Tell HN: I want to see the same moon as you | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: I want to see the same moon as you

17 pointsUnderABlueMoon15 comments

My wife was at home in San Francisco and I was in Mexico City for work.

She told me to go look at the moon.

Being 2000 miles apart we could look at the same object at the same time.

The Internet used to be like that.

A shared experience - “did you see what was on the front page of Instagram?”

I miss that.

Now we are off in separate algorithms like the Tower of Babel.

Doesn’t it feel like without a shared experience it’s basically offline?

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Funny enough, just this morning someone started telling me about a video they say on YouTube about tracing all the power lines in Red Dead Redemption 2, and I had also seen the video and was able to know exactly what he was talking about and discus it.

I find people I have stuff in common with will also get a similar feed. I sent something to a co-worker last week, and he said he had just sent the same thing to another one of our co-workers and hour earlier.

There was a period of time where this happened so often it became a bit boring. Reddit about 15 years ago. Everyone has already seen everything we tried to bring up to talk about, so there wasn’t much to say. It was a lot of, “did you see…”, “yep”, “oh… what about…”, “yep”.

> The Internet used to be like that.

Not really... Even back in the Web 1.0 days people didn't visit the same websites unless they had the same interests. And even today this exists – I'm seeing the same HN homepage for example, and this is true of most sites.

I think what you're describing was much more of a thing in the 80s and 90s with TV. People genuinely would tune into the same programs as each other every night and have these collective cultural experiences which don't quite exist in the same way they used to.

I don't miss it personally, but I suspect us losing that has led to some of our cultural divides in recent years.

I'm not the global shared experiences you're describing really ever existed.

In the early days of YouTube when uploads were still few, there were videos (often shock ones) that got views from a substantial slice of the American public. It was as unifying an experience as TV.

In early days we all saw the same ads, uphill, both ways.

Tell her to read HN.

PS: Was there ever a front page of Instagram? Sounds weird!

If you want somebody else to decide what should be streamed straight into your brain, then just turn on the TV or the radio. That's exactly what you're looking for, and what billions of people prefer over social media feeds.

Interestingly, there is a famous ancient Chinese poem with the line, “May we both live long and share the beauty of the moon, though a thousand miles apart,” which is very similar to what you said.

The Internet used to be like that.

Once, there were approximately three TV stations.

We're basically right back there.

When there were three channels, a lot of people watched the same shows at the same time.

There were common experiences, not personally tailored/calculated/curated feeds.

Without a shared experience, it’s direct mail on steroids.

Offline is a shared experience.

I often think about MySpace - how it was so anchored in the real world.

It was a social media about real life. We don’t have anything like that.

Closest thing is maybe Yelp but it’s totally separated from being social. They have made it into a kind of Yellow Pages with comments.

But MySpace did ticket sales and music streaming and people were designing their profiles in wildly creative ways, there were games, news, gossip, and somehow it was all seamless with the real world.

I guess Big Media took over because, now it’s all individualized social media, a manufactured feed of random drama. Like the WWE shoved its way into websites and started setting up Trump and Joe Rogan, and COVID-19, Netanyahu, and “Black Lives Matter”, and all this heightened sensation totally unrelated to my actual real life. I’m not even saying it’s all fake or bad or anything - just that it’s now mostly information detached from my daily life.

I digress, offline is a shared experience, yes. But online could be too. It was.

Having offline for free, why would we need online for a price?

It’s also a portal in time. 2000 years ago people were looking at that same moon

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