waif

Could be. The baffling thing is there doesn't seem to be much consideration by those community leaders for how different these mediums are. It would be like if HN converted overnight into an IRC server or mailing list. Those formats just don't make any sense given the context.

I dunno, people complain about maintaining a forum software stack, so maybe that's where this stems from. Could be a market worth trying to capture, a 5 minute deploy that truly requires no maintenance ever. And if you want it private, just set the robots meta to noindex, problem solved.

I think I broke YouTube?

I signed up for the Premium trial. The day before the trial expired, I cancelled and deleted my card info. This was weeks ago, and I still haven't seen a single ad ever since. There are ads in the home feed, but none in the video streams themselves. I'm not using an ad blocker.

I also suspect this. We'll find out decades from now.

Like woops, we shouldn't have put lead in gasoline, even though we knew it was hazardous. Or sorry for putting flame retardant chemicals in all of your furniture and bedding, that gradually absorb into you.

It wouldn't surprise me if micro plastics and forever chemicals etc have worked their way into everything.

I dunno. I have a blog with niche info, but it doesn't even show up before page 10 or whatever. But technically, it's still indexed...

Search engines lost. With ChatGPT it's about to get 10x worse.

We could switch back to manual human-curated web directories, or website link lists.

The latest crop of "metaverses" are almost all intertwined with blockchain. It's about buying into the metaverse, buy your plot of land, buy your sneakers, buy your new hairstyle, buy your emote laugh animation. Every possible interaction is monetized. It's baffling, like why would anyone want to spend time in a dystopian capitalism simulator.

VRChat seems to embrace the pure spirit of the thing, from what I can tell as an outsider. People are free to express themselves and be creative, making their own avatars and worlds from scratch if they want. It seems like a wacky hangout space, the whole point is to not have constraints. Trying to turn it into anything beyond that seems like it would fail.

But then again, I also don't understand why people drop thousands of dollars on Fortnite skins. I don't feel out of touch with tech, but this I simply do not get, at all.

Agreed, we need to get back to independent forums.

And there are better techniques to sustain them now, compared to back then. They don't need to be plastered with banner ads.

- Annual donations with Stripe checkout, etc

- Job boards

- If you have a product/service, host a community that caters to your general industry! For instance, if you sell film editing software, host a forum for hobbyist and professional editors, and don't make it specific to your software. You'll make conversions over time, and it's win-win for everyone. HN is essentially a form of this.

Also, "microwave safe" does not mean it's safe for people... it only means the container won't melt in the microwave. If you're going to reheat leftovers, definitely don't keep it inside a plastic container.

I also switched to glass containers and stainless steel everything, about 20 years ago, out of distrust for reasons like in this article.

But that convenient place is a single point of failure :3

But should we have a replacement for reddit..?

I think we had the model right before the concept of social media came along, which is many small independent communities.

Honestly it's probably better for the web if it reverts back to the model of smaller independent forums. HN is a good example of a healthy small/medium sized community.

I would say the 'social media era' of the history of the web has concluded in failure. When you consolidate everyone onto a singular platform, it creates a weird unhealthy community dynamic, and the business incentives do not align at all with users.

And wasn't it the Twitterrific client that came up with the phrase "tweet", and they also introduced the blue bird icon.

Then musk took over, and he banned them from using the API and forced them to close down. What a stand up guy.

If the web collectively swings back in the other direction, to the fediverse or some other evolution, there will be a revival of small indie clients, and a revival of a better web in general. Twitter is in freefall and Reddit is on the verge of it, so it might not be a long wait.