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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.