exist. So do spurious arguments, disingenuous arguments, bad arguments, pointless arguments, dishonest arguments, and so on. Which of those adjectives would you like to ban when discussing the quality of an argument?
No, I believe that an argument is either valid or invalid. Any other characteristic is meaningless in pursuit of truth.
Consider the meaning of the term "idiotic": something that only an idiot would say. Therefore, "that is idiotic" means "that is something that only an idiot would say", which in turn implies that the person saying it is an idiot.
> Idiotic arguments exist. So do spurious arguments, disingenuous arguments, bad arguments, pointless arguments, dishonest arguments, and so on. Which of those adjectives would you like to ban when discussing the quality of an argument?
The only one I'd like to ban is "idiotic", since it's the only one that insults the person. "Dishonest" is a little tricky, since it's hard to prove someone's intentions or honesty, but depending on the context it might be okay. All the other adjectives are only describing the quality of the argument, without insulting the person - and while meaningless by themselves (what does "bad argument" mean?), I'd consider them fine to be used, as long as further elaboration is included.
Some examples of other adjectives I'd ban are "retarded", "stupid", "foolish", "lazy", "malicious", since they all insult a person or imply bad motivations, without providing any information.
>created: August 16, 2012
>karma: 16769
Dude, you need to take a hard look at yourself. Looking at your last comments, it seems that you've been drinking your own kool-aid and truly believe you have the objective truth about everything. It's either that or you're a keyboard warrior in desperate need for an ego boost.
I'm not sure what "most opinionated" would mean or how'd you determine relative levels, but I would bet whatever metric you chose wouldn't find the most opinionated people on 4chan. Also just because people say things online doesn't mean they actually hold that opinion.
> I 100% agree with them that child and human trafficking is a big issue in this world and some of the most powerful people are definitely involved
Oh, ok, you weren't actually responding to the parent comment at all.
And then they came up with QAnon, not out of any sincere concern for "the children," but just as a shitpost that took off because it was too on the nose, and now legitimate efforts to curb child abuse are being hamstrung by this insane obsession they've bred into the zeitgeist to see trans people as "groomers" and secret pedo conspiracies everywhere.
And yet, even though they'll gladly take credit for it, none of them saw Epstein coming. Sure, one anon posted about Epstein's death before it hit the news. That's about all they can legitimately take credit for, but overall they've done more harm than good.
> they got
> they wanted
> they equate
> and then they
> they'll gladly take credit
4chan is not a person, or even a coherent population.
You want the world to be simple, but it's not, even if, apparently, you never had in your life to face the fact.
If only you’d considered this yourself before posting.
It is sad that the popularity of internet has reached such proportions that people are no longer responsible for what they read by their own choice, but rather people seem to be responsible for what they write, regardless of the fact that anyone can choose not to read it.
Internet posts are just text, yet people act as if we're forcing others to read what we write. Imagine if writing books that make other people feel bad was banned - what a culture would that be.
Between death threats and insults directed at real people - and a fictionary book, there is usually a difference, even though books can be bad as well, if they are directed against certain people (e.g. Mein Kampf).
There was always an underground of filth(even in the pre-internet days) but unless you sought it out you werent actually exposed to it back in the pre-platform days.
It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).
This is so true; on every internet forum or community, there are different moderators, rules and values for the community and on the Facebook for example there is only Facebook and its TOS. You are in the mercy of the Facebook when it comes to the content moderation and setting rules and values for the community.
Eh this kind of discounts how the entire world has changed between now and then.
At one point online was something disconnected from who you were as in IRL identity. Really very few people posted back then (think tens of millions verses billions across the world). When you hung your modem up, that the online world and the real world were disconnected.
That seperated world no longer exists for any number of reasons caused by any number of actors. The real world affects the internet and the internet affects the real world, these are no longer separate entities, but things that are intertwined by billions of connected devices and sensors almost everywhere.
Quite often in the past middle sized sites got blasted by DOS attacks, and if your own small forum got a DOS/DDOS you could suffer some problems. Now, you don't even need an attacker to DOS most small sites, it's pretty damned easy to get search engines trying to index your site to take it off line, or for just random bots to be 99% of your traffic. People moved to big sites to avoid having to be said system administrators from all the crap that moved into the net.
It also doesn't really lead to a blandification of content. The quality of content on the web now is higher than its ever been. The value gained by being able to publish nearly effortlessly to the web without being a tech nerd is outweighed by the value lost in not being able to put a skull playing a trumpet in a site header.
And that's never going away.
Now it's not even a website, but a phone app. I hesitate to click on reddit links unless they're old.* prefixed.
I'm not sure I want to be part of "society at large", although I admit it doesn't seem optional. The establishment of the monoculture has gotten rid of a lot of good in the world (just try finding somewhere to visit without a mcdonalds).
What? Reddit has gone from interesting and nerdy, to circle-jerk, to an insane aslyum. At least for anything remotely political (and political things will often invade hobby subs). I used to use it all day every day, and now I use X instead. Almost entirely 100% -> 0% | 0% -> 100%.
It's the exact feeling I get from the internet today, we have lost the interesting content being put out in a decentralised manner, the quirky websites, the passionate community ones for product reviews (like DPReview), everything has become commercialised, lots of blogs are just fronts for some brand/company/individual trying to peddle their own brand through visibility.
It's just sad.
Not trying to denigrate the third generation there, it's just that for them it's a mature product, like a TV or a car. They feel no need to tinker with what BigCorp is selling them.
I love it. Though FaceTokGram rolls off the tongue easier.
Those users were large numbers of mainstream non-geeky people, but they used websites on desktop computers, not through the walled garden of facebook on a phone.
Wasn't the internet solely the domain of the (techno) elite for a very long time? It's the masses that have wrecked what we had, the the "new" elite profiting off of them. Maybe the societal gains outweigh what we lost, but if you were part of the original elite 20+ years ago, you're now in a much worse place.
For example: the New York Times ran an editorial in the 90s about how the internet would have a similar effect to fax machines. They are an elite organization and didn’t care about the internet much then. Now, twenty five years later, they do care a lot about what’s on the internet.
Who would’ve thought using legal fucking names online would be bad
I remember reading one of these blogs, and saw something like "You have an obligation to advertise your content to potential users", the very idea of which is genuinely insane. Imagine trying to run a banner ad linking to your blog. But, those are the people who will play the SEO game, and they're the people you'll find in the first 2 pages of search.
I think most probably blog search engine wouldn't be viable as a commercial product but some hobbyist can definitely pull it off. Good example is listennotes.com a hobbyist search engine for podcasts.
I had a decent idea for a blog search engine, I will try to pull it off if time and health serve me.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149
One of the magic bits of the earlier web(s) is that it was all new, participation involved an element of non-replicable self-selection, and the parasites hadn't had enough time to adapt and colonize it.
I'm not even sure if it's will be possible to have a community of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" in the future. It'll probably get swamped with AI generated garbage, like the crochet groups posted about a week or so ago. The human participants will get overwhelmed trying to figure out what's fake.
Honestly, like many kinds of forest, what the Web probably needs is a good burning, controlled or otherwise.
The basic problem: make it easy and cheap to participate, and the scam artists will inevitably gravitate to it, and eventually choke the life out of it. Add enough friction to discourage the spammers, and you drive away real users as well.
Older forums are still around, or the fediverse. If you're participating on them, you're part of the solution.
Probably in all causes because being unable to legally make money from your activities scares away folks that just want to cash in on the latest grift, and don't care a single damn about quality.
There’s no debate any more, just banning and shadow banning. Forums used to be spicy! Now they are nothing but toxic positivity or bland nothingness.
Freedom is really just the right to do or say the "wrong" thing, which is the "spicy" stuff, IMHO. To me they're one and the same. No spice indicates a lack of freedom of speech.
IMO, the unpleasantness of mobile web usage does a great job of discouraging me from walking around with my face buried in my phone. For me, the phone is more of a multi-purpose tool: camera, alarm clock, timer, calendar, weather radar, hotspot for my laptop, navigator, music player, etc. - and I don't care much to use it for random surfing. At most, I might look up something while I'm shopping.
Still, that single phone replaces a whole slew of single-purpose devices. Does it replace them perfectly? No, not at all, but my pockets only have so much room.
without the threat of "we'll kick you out and you'll never be able to get back in", these sort of communities don't work. there's just too many assholes on the internet now.
Perhaps you meant to ask "why has the signal-to-noise ratio dropped on the modern web?"...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/928428.We_ve_Got_Blog
There are more independent websites than you could ever visit in a lifetime. Who cares if they "lost" to the social networks relatively speaking.
100%. I had the exact same impression at the time.
Another maybe related question is, where have all the social networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life on the internet and other people read it. But now it seems everyone's trying to craft their online presence to maximize attention. For example Instagram is no longer a social network, it's a self-promotion network. Getting likes is not socializing.
That fell out of favor when too many people's lives or relationships or employment were ruined by this. People are more savvy now and know the risks of posting their personal info on the internet for the world to see.
https://www.evilmadscientist.com
So relatively if you look at the numbers no one is using websites anymore, but I'd be willing to bet that some of us old internet users still use the internet much as we used to.
The websites I still visit are mostly old message boards.
And of course I visit a lot of blogs but they're always linked from a message board. I don't subscribe to any blogs but that's just personal preference, I never did before either.
For a large part of users, the internet is not websites, message boards or blogs. It's the four or five content aggregation pages that they got started on, because those invest huge sums of money into keeping people on their platforms. (And into SEO to lead them back to their platforms, should they dare to venture out).
I think the author is very well aware that message boards and blogs still exist. They just don't have a prominent spot in today's internet world anymore. And you bet if any of them dares to produce quality content, it will be ripped and regurgitated ad nauseam on content aggregators like TikTok and Reddit.
The OP's blog would get a lot more engagement if it had a comment form underneat
It was not a mistake at all, and you stated exactly why. Spam.
Not just spam.
Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam.
A never ending torrent of shit. An ocean of it.
And that's before the mean spirited comments, trolls, outright illegal posts and more. Oh, and if you post anything really controversial, might as well get behind cloudflare now before you get blasted off the internet.