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ravenstine

I anything actually good anymore?

- Goodreads: Broken recommendation system, meh UI, review wars

- Google Search: Pointless

- Reddit: Overtly user-hostile, poor UX, tiktokified

- YouTube: Mainstream, ad-riddled, tiktokified

- Yelp: Cluttered-UI, favors jerks, hostile to businesses

- Gmail: Oh yeah we're gonna delete your emails if you don't log in after a while

- Netflix: Shrinking catalogue, worse quality shows

- Instagram: Tiktokifying

- Twitter: Mostly the worst people remain on it

- Facebook: Not much of a social network, only decent thing left is Marketplace

- Wikipedia: Strayed far from its mission, mass editing by agenda-driven groups

- LinkedIn: Recruiter-centered, mostly garbage content

- DuckDuckGo: Can't even respect quotes or intitle like it used to.

- Amazon: Tons of shabby products, tons of fake reviews

- Medium: The TEDx talks of blogging

No wonder I visit an ever shrinking number of domains daily.

View on HN

I find that grilling out with friends and family is good. Books are really good, lots of interesting stuff to learn on the non-fiction side (and I honestly think the new AI stuff is making it even easier to learn things!), still more interesting fiction that I haven't read yet than I could ever read in a lifetime, not to mention re-reading books I already love. Similar thing with movies and tv; just finished the new season of The Bear and rewatching the first season now and it's great. Video games are pretty great; playing the new Zelda game with my daughter right now. Really enjoying museums and zoos and parks and pools and these trampoline places (which didn't exist when I was a kid) with my kids. Hiking and skiing trips and road trips are still great (though harder since I had kids). Meeting new people who live in different places and have different experiences is great.

There's lots of great stuff! But yeah, none of it is really on the internet. Touch some grass!

Oh yeah, 100%! Most of my enjoyment these days is offline. Been going to different bars in the city and playing bar games with people for the last 6 months and it's a lot of fun. More expensive than hanging out on web forums, but also way more fulfilling.

> I honestly think the new AI stuff is making it even easier to learn things

ChatGPT is the closest thing we have to A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

Exactly how I describe it to my wife.

I have to disagree with YouTube. Yes, theres a lot of garbage on there, but I've managed to curate a collection of subscriptions that make _extremely_ high quality videos. Even the reccomendation system thats so often criticised here has regularly served me new channels that are right up my ally. I get more value from YT than most other sites on the net (with the exception of HN, obviously)

I've found that when websites start their decline what happens is that the barrier to getting good results from them goes up. It can still happen! It just takes more and more work, like a computer that is a bit underpowered and a bit overly bloated.

I have my well curated youtube subscriptions.. but there is less content every day. Twitch died for me a while ago. Reddit was pretty fine for at least consuming stuff until this latest debacle (it stopped being a good place for discussion long ago).

Lemmy seems promising. I have yet to have luck with mastodon. As the older apps die off slowly, new ones will appear.

While I also think YouTube has great content, their war on adblockers annoys me very much.

Also, YouTube Short was not a great addition. It entices garbage content in my opinion. There is a reason I’m on YouTube and not on TikTok.

I’ve come around on shorts. Many of my favorite creators take weeks or even months to create a single video, vsauce comes to mind. Shorts allow them to create shorter form content that’s still interesting more frequently, without affecting their algorithmic ranking for main videos.

I also think it works as a marketing tool. At this point, YT knows what I want and shorts act as a sort of teaser for new channels. 60 seconds of their most interesting content to see if I want to subscribe or not. It’s less commitment than watching a full (often 20 min +) video.

I feel like more it’s more interesting to discuss why everything got bad. These companies all grew up and reality hit

- Goodreads: Never was going to be massive social network. Hard to monetize so little investment.

- Google Search: SEO + ads obscures what people are looking for

- Reddit: Too much investment for the companies current size and lack of growth. Poor new products offerings

- YouTube: Taken over by engagement bate and need to monetize

- Yelp: business model provides bad incentives

- Gmail: promised everyone free stuff and doesn’t charge. Needs to cover costs

- Netflix: doesn’t actually own most of the content users used to watch. Has no more subscriber growth

- Instagram: Losing ground to new social network and must adapt to be more video+algorithmic

- Twitter: makes no money. Had too many employees. Run by Elon who is controversial. Moderation is expensive

- Facebook: for my generation at least, a combination of things led people to migrate to other places

- Wikipedia: people who moderate for free have agendas

- LinkedIn: business model makes for bad incentives

- DuckDuckGo: hard to be the third place social network

- Amazon: moderation is hard, too much seo and ads, direct from china allows for more cheap goods but introduces more fakes

- Medium: nobody wants to pay for pretend news

Absolutely. May I add one more?

- Hacker News: filled with old ~men~ people shouting at clouds, reminiscing about how things were better in the good old days.

I live in the suburbs so no one comes by lawn, ergo this is where I shout at the kids to get off my website

Same.

I'm not old but it's fairly obvious that most internet companies have refocused from an exceptionnaly long growth centered phase towards extracting value from their user base in the last few years. As a consequence things have gotten measurably worse for said users.

We should be seeing competitors emerging right now but sadly years of lax competition laws enforcement and extreme concentration of wealth amongst said companies make that unlikely in the short term.

No shouting at the cloud required here.

Maybe tech was just a fad.

I knew there was a reason I spend so much time here

Yes how dare we hold society accountable for bullshit.

We should all just watch tiktok like good zombies and ignore the enshittification of the entire world.

Damn clouds! =p

The good old days like yesterday, when ad blockers worked on Youtube, and you could read through Twitter anonymously.

Get off my lawn

Hey now, we're not all men

Sorry about that, I’ve amended it. I was actually referring to the old man yells at cloud meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud) but I recognise that I can be more inclusive in my putdowns.

My implication was merely that I too am old and yelling at clouds. :) No actual offense taken.

People like you are destroying the fabric of society.

Thank you. It feels so good to be recognised. All this time I was toiling away, trying to destroy the fabric of society but no one noticed or cared.

FWIW, I admire your dedication.

Google maps is basically the only app as I see it which is still amazing. Besides the whole tracking your entire location thing, but you can mitigate that.

i hate how they worked ads into directions. i know some people find it easy to hear "turn left at the mcdonald's" but i've been fine at estimating distance and don't need to hear the name of a chain.

You know it's funny that I never noticed this, I always turn off the voice directions since I found them annoying.

But yeah that's an annoying experience if you use voice directions, and in some instances I could see it as really degrading the directions app, since "taking a left at the intersection" may be more clear than "turn left at the kfc"

I now use Apple Maps for navigation because of this “feature”.

Google Maps is still much better for searching, but the gap seems to be closing.

I think the blunt answer is that it's irresponsible to outsource your social life to for-profit companies.

It's easy, and it's addictive, and it's not all bad. But it's irresponsible.

They will change your social activities in ways that you may or may not be ok with. They will treat you like a good to be sold in the most efficient way possible.

Basically - These companies treat the social lives of people as though they are cattle, herded around so they see the right ads and sold off or butchered when it's profitable. They care about the cattle only in the sense that they are a means to an end, and that end is profit.

There's a place for that kind of efficiency. Human relationships are not that place.

My biggest complaint about Twitter is that the spam has gotten worse in the last year or so. I get 2-3 spam DMs a day, and probably once every week or two I go through and report all of them but it's never-ending.

IMO the people who left Twitter (and haven't come back) were worse than anyone who's on it now. There hasn't been any meaningful change in discourse - for better or worse - that I've noticed.

| worse than anyone who's on it now.

Bold claim about a site that is, in the last year or so, pivoted to explicit and quite public encouragement of Nazi/racist viewpoints.

Wandering Powell's and reading the handwritten staff recommendations on the shelves still works just fine for books.

You forgot TikTok - Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting post on how platforms get bad ("enshittification"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

This is overly cynical. And what's the hate for tiktok?

Google search is worse, twitter is becoming worse, but not unusable. I learn so much educational stuff from youtube/tiktok and connect with musicians on instagram, etc. These platforms can be useful if you want them to be.

RateYourMusic is a pretty nice site for finding movies and music.

I wish that Goodreads was more similar to RYM.

For movies or tv series I am using https://trakt.tv.

I started using this about 6 months ago after a recommendation here and would recommend it to others.

It particularly helps if you have access to multiple streaming services.

Sonemic has been pretty good about not turning RYM into an affiliate link ridden landfill like Goodreads.

letterboxd is also alright for finding movies to watch and critique of them. OTOH you need to play whack a mole against the meme accounts and their 4 words long super popular "reviews".

Or just find a way into RED and PTP.

Creating something good requires a lot of effort and it's not just 1 thing you have to be good at but 1000 things.

Any business has thousands of moving parts which all need to work properly or the website or operation shall fail.

This is the cost of the infinite growth model. You can't just keep things good because you have to change something and a lot (the majority?) of that change turns out to be for the worse.

"Medium: The TEDx talks of blogging"

I just about coffee spit lol'd.

personally would not add wikipedia, amazon or gmail. still useful for me.

youtube ok-ish. but worse every day.

goodreads useful for reading quotes.

I feel like this is overly cynical. Facebook is still the best social network for certain age groups. Instagram (and Facebook) engagement is dropping but it's (they're) still one of the best mediums for getting the word out about events (for me anyway). Reddit is fine as long as old-reddit still works, though with losing API access the mobile story is about to suck.

Facebook is still a good social network so long as you limit it to friend you personally know only. Block marketplace and all groups. Use it to keep up on those distant friends and family that you are not ready to leave out of your life completely even though you don't get together often (that is they live far away from you so you can't visit in person often)

Agreed. I do not engage with groups all that much and the snippets/suggestions it shows me for some are just downright nauseating. On that note it has been useful for figuring out which of my friends are secretly assholes and which of them just like to shitpost.

> Facebook is still the best social network for certain age groups

It's a great place to hang out for 65+ retirees posting crackpot conspiracy theories, that was the main reason I left.

While I'm yelling at clouds, Facebook was better when it was more profile and people focused instead of turning the newsfeed into a twitter copy and optimizing for engagement bait content.

> Facebook was better when it was more profile and people focused instead of turning the newsfeed into a twitter copy and optimizing for engagement bait content.

Which is why I tell everyone to block every single group. If someone shares something (that is it isn't a photo they personally took, or a thought they personally wrote) hit the "block all from [whatever group it was shared from]" button. Leave all groups and market place. I did that almost a year ago and Facebook became a useful place again!

You forgot to mention Stack Overflow.

The enshittification continues.

ChatGPT: ???

ChatGPT: Ruined TV by causing a writers strike...

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