Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
jarredsumner.com
jarredsumner.com
Mind expanding stuff.
I feel like today all of that has moved to silos like tiktok and instagram, in extreme short form formats that are easily disposable - so almost no one creates truly great "compilations" of stuff, directories, blogs, galleries or whatever - it's all just streams of disconnected content free floating towards oblivion in a few days.
This has made everything bite-sized and fragmented everyones attention as nothing is getting polished or curated to perfection.
I miss people polishing stuff, then just letting it sit out there for people to enjoy. Today everything is hidden after a few days - so the rare gems disappear too while the algorithms and search engines favour the easily devourable in the first place.
We need something like Stumbleupon back, does that exist? I wonder why it wasn't viable.
I did this for quite awhile using bookmarks, and the link rot is real. If 10% of my historical bookmarks were valid, I’d be pleasantly surprised.
I'd say I could just use archive.org (or similar), but their (admittedly necessary) respect of robots.txt makes their archive incomplete.
I haven't had the time to figure out the details of how the pieces should be glued together.
I feel like Reddit doesn't really have links anymore. The subreddits that have external links are usually spam subreddits which humans don't visit.
The human-inhabited subreddits seem to mostly be favoring selftext, images, youtube videos, maybe wikipedia, and possibly some image hosts (but they are falling out of favor since imgur turned to shit). Very rarely do they seem to link to other websites.
Could we come up with a privacy-preserving equivalent to stumbleupon today?
The big downside was that, because it was turned on by default, a whole bunch of people who didn’t actually want it had it foisted upon them, so it got a very bad reputation right out the gate. Right algorithm, bad execution.
Because for the most part, people making content would rather earn money for their content than not earn money. The silos of TikTok and Instagram and YouTube allow for sufficiently low transaction costs such that this market of advertisers interested in buying attention and content creators interested in buying money can exist.
Maybe stumbleupon was too early, but the fact that the app ecosystem makes it much more difficult to copy content makes the silos much more appealing to both content creators and advertisers.
There is Patreon, Substack, Youtube and others that does work, the problem lies in the curation and personalisation that seems to have gone out the window replaced by algos and simple designs with bland and uninspired designs and concepts.
Even music apps are disappointing. Sometimes they do well, but most of the time it seems not. I play a radio station for Mat Corby, which is a pretty chill downtempo vibe, and the app throws in stuff from my library that has no relation--like Kanye West's Jesus Walks. Literally did that multiple times. Those vibes could not be more different.
Maybe cataloging music is a difficult problem, but there was a time (maybe 2010?) when YouTube would efficiently suggest music that had a vibe to what I was listening to, and it helped me find many artists I listed to now.
Edit: And a time when Apple's Genius was not a bad house party DJ
I love hopping in and hitting the "surprise me" every once in a while, and reading some obscure webpage written by an actual person with a passion for a subject. In the past I've seen a site dedicated to the soundtrack for a film series (I can't remember which), not even necessarily streaming the soundtrack or something, but just a bunch of articles about every facet of these soundtracks.
Just now I got linked to a page about Kodak Photo CDs
https://mebious.neocities.org/Layer/Wierd.html
It's a Thought Experiments Lain website
P.S. There absolutely is definitely going to be sound coming through speakers. Fair heads up.
Landed on some HAM radio operator's personal text-only site and then a site about birds in some far off place in Nova Scotia: http://www.capebretonbirds.ca/.
http://www.rechenmaschinen-illustrated.com/
It's a site full of photos and descriptions of antique calculators!
In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.
The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.
In high school my friends and I were on a team for a robotics/programming competition run by NASA and MIT that involved programming 3d models of these SPHERES to do some action in a virtual space against an opponent. But if you made it to the final round, you got to watch your code get executed by ACTUAL SPHERES on the INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION. We won 2 years in a row, and made it to the final round 3 times (while I was on the team, I think they made it to the final round once the year before I joined). I doubt I'll ever do anything nearly that cool ever again in my actual career now.
Cant wait to try it.
I like this clone.
It would have to support mobile, perhaps have a nice editor like the Medium mobile app had.
[0]Computational advertising for print in the very early nineties...)
Edit: a last gasp website I absolutely considered Sui Generis and was invaluable in the graphics world was Drawn.ca . I'd be immensely grateful to hear of any mirrors or archive.
Could that reduce demand for marketing and advertising in general? Maybe the tighter market will drive up demand for more aggressive data capture? Where does all that leave social sites and content creators who but their empire selling fast fashion an overpriced gaming accessories during a time when access to money was easier?
There's a ton of cool stuff going on on the internet, much even public, but the ethic by which things are shared still seems to me to resemble these insights: https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web Thinking of things as small social niches is helpful in figuring out where the best bits are.
[1] https://maya.land :)
Here's mine: https://moonjump.app
One problem is that these things get lost in the timeline. So I made a StumbleUpon for Twitter threads [0]. Check it out!
O@https://mood.surf/build/routes/tweets/$tweetId-ID4B42CB.js:1:8106
Zi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:64683
li@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:74110
bs@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:104095
Kf@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:104026
st@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:103886
yi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:7:100770
yi@[native code]
@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50511
@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:1:4097
_s@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50458
we@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50393
Ve@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:7:98358
bi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:69948
bi@[native code]
onChange@https://mood.surf/build/_shared/chunk-23IGV2EQ.js:9:31745
u@https://mood.surf/build/_shared/chunk-23IGV2EQ.js:9:18647
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asyncFunctionResume@[native code]
@[native code]SU relied on individual human curators to discover worthy new web pages instead of trying to crawl the web in bulk. Our most passionate users, the people who would submit great new URLs, tag URLs, rate heavily, and curate good collections, were heavy users of our XUL based Firefox extension. We were never able to build an extension as featureful post-XUL and that hurt new content acquisition and categorization.
The linked content we served to users on the web had to be iframeable. That described most of the web in the early years of SU. By the time of the shutdown, most new sites and even many established sites couldn't be displayed in iframes any more. It would have been technically possible to replicate most of the iframe experience without iframes by serving up our own crawled copies of pages, but then we would have been infringing copyright. Iframes allowed SU to show a third party page without actually copying it.
Over time, more sites disallowed crawling via robots.txt or by thwarting them without prior declaration by rejecting "crawler-looking" requests that didn't come from Google.
Our mobile apps allowed us to serve content in a webview even if it wasn't iframeable, but mobile platforms inherently excluded a lot of the "weird and wonderful" stuff that people loved SU for. For example, our online games category contained mostly Flash games. Even most of the non-Flash games assumed either keyboard or mouse access; few of them worked well on a phone's touch screen. Similar problems applied to other interactive content (simulations, interactive visualizations). Take away the interactive content and SU started to look more like just another app for passive scrolling.
Web pages became increasingly encrusted with ads, nags, and tracking scripts. I was the final developer responsible for maintenance on our Android app. 95% of the performance complaints we received about the app were, in truth, complaints about the analytics and ads an individual recommended web page was loading. This was also the source of 95% of the complaints about ads that we received. SU monetized itself with interstitial ads between recommended web pages. Every ad running on a recommended page was put there by the site owner, not us. But negative reviews and customer emails blamed us for the battery-killing, device-heating, content-obscuring ads running on-page. The ad problem was much less severe for people who used the web site instead of mobile apps, since they were largely power users who had ad blockers installed, but see previous problems about iframes and Firefox plugins.
Consolidation toward siloed content platforms certainly didn't help either. But I think that SU would have been able to keep going until the present day if not for the problems mentioned above. Some of them seem like mere happenstances of history; I could imagine Flash living a lot longer if it hadn't been a notorious source of exploitable security holes. Other things, like long-form articles getting increasingly barnacled with ads, nags, analytics, and paywalls, seem like a more inevitable outcome of the collapse of old-media print revenue.
One thing I've idly pondered since SU shut down is just recommending weird-old-web content that's findable in the Wayback Machine yet missing from the modern internet. The beauty would be two-fold: it's likely to be cleaner content in the first place, and you can transform it (e.g. running Reader Mode over it server-side) without worrying about the site owners coming after you for copyright infringement. Or at least not worrying as much. It seems like marginalia_nu has managed to find a goodly amount of content that still lives so maybe resorting to the Wayback Machine isn't necessary at all.
You can no longer deliver the full StumbleUpon experience through a web browser, at least not legally. The tightening technical constraints make it impossible to replicate what we could do 10 years ago. Of course now it's also harder for someone to enroll your machine in a botnet because you played a game, or steal your passwords because you installed a browser extension, so those things are to the better. But increasing attention to security and control also make it harder to offer "fun and weird" experiences of various kinds.
Also have to just realize the web is now public transport where it used to be exclusive. It’s like flying in 1962 versus 2022
Doesn't YT share some ad revenue with you if you're over a certain amount of views? :)
My YT watching tends to be around DIY stuff, how to, engineering and home/construction. These are people that in past would have made high quality blogs with tutorials but now just make videos. I’m consistently impressed by the storytelling and production value. Even if they technically receive an ad share I still think they’re amateur. There are a few that have crossed over into massive popularity and it’s probably significant but that’s not the norm. Even in the old days, people put ads on their tutorial pages and a lot of blogs so it’s no different, to me.
I remember when I first showed my mum how to use a computer, StumbleUpon (the FF add-on) was one of the first things I installed. She was hooked! And then she'd email me every time she saw something interesting - which was every 5 minutes...
I guess now the equivalent is your mum tagging you on Facebook?
(Thankfully my mum's not on social media)
I've spent the last year or so building tools and algorithms specifically to dig up "fun and weird". It's still there: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
If your primary mechanism is Hacker News, the internet is going to look like it's dominated by a bunch of startups and open source projects.
If your primary mechanism is Twitter, the internet is going to be dominated by big-name thought leaders, there will appear to be a lot of outrage and inflamed conflict, maybe some culture wars stuff will stay on your radar.
If your primary mechanism is Google, then a bunch of huge websites are going to be extremely prominent: Wikipedia, Goodreads, WebMD, Pinterest, Stackoverflow, etc. It's also going to look like every blog is just a bunch of spam.
If your primary mechanism is Facebook, then the web will look like a bunch of tabloid news articles, try-hard viral videos, minions memes.
and so on and so forth.
Perhaps it is the way we think about the internet that has also changed...
Back in the day, when I wanted to find something on the internet, I knew I was going to have to dig and search and explore. My mind expected this experience.
Since web 2.0, my mind doesn't work the same way.
The fact that MySpace was mainstream and allowed for HTML/CSS hacking did exactly what the article said -- it tricked a generation of teenagers into learning how to do that "weird internet stuff."
For the most part, if you want to do anything like that now you're gonna be stuck figuring out domains and hosting and whatnot which isn't nearly as fun as typing some HTML into the platform you and your friends already use. So not as many people are going to do it.
I remember laying out my page like a pink and black newspaper. All that work for no one to read lol.
But now it is essentially my career
Police state utopia!
Recently I wanted to find information on hacking a device I had obtained - but of course any search query I could throw at search engines only yielded ways to buy it or low-effort reviews. I tried marginalia but it seems like the index wasn't quite large enough for my purpose yet.
In other words, it's a bunch of dead websites and there is little incentive to create anything out of the ordinary.
For example, browsing a website that looks original, but is likely abandoned is a very different experience from browsing it in the 90s or early 00s when it was a part of something big, new and exciting. Even if the content is identical. The same principle applies to authoring.
I have seen countless claims that all the technology that someone could use in the 90s is still available. Regardless of whether it's true or not (mostly not), it misses the point. The social project that was web 1.0 is now defunct.
Paradoxically, the only way to create something equivalent to old-school web now is to invent something entirely new.
Web 1.0 was and still is a fringe project by and for oddballs. Just like most people in the '90s didn't know how to get on the web, most people today can't find their way past google and social media. In that regard, it's very much still the same.
The algorithm aggressively promotes freshness (things posted in the past few hours for certain queries!) and 10+ minute long videos.
Every algorithm change directly impacts what creators, create, because no one wants to put in a whole lot of work for something to never be seen.
If, for example, the ideal format for a joke or video is 3 minutes, that either gets disappeared from public view or becomes part of a longer video.
The real answer, in my opinion, is that current recommendation engines prioritize profit rather than quality or innovation. Or perhaps their evaluation metrics are so bad that their goal is misunderstood. Or perhaps those who stand to profit have become too adept at gaming algorithms (or human psychology e.g. lewd thumbnails) that they degrade results.
...or perhaps we all suffer from nostalgia and forget how terrible the results were of yesteryear.
Who knows, all I know is I feel disappointed in what the internet has become. Even this thread is really just an ad, hijacking our biases and climbing the HN ranks accordingly.
I mostly agree, but there are some counterexamples that provide very in depth, quality information and have gotten popular because of it. Off the top of my head, Ben Eater, Sebastian Lague, 3Blue1Brown, and Reducible.
I think it's still very possible to get stuff that doesn't fit into the algorithm to take off if you make it interesting and high quality :)
The expert/nerd internet was pioneering, weird, edgy, cooperative. The internet for the masses is...different.
You'll see the same effect in movies, following "safe" formulas. Every movie must have a romantic side story, no matter how irrelevant. It must deliver to the broadest audience possible. And of course, nothing should be thought-provoking, keep it middle of the road.
Check out musical charts, songs are so repetitive that they seem AI generated.
I've found another recent example in F1 racing. It's a pretty technical sport that used to have a fairly limited following. Now the thing is exploding and there's friction between the "original" fans and the clueless idiots spoiling the well (not my words).
As soon as you have the masses on board, this obviously also invites a heavy commercialization of any space, with goals entirely opposite to the original spirit of the internet.
Concluding, the only way to get it back, is to be elitist. Create well defined spaces, heavily curated in both members and content.
Yes, the Internet of yesteryear was more interesting to our type of people, but it had no appeal whatsoever to anyone else. The world is better off today with an Internet that billions find fun and useful, even if it's way less fun for us specifically.
There's plenty of room for both groups. In a way the internet is limitless. A lot of that weirdness still exists, it's just incredibly hard to find.
2000: creating content and fostering an online community in private was seen as super nerdy.
2022: binge watching TikTok in public and grown-ass adults fighting over Internet Points is "normal."
And, yeah, the content is much worse. It's a lot of overly-socialized people taking care to say the things they should say so the great Algorithm gives them more Internet Points. And those Internet Points warp the process of creation, especially when they're tied to money.
Like the article said, it's all taken way too seriously, and there's no going back.
We don't have to compromise for the huge social platforms or to make money for them.
Turns post into an advertisement
It’s fucking GREAT really, furry is poison to megacorps and there’s a ton of room for individual creators to thrive without corporations relentlessly optimizing their cash extraction at huge scales.
One thing I love about the greater furry community is that a LOT of art gets aggregated to a certain site, which I am sure you are aware of, that puts high value on proper sourcing/tagging. (And still respects the wishes of the creators)
Maybe unrelated: Do you think furry commissions are so expensive because so many furries are wealthy, or do furries pursue wealth to pay for commissions?
Furry art is a significant part of my income and trust me: furry commissions are crazy cheap. Yes, even that one guy charging in the low four figures - he does some pretty complex work that I'd charge four figures for too, if I was willing to work that long on a client's piece.
I could be making a lot more money if I'd stayed in the animation industry, or if I was hunting corporate illustration work. But then I'd have to deal with much tighter deadlines, restrictive style guides, clients who really have no idea what they want and no idea how to articulate how what I just spent a while working on fails to capture what they want, figuring out how to make the lucrative but incredibly boring world of, say, standardized shipping pallets visually interesting, and a whole bunch of office politics. Drawing happy animal-headed people having a good time is a lot more fun. It's nice when a corporate gig comes my way now and then because it can pay a few months rent, but it definitely takes its toll in the amount of tedious bullshit I have to deal with.
I'd also maybe have things like "health insurance" and "a retirement fund" but, hey. It's a tradeoff.
looked up your art, pretty cool style youve got going.
And yeah, corporate anything can be a pretty miserable experience.
Also, maybe I shouldve added a /s to my implication that most if not all furries are somewhat wealthy.
And yeah, it didn't read as sarcasm to me, oh well :)
That being said, I think sometimes it's better to just reply based on the title and theme of the HN post and not focus on the other promotional elements or ignore the post altogether provided that the poster is not really trying to spam or deceive us... Coming up with creative ways to work your own struggling ideas into conversations online is not really easy when you don't have a marketing staff and lots of ad money.
same thing happens in any community/society as it ages and grows. People who create it are different from those who move in later once things are great
That doesn't explain MySpace, though. Extremely mainstream/mass-oriented, but still fun and weird, while it lasted.
There is a lot of heavy stuff going on around the world right now, and many of the routes to money success are heavily overcomplicated and undesirable in execution.
I have been keeping calm on my end through working on music and editing (often strange and comical) TikTok videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9__Jq3hyHuI), commenting on HN and Twitter, and through doing occasional stand up comedy open mic nights...
Or, you know, you can write HTML and avoid all that complexity.
About 100 lines of PHP code to add navigation, feed and routing.
About 50 lines of CSS to avoid cringe nonsense like P tags while retaining the power of everything else in the browser. (The main ingredient being white-space: pre-line.)
Then you just upload your posts via SFTP and they become published.
Instantly portable to any shared hosting provider in the world. The only local tool requirement is an SFTP client.
My project aims spark curiosity and provide a portal to the vast collection of interesting material hidden by the commercial web. The source material is compiled with care by users of these aggregation platforms. Since this accumulation is performed by hand, pages are saved because they had an effect on the users who saved them. Hopefully you will find things that have an effect on you. Everything opens in a new tab, so you can easily close and jump again. I find that it's fun to map the jump function (https://moonjump.app/jump) to a keyboard shortcut.
Try it out: https://moonjump.app
What actually happened was not minor changes in UX culture.
The web became powerful, instead of a subculture over to the side. It became democratic and populist, with everyone participating rather than a self selected few. It became monopolized, regulated by Google/etc. and regulatable because giant companies are easier to regulate. The coming of copyright is underated as a factor in changing the web.
Remember the spindletop days. Why is the oils industry no fun anymore?
.. you might want to lead with that. You know, so people know what kind of thing they're clicking on
I miss it too, but we are the minority.
What's relatively tame and normal by today's standards would have been groundbreaking only a few years ago.
Desensitisation is the issue, not a dearth of fun and weird.
A guilty pleasure of mine are some of those klrdubs YouTube videos. My daughter launches a series of them at me every now and then, and whilst many of them are so-so, a few of them are absolutely spot-on genius. Fun, clever, and weird.
Maybe accessibility contributes towards this desensitisation too? At any time that level of genius is at our fingertips. We're spoilt by the accessibility of the top 0.01% creative talents of humanity.
Maybe we also actively avoid some of the fun and weird because we know we'll get caught in a productivity destroying rabbit hole of fun and weirdness?
I can find the most interesting and entertaining subjects searching in Japanese that do not show up when the same search is replicated in English, where it instead gives me something only barely related to my search that was simply popular enough.
It's quite simple how Twitter is actually a bastion of free expression, so long it not be in English.
Japan may have some areas they are more flexible with, but they have just as many, if not more that they rigid about too.
People are different, trying to make them the same would be just as boring.
People have long noted that one can get away with writing many things that would have one banned or removed on Reddit or Twitter, so long as one not do it in English but in another language. The same thing applies to Youtube's anti-swearword system that really only demonitizes based on English swearwords, not in any other language.
This is a problem that big companies can solve, but it's much trickier for one guy with a web page to solve.
If everyone starts fiddling with colors and creative designs, it will decrease the throughput of an average information consumer. Therefore, no meaningful customization is allowed. It's that simple.
This applies to web sites, social media, and even discussion forms like HN.
If you try to express humor on 90% of the internet today, you are attacked by anonymous mobs of people who get dopamine hits from being offended for other people who they have not met, and may not even exist.
Case in point:
In another thread, someone accidentally or through auto-correct used the word "silicone" instead of "silicon." A helpful HNer replied:
You mean silicon. Silicone means something else.
In the early days of the internet, someone could then have replied "What a boob!" and a certain percentage of the viewers would have gotten a slight giggle from it and moved on with their lives. Those who didn't find it humorous would also have moved on with their lives.
But today, the self-righteous internet mobs would attack the person who wrote the boob comment, so people self-censor.
Almost any time someone introduces any humor into HN, for example, someone points to imaginary "rules" and gets upset that if something isn't humorous to 100% of every single person on the planet, it shouldn't be uttered in public. Well, guess what — you're never going to get 100% of the people on the planet to agree about anything, so get over it.
> We — the programmers, designers, product people — collectively decided that users don't deserve the right to code in everyday products.
Nope. People chose the simpler platforms and tools with lower barrier to entry (no need to code) and the strange, fun, weird things were choked out or relegated to the unseen corners of the Internet. For a brief period you had a lot of people learning to code at some level because it was the only way to engage with the Internet at all.
It wasn't developers, designers, etc. that decided things should no longer have access to the tools, it was the consumer base at large who consistently chose the smoother, simpler, easier-to-use, less flexible, locked-down products.
People still have access to the tools. The Internet has an extremely low barrier to entry. It is accessible in a way most serious technology isn't. My son has been publishing his own page, full of weird little games and odd styling choices, etc. since he was nine.
Most people don't want products like MySpace. They voluntarily chose Facebook.
I hope this company finds a successful niche. I'm glad for any tools that encourage people to invest in their own creativity. But I doubt they are going to achieve mainstream success. Hopefully I'm wrong.
Etiquette. For example, humor is frowned upon on some forums (HN included).
In all seriousness I actually did start to collect HN rants I find funny a short while ago. There is something about elaborate rants that just gets me. Similarly I love elaborate, negative (social media) reviews. They are often way too serious and over the top.
/j
Lets start with the scripted spaghetti jokes, work towards functional humor then eventually do classes. OOH!
Reddit loves to beat the dead horse until it's not even recognizable as something that used to be an animal.
I believe Mojeek will be a gamechanger.
We were children discovering a new world, all over again. It was full of wonder and magic.
Now - any idiot can whip out their phone and write anything they want, in a few seconds, and create "content". And THEN we all have to process that shit.
Most of the web's noise content isn't low-effort comments, but low-effort commercial websites: Sometimes "tutorials" for extremely easy tasks padded with a bunch of superfluous instructions, sometimes freebooting other content, other times apparently AI-generated texts that seem legitimate at first glance but don't really make sense.
I still remember being on the phone with Network Solutions for an hour to activate my first domain. They asked for my password... Over the phone.... Now content creation is easy and, yes, automated.
In case you asked, there's also an explanation for this. :-)
(Notebook or desktop preferred, at least some mobile browsers seem to have issues with scaling SVG origins.)
“Make the internet weird again with codeblog”
There's also an enormous difference between personal 'weird' and corporate 'weird'. 'Personal weird' came from early-gen web designers who had to do everything on their own, including making GIFs with primitive '90s image editors. We have more advanced tools on our phones today, yet bloggers would sooner pick something off the shelf from GIPHY (a Facebook company), because it's easier.
We don't even have weird homemade clipart anymore, we have soulless stock graphics from Canva. And a big Discord button where the webrings would be.
[1] https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2019/readings/advisory4.5.06...
ignored, banned, de-platformed, censored , ridiculed, etc. So you end up with dozens of the same Vox and NYTs pieces about the same dozen subjects written in the same style, because those are the only things that survive the filter.
No one's going to read a hyper-neurotic blog post about a quantified self experiment anymore and that sort of content won't fare well on tik tok. And it's a shame.
Wow, well stated. I particularly miss just seeing more original content written by people's personal experiences. Now, it seems like any Google search results in bloat-ware sites with a ton of journalistic fluff around a few data points that came out on a news wire.
I personally have some hope in the Gemini protocol returning some value to this space. It doesn't quite fit the "internet as a canvas" model, being text based with only links to images, but I think there is a lot of potential to bring more interesting content to the forefront again.
"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever." - George Orwell, 1984
Which took the "look at the weird stuff I found" aspect of stumbleupon, and used it as comedic fodder to poke fun at all the weird stuff.
Right now this reads as "content platforms today don't let you enter code, so publish with us we don't allow code but we have confetti".
Twitter : We hoped for listening in on The Algonquin Round Table we got listening to the last round at Al's bar.
Facebook We hoped for pleasent updates from our friends lives, we got content moderators with PTSD
Instagram: we hoped for pictures of our friends lives - we got told our friends aren't as good as other peoples friends.
Because everything is complicated now. To code your own website you have to learn hundreds of hours of web technologies. There is no clear way and a lot of old, now wrong, advice in old blog posts. This limits the creativity that can be expressed a lot and is probably the main reason why "everyone" is now using "platforms".
The problem is that people didn't like MySpace. It looked like crap and giving people that level of control made them feel bad. Only a few fearless kids actually made the gloriously crappy content you admire.
The other problem is that the Internet is well-settled terrain now, and users have many many options about where to hang their hat(s) and what they do there. Try convincing a Medium author that HTML is a good authoring tool.
This article is the Internet version of "good old days" nostalgia, which is, ironically, retrograde and horrifying. One important exception: if the internet ever deprecates the tools needed to make another myspace (http 1.1, html, css, available ip addresses, ability to host a durable process) then you'd have my full-throated support. And of course you're allowed to like old things that failed because of market pressure. Just don't fool yourself that the world is worse because the thing you like fell out of fashion. As much as I hate to admit it, the world is better off without coin-op arcades.
I disagree with that, youtube for example is not the prevalent video platform today because it is better than its competitors. Youtube today is absolutely terrible.
But it does not get replaced, because it is the established platform, and using a competitor is suicide because your content will never get any traction.
So we are stuck with a horribly monopolized web, where the established websites can become very shitty, but you have to stay on them because everyone else is.
You can post on multiple platforms, you know. Content creators aren't stupid. They post on whichever platform is buzzing. It's their day job and the most popular ones know what they are doing than any of us.
No one is stopping these nostalgic folks. Those older techs aren't banned. They have just lost their war for network effect.
Previous discussion from not really that long ago when this was first posted, probably alot of same sentiment as the question has been asked many times last few years.
Nowadays, I don't put anything too valuable on the web. Because why should I do anything for free, right? I don't live at the expense of my parents anymore, and society does not provide me with means to survive if I spend my time doing all that and "share". Now, since I'm unemployed and basically unemployable (no linkedin/facebook/whatever, disagree with gov policies re. covid and the society that accepts and promotes them hence don't get out much, won't consider working for unethical companies that track people for any purpose whatsoever (there are so many of those), introversion, etc.), I continue to do what I always did, write code, come up with theories that sometimes lead to personal projects, etc. But I definitely won't put these up on the web.
Nowadays, I don't put anything too nonconforming on the web. There are still people doing stuff "for free". They get money from something or somewhere else. But nowadays it's mostly boring as shit. Why? Because nowadays people learn to abide by the dystopia's unwritten dicta: conform, obey, self-censor, follow, like, share. When you can no longer post anonymously, when everything you say is on a permanent record, when everything around you is moderated to Hell. When every movement is tracked, your best bet is to move along in the direction of the herd. If you don't, you will be disappeared from the relevant environment. Such a society can't be fun and weird; it actively discourages fun and weird.
I just think its discoverability has been swamped by the platforms overwhelming everything with low-effort-to-consume autoplay-until-I-fall-asleep content.
I think the only way to get back on track is if somebody comes up with a way to make publishing content on the net both trivial and robust. It needs to be a feature of your browser, not something you have to fiddle around with, with other tools.
IPFS kind of promises that and at least in theory would be a great tool to rebuild the Web, but the performance is downright miserable right now and doesn't seem to be improving either. So maybe that's a dead end.
Publishing aside, web browsers also need to get much better at discovering and keeping track of content. Bookmarks haven't improved in 30 years or even gotten worse, thus making it impossible to look for new content on small sites that don't update frequently. Having RSS support removed from all browsers was another big loss.
Seeing is believing!
You have to learn a new language to do anything, people are publishing weird sci-fi on it , there are raves and parties , it is self selecting a lot of weird people
You need populaces with higher than 86% literacy to make things like, "Internets" work.
Most people are fine with the Web being what it is today: QVC with a comments section.
But there is also truth that creativity of people gets stifled by locked down environments. In the past myspace blogs got a lot of mockery but I guess most people will miss it in contrast social media we have today. There is good stuff too and Tiktok is not the end of society, but the interesting stuff that can hold your attention beyond 10 minutes is rare. Perhaps it was never different and just seems this way because there is unlimited content.
MySpace was owned by a corporation, but allowed massive customization including custom CSS anyway. Youtube also allowed way more customization in the past (remember the old profile pages?), all those small local social networks that often allowed straight custom HTML died when Facebook expanded worldwide, they were mostly for-profit.
haha this is gold :)