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Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

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

"but if you post more than a couple of replies they get collapsed up"

Forums do the same thing, just with pagination instead of collapsing. Newcomers to a thread or FB post aren't going to read through the last 40 pages of comments, but the option to do so is still available.

Exactly this. They just got old.

I started playing on the internet in 91, I used IRC mainly, it was exciting and fun talking with people around the world, not many people were on the internet..... to me it went down hill from there, it started being more of a tool with the various phases of new amusing things :)

other people started at various points and they would go through a similar thing, it's a great toy that slowly becomes a tool but you can still use it as a toy, but often less inclined to do so, mainly because the toy changes shape all the time and the way you originally played with it morphs into something else.

I may be wrong on this, but lately I find the Reddit hivemind has gone into overdrive. On any given sub, you're either "with us" or "against us".

It's gotten to the point that making a perfectly benign comment that couldn't possibly be seen as taking a side or disagreeing with anyone's opinion is insta-downvoted or attacked, assuming it's not parroting whatever the sub's current talking points are.

I'm not even referring to the political/news subreddits, which would be understandably partisan. Other subs that used to be about the topic at hand have started coalescing into us/them teams.

The main subs are super super stupid. Pun after pun. Maybe the parent comments are a bit thoughtful but that's it.

A 30-something is old? I feel like we have differing age categorizations.

Then again, I'm 36.

For my part, I've spent less time on things that don't matter and more time on things that do matter. So while yes, the web has lost its luster from my teens and twenties, I think my general sense of life fulfillment has broadened considerably.

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