Newbie: "Remember the time when 4chan was good?"
Veteran: "4chan was never good."
"4chan" can be easily replaced with "Twitter" or "The Internet" here.
2. There's a universal tendency for people to reminisce fondly about the good old days and contrast them with the ostensibly bad present. It has nothing to do with the truth. It is simply a syndrome of getting old. People were doing it 3000 years ago.
I'm afraid that whilst there's some truth in what you've said, I think you're far wide of the mark here.
It's not about getting old. It's about the fact that, and I wouldn't pretend to understand the mechanics here, for whatever reason when too many people get involved in something it changes. It might get better, or it might get worse, or it might get better and then get worse, or whatever.
In this case I think the point that twitter, or whatever, somehow gets "spoiled" is perhaps valid. I would argue I've seen a similar thing with facebook. It used to be people posting updates about themselves and was a good way to keep up with people; now it's largely people sharing pre-created content - 10th rate jokes and memes, political petitions, news - real or otherwise - from a parasitic ecosystem of sites predicated upon social sharing.
That spoiling can manifest itself in a variety of ways, and can take either a short or a long time to happen. The point is that a large influx of newcomers into an existing community, business, special interest group, or whatever, can radically alter the dynamics of that group in a way that is unpredictable, and sometimes not good.
And I apologise for the slightly rambling nature of this comment - haven't had time to edit it into shape.
Nothing to do with the truth? Maybe in your cases, but in others it very much does. In the good ol' days Democrats and Republicans weren't as hostile and unwilling to work together as they are now. In the good ol' days it used to snow way more in some places than it does now. In the good ol' days many places were less polluted than they are now. In the good ol' days people had to learn to actually ask each other out instead of swiping right on their phones. In the good ol' days businesses had longer-lasting relationships with their employees and didn't view them as disposable goods. Yeah, totally nothing to do with the truth, just people imagining things.
LA is way less polluted than it used to be. People used to go to speed dating events where they have a pool of maybe 15 people who might be compatible. Democrats and Republicans both used to be racist and sexist. The weather in New England is much more pleasant in winter than it used to be. These days it isn't a black mark against your name if you've changed jobs 3 times because you wanted to try something new.
All about perspective. If you want to reminisce, go ahead, but there are two sides to the coin.
(b) My point was not that the good ol' days were paradise and we're all rotting in hell now. My point was that old people are not necessarily making $h!1 up in drawing comparisons with the good ol' days, in contrast with what the parent said. I thought this was obvious but evidently not.
If things are distributed between bad and good, it doesn't matter how that distribution changes over time if the bad things from the past are forgotten in the comparison. It is still dishonest.
Remembering the good vs the bad probably aligns with someone being naturally upbeat or sad (glass full vs half-full personality).
Also I'm skeptical of that Democrats and Repubs line. In the good old days they got into fist fights on the congress floor.
As for the last part, it's hard to tell if you're referring to the 1800s or the 1900s as the "good old days" where Congressmen got into fist fights, but anyway, some digestible material: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/polarized-po...
The "4chan parable" is saying that though.
I was addressing part (2) of that comment.
This is the kind of thing the GP is talking about, and you've fallen into the trap. The rise of OH&S is a clear counterpoint to your statement here. For example, about a hundred people died during the building of the Hoover Dam. Such a death rate would be unthinkable in the modern era.
> In the good ol' days people had to learn to actually ask each other out instead of swiping right on their phones.
And if you were gay or even asexual, you had to pretend that you weren't or you'd be ostracised. Even to the point of marrying someone straight and making both of you miserable. And if you were pregnant, you were expected to hide yourself from public view, because being visible pregnant used to be distasteful.
> In the good ol' days many places were less polluted than they are now.
Good old weasel word 'many'. Many places are less polluted now than they were then.
The point is that you're cherrypicking just the good stuff, which is exactly what the GP is talking about. Few people would actually be better off if you turned the clock back 40 years, especially women and minorities.
Twitter is like the planet. Dying. Slowly. But. Steadily.
Stephen is a big boy and can make big boy choices. I still don't get the infatuation with the social media, unless your livelihood depends on it (e.g. marketing your products/services, or plain and simple you ARE facebook or twitter or ... that make money out of these products)(products = people).
In both cases, a lot of it has to do with increased censorship. A large number of people left 4chan for 8chan after moot started engaging in fairly aggressive political censorship. Who knows what his motivation was - maybe an effort to appeal more to advertisers, maybe a change in beliefs about freedom of expression - either way, the effect was the same. There was a big exodus to other chan sites.
Twitter has a similar censorship problem; many of the twitter accounts I followed, which were mildly offensive but nothing compared to the worst of the site, were silently banned without justification. The only connection I can find between them is that they were political in a way Twitter didn't like. Unfortunately, twitter is too big for there to be an effective exodus, so the whole internet is just worse off.
Not all nostalgia is misplaced. The internet is unquestionably changing, and the trend seems to be that as a system becomes more popular, it becomes more hostile to viewpoints too far from its median. Reddit, twitter, Facebook, etc. have all been extremely ban-happy in recent years, moreso than ever before.
That's not a current trend, that's just statistics. The larger the sample is, the closer it's median is to the median of the whole set of data. It was always this way.
However, people can still build their own smaller on-line communities. With sites like Reddit, it's easier than even. You have r/TumblrInAction, r/ShitRedditSays, and everything in between.
I think there is more than just this: any community/social network that grows from thousands to millions of users has to make changes in order to scale (for example, changes in the moderation). Whatever they are, these changes are likely to be a disappointment for the oldest users who join the community for what it was in the first place.
Another plausible explanation is that, as these communities become more popular, the goal of the companies supporting them often shifts from the original goal of creating a nice and attractive community, to a new more ambiguous goal of keeping the growth high while generating profit (thus adding ads, tracking etc.)
Often there's more to it: early adopters of anything tend to be of a different temperament than the people who come after.
Twitter could clean itself if they weren't so afraid of the wannabe Nazi crews + follower bots, and the effects cleaning up would have on their already bad-looking user metrics.
Here's an interesting essay about this effect: http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
“I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.” ― Alan Moore, Watchmen
> There isn't.
Cool, I'm sure you managed to convince him now.
There's a tipping point, and I guess Twitter has gone over it.
And to those claiming that this author is making concrete points about twitter, I would add the observation of an outsider who never understood the draw of twitter that it was always overwhelmingly a) cynical sarcasm that can be easily encapsulated in few characters, b) public disagreement. The medium itself favored caustic commentary. The purpose of Twitter has always been negative and pandering to the choir.
Halcyon Days: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/halcyon_days
Days of Yore: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/days_of_yore