Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonvibecoding | Hacker News Reader

This didn’t just start now. It’s been fading for over a decade. I remember when every forum had its own look, strange layouts, unique colors, and a vibe you couldn’t really describe but you felt it.

Now everything feels the same. Same layout, same font, same clean boxy design. Sites copy each other. AI just made it more obvious, but the soul started slipping away long before that

View on HN

I remember usenet where every forum was exactly the same and it was still better than today, so I’m not convinced this is a fundamental symptom of our current problems. To me it’s more that the internet has lost any sort of physical, spatial, kinetic quality. There’s no time or place, no nooks and crannies to disappear into with friends. Just an unyielding cacophony. I agree it’s all undifferentiated but it’s not the aesthetics that are the problem for me.

I think the issue is optimization. As these sites have grown more efficient at gaining and exploiting (like a natural resource) users for money, they’ve optimized away mechanisms people used to form community and such. Moving to a feed of recommendations instead of a feed of people you follow is an easy example, but there must be a thousand little examples like that.

Fundamentally, if the goal is to make money, then that’s what will be optimized for, and in this case that goal appears to be in conflict with the formation and maintenance of community. It was just a matter of time.

I was thinking about this the other night - everything is more fun until it becomes professionalised too much. In this case, professionalisation is synonymous with optimisation for engagement.

Motorsports, video games, chatting online, working in a warehouse - all things that are loads more fun to do when someone isn't seeking to eke out more and more marginal gains.

Yeah, I see this all over. Every hobby becomes a question of how to get better at it, not of how to enjoy it more. Even if you enjoy your craft and growing your skills, the internet presents you with infinitely many well-trodden paths, completely robbing you of any sense of ownership. Instead of being here and now, possessing agency in a particular moment, you're just a dot in the bottom-left quadrant of some enormous scatter graph. It's the total perspective vortex.

Yeah, maybe you’re right. Could be nostalgia playing tricks on me. I just remember how exciting it felt to join a new forum, or discover something like eMule, Sababa DC, or random p2p tools.

Everything felt raw and full of possibility. Even if a lot of it looked the same, it didn’t feel the same. There was this sense of exploring something alive.

It's possible that various Discord servers, or obscure streamer chatrooms still feel like this, and we're just old. But it definitely feels like the default has become very top-down and public instead of bottom-up and intimate.

I think the difference there is streamers are just there to get money from their audiences. Doing something they like sure, but a vast majority are trying to make a living. That has a different context entirely.

I think there's an extremely long tail of streamers and associated chat communities that are untroubled by any form of financial rewards. When I speak to people in those communities it sounds to me like the closest thing to IRC in the 90s - tight-knit groups with regular comings together at specific times and places, being their whole selves with each other.

"Context collapse"? The phenomenon that, no matter where you go and what the nominal topic of discussion is, it always comes back to US politics.

It's more a thing of the masses now when in the earlier days on average more smart people used it.

It's funny, I generally agree with you, but this reminds me of old people complaining about rock music. Maybe the cacophony is the point, it's not to our taste, and we don't get it. But maybe it's also less and less our world anymore.

I imagine it's less about "rock music" and more about the disappearance of "bands" from the mainstream. Almost every charting artist now is solo and makes pop music, which greatly limits the variety available to listeners, and encourages labels to push copycat acts because they feel those are the only ones worth taking a risk on. The Oasis reunion is an example of this: they are a band selling out arenas and pocketing millions performing songs from the previous century, and facing little in the way of competition because bands like them are largely extinct.

You don't think it's because wealthy older folks are nostalgic for their youth and have money to spend?

Seems like there is plenty of variety, just nobody telling everyone what specifically to listen to.

> I remember usenet where every forum was exactly the same

alt.confident.assertion.question.doubt.disagree

;)

This was in reply to a post about visual design of different forums.

My memory of this was Facebook overtaking MySpace

I remember being 13-years-old and completely baffled people preferred the platform where I had no say over the HTML on my page.

I didn’t understand how people could prefer a boilerplate with profile picture and name over an actual artefact made by the person.

I loved Myspace. You could talk directly to bands members (At least the unknown punk bands I was following back then)

Once they lost all the pre-2016 content, I think that was it. Hard to make a comeback after something like this

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/18/myspace-l...

It's a long shot, but you might find some resources here:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Myspace

You can still do that on Instagram

I guess you didn't have a lot of friends that would make their text white, on a yellow background, with autoplaying music. Then sprinkle in some blinking and/or moving text to make it even harder to read.

I think there could have been a nice middle ground with more "tasteful" customization that would have still left plenty of room for individuality, but nobody built it before Facebook totally took over.

Yeah, too many MySpace pages would drag your browser to a crawl or outright crash it. Facebook's uncluttered interface was a breath of fresh air at the time.

It has turned from a library into a shopping mall. Anything that is not totally bland and mainstream would only pose a risk to sales.

I think it's more that they built a shopping mall around the library. Web hosting is cheaper and more accessible than ever, so the small quirky websites that existed in the 90s can, and probably do, exist today as well.

Accessible web hosting was when your internet plan gave you access to a web bucket by default, and when the average internet user needed a computer to go online. The default Internet-connected device now is a locked down phone that barely lets you write to your own storage in an exportable text file format.

As a counterpoint, have you seen Stack Overflows proposed new brandings and redesigns? Pretty wild colour choices.

With CSS and JS Libraries I can create a 'good' looking and usable web interface in minutes.

You still have Straight Dope for realtalk and RPGCodex for shitposting.

Besides that, there’s Reddit. They’re all vastly different and are essentially discussion boards.

What faded were the obscure or niche ones where discussions simply didn’t invite enough people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com