Hacker News Reader

Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

If you think the web is boring now it's because you stopped surfing the web, not because people stopped making exciting and innovative websites. That isn't meant as a criticism; people's priorities change and we do different stuff. I still find the web wildly exciting after 30 years of using it because I still seek out interesting things on it...

Tell me this looks like every other website: https://www.anumberfromtheghost.com/asleep-in-trees

View on HN

The web is boring now because everyone interesting is banned by bland mediocrities. If you don't follow the current thing to the letter every major social media platform - bar twitter for the last two months - would remove you from circulation pretty much instantly. The only people who agree with everything that is popular right now are the ones incapable of thinking. Ergo a chat bot trained on old forum data seems more genuine than anyone left on Reddit.

"every major social network" is a very recent sub continent on the internet and didnt replace most of it.

I find reddit super exciting as well, it's THE place to talk quickly with random english speakers and I wish that existed when I was a french kids pinging randos on ICQ...

Old forums aren't much better unfortunately. Going back to the places where I hung out in the 00s the inmates are running the asylum now.

Yeah I miss the old days where on most sites you really needed to be a hard-core troll or do/say something illegal to get banned and removed. Now on for example Reddit if you say anything that's not acceptable in the current zeitgeist it's instant (shadow)banning.

It all became so corporate and milquetoast - all that matters are ads and so that they don't appear near "controversial" content to not to loose revenue.

It's much worse than that. The people doing the banning on reddit aren't doing it because they are paid or told to, they are doing it because they think stopping wrongthink is a public service and will feel right doing it every time.

HN isn't much better with flagging of posts. The highwater mark of this was PG's heresy post being kept off the front page for 6 hours before dang made the post unflaggable. I would have loved to see the Monday meeting where he had to explain why that was needed.

I've seen that for many of those people it's not a matter of being right or wrong but a moral battle of good vs. evil. Heretics are to be purged, not discussed with.

Being honest I think religion is kinda hard-wired into the human brain and if it isn't the mystique kind like with Jesus or Allah then it (d)evolves into this kind of agno-atheistic fanaticism where some flavor of the year "problem" appears that these people obsess with. And this is coming from a long time atheist btw.

On top of that, only the reiteration of the same trite puns or catchphrases gets upvotes, the rest drowns.

/r/homelab was interesting, now it's just pictures of people's setups

/r/garmin was interesting, now it's screenshots of people's VO2max stats

etc...

Repeat ad nauseam. Everything is bragging or showing off for fake internet points.

The nick mullen rant about the yeti cup subreddit is good for a laugh.

I don't know what is driving it but I think those posters really feel they're part of a community. The give gold, repeat the same tired jokes, and feel better. It's insane to me.

I'm going to let you in on a secret: it isn't a real community. It is Yeti astroturfing. ٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶

The problem now is finding interesting content, in the recent past it was enough to fire some few keywords on a search engine. Even leas advanced search engines found those sites. Google beat them adding some kind of authority but at the end the authority is gamed. Well content sites giving a s*t to SEO remain under layers and layer of dust.

I think pinning all of this on Google is unfair. They're part of it, but Reddit/Twitter/Facebook is every bit as complicit. Honestly, I think most of what's changed is our collective web-usage habits.

In my experience researching ways of building different and better discovery tools, the ice-berg of stuff that you'll virtually never find on Google/Facebook/Reddit/Twitter runs extremely deep, and is often much more interesting.

The platform-oriented web is like a giant shopping mall with some magazines and newspapers sold in-between. News websites are mostly reviewing the "products" sold in the shops. YouTube celebrities are demonstrating their shopping abilities. Sites like Reddit/Twitter are fostering customer discussions whose aim is to determine the "best product".

Completely agree. I mentioned Google specifically because it in their official mission [1] and this is where they started.

[1] https://about.google/

> The problem now is finding interesting content, in the recent past it was enough to fire some few keywords on a search engine.

But it's still enough to subscribe to some newsletters or reddit or listapart of the decade, etc. It's really not far away.

Now the problem is turbulence.org. Man, that hurts.

I mean, no, that's hardly a website. It's as much a website as example.com/demoscene.exe. Nobody ever stopped making art and video games, it's just that they don't run in the browser.

If you call it a website, then Unity is a web authoring tool.

It actually is a pretty decent website. If you look at the main page [1] instead, it's a gallery to navigate to the subpages. Conceptually not too different than browsing a traditional 2d webpage.

1. https://www.anumberfromtheghost.com

As a virtual 3D space it is much more of a web "site" than a collection of "pages" is a "site".

Umm, it reminds me of all the websites when VRML was a hip fad in the 90s (but obviously higher resolution/better).

But still, this misses the authors point - that mainstream websites have become homogenous. Obviously its not about literally every last website, but bemoaning what is currently trendy.

Umm, it reminds me of all the websites when VRML was a hip fad in the 90s (but obviously higher resolution/better).

I made a few experimental VRML websites in the late 90s (on a lovely SGI Irix..) and I can see why you'd say that, but it's only superficially similar in the 3D-in-a-browser sense. VRML experiences were usually terrible and never pretty.

It's the same idea updated with extra cycles.

It is pretty, and there are some nice aesthetic touches. But the overall look is still very blocky and VRML-ish.

I guess at some point we'll get photorealistic rendering - most likely in AR glasses rather than in the browser - and there will be a lot more experimentation for a while, some of it driven by AI.

But even this is in a tiny niche far, far outside the web mainstream, and if it hadn't been linked here hardly anyone would find it.

I remember the exact moment in the mid-90s when I realised the suits were moving in and the web was going to be transformed from a weird, colourful, mad eccentric thing into a generic mall.

From a corporate POV it has far exceeded my worst nightmares. Sites like this are a very small pushback, but they're not going to make a dent in the overall crapification and hustle-driven corporatisation of our biggest and most interesting planetary cultural resource.

I did some VRML at uni. We thought it was the future :)

Having said that, I think what you're saying is some very superficial pattern-matching. I found it a fantastic experience, and I'm not a particularly arty person.

It's boring because we consume content mostly through platforms that incentivise a certain mode and format of content creation. There is also the bias on recency and the fear of missing out "important" contemporary events and news. The interesting content is still there, but our perception and short attention spans mostly ignore it.

That is lovely. I need to come back when I've got more time and better headphones.

But I don't want my news headlines presented like this. I'm kinda ok with the standardization of the regularly-visited sections of the web - in fact I think it's just UX principles in action.

That website is fantastic. Cutting edge expression, difficult, well realised. I wish that were what modern art is.

What a great experience!

Don't know about the whole fuddy duddy discussion goin on here but let me just say that website is trippy as balls. And I enjoyed it immensely. Thank you very much for posting it, seriously inspired me.

The fellow who made it recommends: https://threejs-journey.com

I know what I am doing this weekend. Cheers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com