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Comment by coffeefirst | Hacker News Reader

> Anyone else feel like the golden age of internet services is behind us, and this shitty version is the only path ahead of us?

Kind of.

But I also use Fastmail. And Fastmail is shockingly, mindboggling good.

And I basically have the tools I need to work from home in perpetuity. While I have lots of things to critique about Slack or Google Docs, I don't have to spend an hour or more a day in traffic anymore, so that's cool. Also Video chat actually works now, which is crazy if you think about it.

I just bought an album from an obscure artist off Bandcamp. It was seamless. And it comes in FLAC if that's your jam.

Speaking of which I've been meaning to run to a neighborhood bakery today and it took 3 seconds to confirm they're still open.

Is the party over? Actually, I'm not sure.

Social media has run its course and it's awful. But social media is not and never has been the web, despite their power grabs.

View on HN

/me nods while switching from Safari to TikTok

According to Screen Time, I spend five times longer on TikTok than Safari. HN comes in at just 39 minutes over the last week. The two possibilities are that I’m consumed by the social media cycle, or that I learn more from TikTok than any other source. Since I love learning, empirically social media seems to be the web.

Don’t slay the messenger; I’m just as nervous about this as you. But we’ve all seen what happens to those who cling to old trends, hoping the golden ages will return. It rarely goes well.

For evidence, I flicked through about ten nonsense videos just now before landing on this gem: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdtq8Mmc/?k=1

I like the web. It has its purpose. But one could also say it’s served its purpose. The power grab exists because it wasn’t serving a very real gap in the transmission of knowledge.

I agree. I think it's fair to say the entertainment/time-vortex/scrolling element of the web more or less moved on from the open web to mobile apps etc a long time ago and there's no reason to think it will come back. I'm not even on tiktok, but there's nothing open web about my Apple TV either.

If you’d like to give it a try, I’m currently watching a lovely stream where an Irish artist is drawing a pug. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdtqCc7E/

The smaller streams seem to be the most interesting, which is sort of the inverse of twitch. Where else can you pass the time while seeing an artist at work?

The history content was the real surprise. I was glued to the history channel as a kid, and watching its demise was a sad point in life. But it seems to be reviving itself in an ad hoc way; there are dozens of channels that go into detail about topics I’d never heard of.

+1 |or that I learn more from TikTok than any other source

You learn from TikTok, for me thats the place to see hot girls(arbitrary).

But,

|empirically social media seems to be the web. '

is true.

Learn has such positive connotation and I want to highlight how a sentence with a not so positive connotation looks like.

The key is to use the “not interested” button. You have to long press on a video. They make it hard to discover, and it’s the only way to get away from the phenomenon you pointed out. Takes maybe 30 minutes of tuning, and I’m also convinced that yesterday’s “not interested” presses inform the content that shows up today, so give it a bit of time. But it’s hard to gauge how any of these black boxes work.

You doxxed yourself sharing that tiktok link.

> Social media has run its course and it's awful. But social media is not and never has been the web, despite their power grabs.

Is this really true? I feel like there are some good social media sites still out there, like certain small parts of reddit and this website we're both commenting on.

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