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Comment by liberia | Hacker News Reader

All the platforms have their own TikTok style mechanism now. YouTube has Shorts, Facebook has its Reels feature which is tightly integrated with Instagram and you need an Instagram account to engage with Reels on Facebook, which is a bit of a growth hacker dark pattern. For now, Reels is not interspersed with ADs which is refreshing, but that could all change.

The whole vertical video craze is a weird one, and one I’ve only recently tried to adjust to. I mean the pace of it is so fast, and I barely have time to process each video before moving to the next one. A whole generation are going to be raised on cheap dopamine hits and will probably suffer mild ADD symptoms because of this.

I want the slow web back where I can chew on long form content and mull over large pieces of text and long winded podcasts, not boiled down snippets of info that prey on my base instincts and giddy 1 minute dopamine fixes.

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> I want the slow web back where I can chew on long form content and mull over large pieces of text and long winded podcasts…

It is what you make it, really.

I watch YouTubers who make long videos, go deep diving on subjects which have no real use in my daily life and have very, very few apps on my phone — all but one are something which makes my life easier than not having it and the exception is because I want to buy a condo.

No Instagrams, Facebooks, TikToks, Twitters, nothing.

I don’t even feel I’m missing out on anything worthwhile either.

I did this because my relationship to social media was unhealthy, and now it feels much better.

Hacker news, because duh.

Instagram is for softcore porn.

Facebook I deleted years ago, no regrets. (I'm aware they own Instagram, and I don't care. This is just a personal issue for me.)

Tiktok I watch funny videos when people send them to me, I feel no need to install an app.

Twitter, I read tweets when people link to them, and every time Twitter reminds me why I'm glad I don't use Twitter.

I understand why other people use them, and some people can do it in a healthy way, but for me, this is the absolute maximum I can use social media without losing myself.

I want the slow web back

Here you go: https://jakeseliger.com/. Scroll through and note the most interesting or useful venues. Then, there are an array of RSS readers available; I've been using NetNewsWire but think that Feedly seems to be the most common.

The "slow web" never left.

> The "slow web" never left.

i wish we had usage stats that were as simple as FB or insta’s “monthly active users”. because i feel like there’s an ebb and flow to this. 15 years ago, blogs had comment sections, pingbacks, RSS. 10 years ago, SEO displaced the blog. 5 years ago, blogs grew again with Twitter announcements replacing the role of RSS. today, email lists are back in style and my friends ask me for RSS reader recommendations.

then there’s the whole aspect of forums. most of the forums i used growing up are effectively dead. on the other hand, there are still new ones i run across monthly. it’s very difficult for me to separate my own trajectory from the overall “small web” trajectory: i just wish i knew of clean stats to illuminate the true state of things.

Exactly. Where are the users? What are the demographics? What places are seeing inflows/outflows of users? IRC, newsgroups, Discord, blogs, HN? Is it true that small message boards are as popular today as in 2005, it's just that the internet overall is bigger so they have a smaller share? Personally it absolutely does not feel true.

Ha, I found your website late last year and eventually started publishing lists of things I had found interesting in a per week, week in review: https://photogabble.co.uk/topic/week-in-review/

The "slow web" never left it just became more underground as the flashy algorithms paved over it in favour of turning visitors into media consumption addicts then into a product to sell to advertisers.

I feel that Facebook really hurts lots of small organization. They fell into a trap of using a free website...instead of building up their own members, email lists, content.

For instance lots of birders post their pictures to Facebook, it helps to connect with people and get tips about birding locations. But...at the cost of depth. The pictures look good, but you don't learn very much about nature. It's like fast food, not nutritious.

It also sucks the air out of the room, and prevents other sites from growing. Sites that could grow into something more useful.

> Reels is not interspersed with ADs which is refreshing, but that could all change.

I feel like it's the opposite. Everything on Reels is either a meme, scam or an ad (be it influencer ad or a blatant one). My theory why Youtube shorts and Instagram Reels turn out this way is that they are attached to an existing network with developed spam/influence markets where's TikTok had to reinvent in and in the progress the culture managed to reduce the obcenity of it. Though, TikTok is getting worse by the day as these markets develop.

> boiled down snippets of info that prey on my base instincts and giddy 1 minute dopamine fixes.

This would aptly describe a tabloid newspaper.

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