And now, the only thing that comes closest in chatting is Reddit/Twitter. It is more of a QA forum though and not really real-time.
Oh the good ol' days, anyone here miss them too?
Yeah I think I actually prefer the Netflix experience.
I realized how true that was when i went back living in the same area as when i was a kid. Everything seemed duller , narrower, and noiser than when i was a kid, and yet it was exactly the same place.
+1.
Usenet is still there, and a few groups are still being used for academic discussions. But many other groups have almost no "legitimate" users anymore, and have been filled with spam messages.
But the real show stopper today is that, since a community does not exist in these groups anymore, one or two crazy people can completely control and dominate a group. Recently I tried to explore the present day Usenet, and I found a conspiracy theorist can keep yelling at everyone in a historically reputable infosec newsgroup. Or you can have two college professors debating about creationism in a boring way for half a month. My conclusion is, Usenet still has some good uses, but is generally worthless today for most discussions.
I was on IRC since the time EFnet had about 2000 users during the day (1993 or so). I left when it had turned into this:
> one or two crazy people can completely control and dominate a group.
op-wars, annoying admins abusing their own, often academic servers, is what destroyed IRC for me. Reddit is the same for groups where various political/ideological views collide, only same-interest groups are worthwhile.
MMOGs possibly made IRC unattractive for many people too...
I definitely feel some nostalgia for certain aspects of the "internet, circa 1997".
But do consider that IRC is still alive, as well as many other kinds of "chat rooms" today. There are still XMPP based chat services, and you have things like Slack, Gitter, Mastodon, Riot, etc., etc. And heck, if you look hard enough you can still find BBS's up and running, many accessible via Telnet. I wouldn't be half surprised to find some Fidonet stuff still going on somewhere.
The spam has been stopped recently, at least where I’m hanging out.
Matrix/Riot is cool (the redesign just launched - https://riot.im/app ) and has the same concept as IRC of a universe of chat rooms you can just join (Vs separated workspaces like Slack).
Discord too, though perhaps more tech/gaming audiences than the wider mix of IRC in the 90s, and again the topic specific servers are disconnected from each other
On most platform, you just needed your nickname of choice and an email address, and you were good to go. If something didn't go well, you could just come up with another username (and maybe another email address) and start anew.
You're looking for Discord. Find an open server on one of the index sites or ask your friends if they can invite you to ones they hang out in.
That said, we also grew up, and now I'm sure a lot of those conversations would seem as inane as the average Discord shitpost. Which, tbh, is terrible... The anime superstimulus girls are grotesque in their exaggerated neoteny, the memes are artless cos the baseline is now what you can glue together on a phone, and the background murmur is gossip pulled in from social media, like a hen party on coke.
I have managed to meet enough interesting people over the years that I can still sustain interest even at age 35, but it's tough. Most people my age are too busy tending their kids, which has permanently distracted them from hanging out, and has turned many into insufferably bland soccer moms.
For the remaining participants it also takes some serious commitment to actually engage in good faith and not let calcified attitudes trump it, for the topics you wanna talk about at middle age. Cos it turns out there's a pretty big difference between saying you're tolerant and open minded among a group of samey youngsters who know jack, and actually being those two things.
That said, at middle age you also just know better what you want. No amount of discussion will convince me sportsball is for me... Most movies are formulaic and predictable because that's what the masses respond to... Math and science is hard and it's taught entirely wrong but the people who can fix it have better things to do than be teachers... SQL is kinda shit and mainly serves as job security for the data priests and constabularies.
(But hey, I'm @geodesic#8759 on discord, hmu if you're interesting)
I do not believe prefacing your argument with a hedge in this manner is necessary :) Barrier to entry and positive attractors, including, in the case of the early web, academic mindset, for early technological adopters are real phenomena. cf. Eternal September
Huh. I guess you just explained why I'm generally disenchanted by cinema. All I can stand watched is bad or quirky movies because only those satisfy my need for novelty these days.
It seems close enough to the same thing, but for today's older kids, I'd have to imagine they are all on Facebook or whatever social network is current.
It is not flashy, but it was the way me and many other kids were introduced to programming through building games involving Lua and their in game GUI.
Engaging people on Twitter in any kind of serious discussion is like doing it in meatspce Times Square. You’ll find reasonable people, but it can quickly shift to crazy or even dangerous.
That’s the downside of the public square.
For practical purposes, I miss Usenet more. Topic-oriented discussion, my choice of client. Instead I'm forced into proprietary opinion graveyards. (Like, well, here)
I also kind of miss the days of movies on VHS, physically going and renting movies, music on CDs, not having millions of media choices accessible within seconds.
Though I have to say, I tried reliving the CD experience a little while ago. I dug out my CD collection and bought a second hand CD player. It just wasn't the same anymore. The magic wasn't there.
Some things are best left to nostalgic thoughts.
I could semi memorize my local blockbuster and do a walking scan for stuff that was new or caught my eye. They also picked a genre for a movie. Netflix you can see same movie in drama/comedy and thriller. Just makes their catalog look bigger and harder to sort through.
I don’t use Netflix through a touch device. Only on TV via Apple TV or amazon fire so there may be some experience I’m missing out on.
Wow, I find it infinitely superior to video stores, besides almost every movie or series ever made being instantly available, and many reviews of them all!
Maybe I can help with that. Lists are good, google lists of..whatever you're looking for. e.g. best movies ever/comedies/european series etc. I use IMDb a lot, I read a page or two of user reviews of a movie and almost always know whether I will like the movie or not, and am almost never very surprised by what I think of it. There are a few critics I regularly read in External Reviews on IMDb, e.g. from Ebert, Urban Cinefile, Moria - but have learnt to mostly trust the user reviews instead. IMDb lists are a great way to discover new movies, either googling lists or seeing what lists the movies you love are in. (NB the movie score on IMDb is mostly no guide to anything.) When I find a director or actor or screenwriter I like, I check out their other stuff.
..If all else fails, you could (I hope) do worse than check out the movies & series I've given an 'outstanding' star to on http://www.adamponting.com/movies/ :-) Good luck.