The internet has become soulless and I hate it | Hacker News Reader

The internet has become soulless and I hate it

tim.kicker.dev

29 points_hypx21 comments

What ruined the web is one word: monetization.

Before it was used for fun, people weren’t looking at it as a source of income, unlike now, take YouTube for example, in ~2010 it was those amateur captured videos where people are just happy they can share some clips with the world, right now, you have “content creators” with their soulless faces and setup, all have the same LED setup, thumbnails with reaction-face pics, shilling and a lot of it, try hards on everything from the tune of how they speak all the way to staged conversations, why? Monetizing the contents. Remove the monetization factor and you will see how it will fix 80% of the issue, following pareto chart method where 80% of the issues can be solved by fixing the 20% cause.

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honor and money are not to be found in the same purse—honora y provecho no caben en un saco. The reason why Literature is in such a bad plight nowadays is simply and solely that people write books to make money. A man who is in want sits down and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it. The secondary effect of this is the ruin of language.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "The Art of Literature/On Authorship"

<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Literature/On_Auth...>

I remember watching an interview to Jorge Luis Borges (can't remember which one, neither if it was in English or Spanish) in which he said something similar.

He argued that he preferred 19th century literature because back then it wasn't (as much as in the 20th century) about becoming famous or rich as an author.

Prince when asked about music piracy: Great! Now people can finally go back to making music for making music.

But without monetization, YouTube would have also long ceased to exist.

There are many layers of terrible software and many terrible products involved.

John Logie Baird demonstrated the world's first live working television system on 26 January 1926.

That's a really good theory, but I'd suggest democratization as an alternate. Upvote/downvote metrics appended to every line of text invited cliquish behavior that optimized for non-monetized engagement. Giving people the ability to comment on anything turned every site into a bathroom wall.

Youtube videos are the modern equivalent of QVC and late-night infomercials.

So-called "tech Youtube" is the worst offender. These aren't reviews, these are ways to stuff a video as many affiliate links as Youtube will allow.

There is also a ton of really high qualti content. And lots of channels that allow the creator to make a living from it.

Just have a look at Mmm [1] or Kinopio [2] to brighten up your mood.

Gopher and FTP servers were fairly soulless as well, so I guess this is just a bit of a nostalgic perspective issue.

Just ignore the large websites, as you would ignore tabloids or commercial television. It is actually quite easy to learn that if something is massively popular, it will probably be so because of competitive marketing tricks, and not because there is something inherently interesting there.

[1] https://build.mmm.page/

[2] https://kinopio.club/

"i was able to experience some of it during my first steps on the internet back in 2009"

Soo... 14 years ago? It was a magical experience in 2009? When Facebook existed for 5 years already?

The majority of users now are on the net to use products that have a practical function they want. Early net users were on the net because they could express their creativity by creating something or were part of a small community that filled a need for them. A relative small audience compare to the audience size today. Any products that fills the need for the largest audience becomes very superficial. We are seeing that with today's internet.

What are examples of practical function users want? All I see is practical things vendors want.

Email, online shopping, banking, image sharing, cloud file storage, online office suites, Photopea (online Photoshop clone), YouTube, and many others.

That's not stopping any of them from also spending hours mindlessly scrolling through social media and Youtube.

Discussions went from helpful and a personals experiences, to insulting and criticizing people. Not friendly or fun.

Do you think the trolling is organized? To disrupt conversations.

https://archive.org/details/myspace-Music?tab=collection

Ive been putting my own tastes and personality into building GloryWager.com but I wouldn't say it's anything special or 90s-esque

I do long for the old web, sometimes I think it's just best to build a new one. But the costs are astronomical.

Funny how the article was published on one of the most esthetically neutral website I have ever seen.

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