See title "Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore". Click link to see. Page loads and shows cookie consent popup over 2/3 of the page. Yeah, well played.
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Technology
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I’m old school. Sometimes when I’m doing a deep dive into a new technical topic, I like to print to paper, go off and sit in my back yard with a beer and a pen to make margin notes. Today, I was trying to understand some web framework esoterica. I found what would have been a 14 page very deep dive article with code samples.
I haven’t written code more complex than simple scripting to automate stuff for years. I can still understand code. I wanted to understand this better to make some decisions about security setting in Apache for the devs who are interacting with this framework.
Hit print, and the preview window popped up. As I said, it was 14 pages. Before sending the the printer, I glanced at the first page. There was this big, square blank space on the bottom right, obscuring text. I canceled the print preview. There was a big ad overlay on the bottom right of the screen. I closed it and went back the print preview. I could see the first page.
I scrolled through the preview. Every other page had a different blank section obscuring the text. They were all smaller than the first, but made it unreadable. I’m assuming it’s some other overlay designed to come up as I scroll.
I could likely have pulled up the developer view and started editing so I could get a readable printed copy.
It wasn’t worth it. I closed the page and moved on.
Like I said I’m old school. I absolutely appreciate that someone took the time to do what looked like a very technical deep dive on what I was looking for. I do not want to read that type of deep technical material on a site with constantly popping up animated ads interrupting my conversation. I’m not even that upset, I just see it as another example of why I don’t like the timeline we’re in.
Have you tried reader mode? In both firefox and chrome (i think, I haven't checked other browsers) there's a button usually in the address bar that you can click and it'll format the article into a readable page instead of a bunch of ad-riddled garbage. It works pretty well generally.
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Ridiculous ... for 11k of text.
I feel like I've found refuge here. Looking at my open tabs, what used to be Twitter, Reddit, and Insta is now my own hosted platforms. Plex for TV and Lemmy here for social. I have gmail still, but I'm leaving.
The communities are smaller, but I rarely feel as anxious, stressed, or annoyed as I did with the other platforms. Oh and no one is trying to get me to buy a washing machine either.
Dissenting opinion, I'm sure, but I see in Lemmy the same problems I saw with reddit at the time I left it: superficial content designed to generate superficial engagement driven by people on mobile devices. Lemmy, reddit, and virtually all other content aggregators fall into the same pattern of posting screenshots from Twitter and recycled memes that everyone's seen. It's like the author of the article says: the internet isn't as interactive or novel as it used to be. Part of that is the centralization of media into a handful of supergiant corporations, but it's also an extension of the technological landscape and how people today interact with the media they consume. Which as time goes on is more and more driven by mobile devices.
I like all the dad-level humor with the awful, often punny Star Trek memes. They give me life.
Live long and prosper is the opposite of live fast, die young.
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Blocking some of the meme communities is a big help in that regard.
Or just switch your default timeline to "subscribed"
"All" was always terrible on reddit, that hasn't changed here.
imo there isn't enough content on Lemmy to only whitelist certain communities. I prefer to just block the extra stuff I don't want. All is fine if you take out most the low effort communities. I only have 10 or so communities blocked and it makes a noticeable difference. Much easier than subscribing to a bunch of communities for me.
there isn’t enough content on Lemmy to only whitelist certain communities
This is really the central problem. There's way fewer posts on any given Lemmy/fediverse network compared to the major players, and I've been conditioned by the last 13 years I spent on reddit to have constant interactive stimuli and discussion based on my interests. That doesn't exist here because the communities are so small. Admittedly, yeah, I could post. But I've always been a commenter on existing discussions, not someone who wants to start the discussions myself.
The relative lack of content on Lemmy, for me, has been a boon. I go through New, then Top 6 Hours, then Top 12 Hours, then I need to find something else to do. When I was on Reddit, I found myself bouncing between Reddit and YouTube for entertainment. With Lemmy not having boundless amounts of crap to scroll through and no algorithm, my tech usage is far more varied.
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They're not selling washing machines, they're just trying to convert you to a Linux-using, FOSS-compliant Marxist-Leninist.
What if the washing machine runs linux though?
Well, then it can run DOOM. I'm sold.
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The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over.
The social media web was literally the start of the decline. There used to be thousands of niche internet forums, now everything is in a AOL style walled garden.
The thing I hated most with social media is that no one really wanted to email anymore.
I used to have several pen pals around the world. We would exchange long mails every couple of days telling each other about our lives. But the moment social media popped up, the one-on-one conversations started to shift to posts with something everybody got to comment on. And on top of that, they didn’t seem very personal anymore. Not like the friends I used to know.
Didn’t take long for those friendships to fizzle out. I’m still quite sad about it.
I wonder if Discord is replacing that? Lots of teens have their private discord servers (or whatever they're called) where they chat with each other. It reminds me of ICQ, MSN Messenger, Trillian, and the other chat protocols we used to have.
I never had the experience of email pen pals, but there are still ways people are connecting with each other authentically online.
Discord seems to be ethereal. If you're on when things are happening, cool. If not...it's just a wasteland, like walking into a bar at 10am and seeing holographic echoes of last night.
usenet was probably the first community I found on the internet, and I think the format is still a good template for human interaction. Reddit was, in a way, very similar in it's "old" and pre-enshittified format and I believe that's why it found success. It's less about discovery and more about deep dive, niche communities where you can connect with real and remote people with the same interests.
I use the internet for so much more than social media; the only real downside (aside from the loss of communities like usenet/reddit as a common point of connection) is that the search engines have tipped over and are getting worse rather than better. They're falling into the AI/ML autocorrect disaster hole where specific, technical queries are dumbed down to an 8 year old's level of perception because that's what the average user is searching for.
Web2.0 was bullshit and plebs fell for it.
So now we are under fucking survielliance regime and social media is used to drive public opinion better than cable ever could.
I thought Web 2.0 was stuff like AJAX and DHTML, like Google Maps compared to old MapQuest. That started in the mid 00's. The tracking stuff came about a decade later.
Tracking stuff came as soon as you could communicate asynchronously with a server, really. It became widely known and a plague in the 10s but it started as soon as Ajax was available. Keep in mind that Google and most of the websites were free and ads driven almost from the start because that was the only way to create a critical mass of users.
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I remember hearing about the potential of Web 2.0 in the 00s and thought it sounded like it was going to be really cool.
Now I just want the old web back. Isolated forums had a sense of community that, even on Lemmy, isn't present in the same way.
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In the early 00s, here in my city, it was fun to go to a certain pedestrians-only avenue to drink with friends. Or a date. If you do it now - yes, post-COVID lockdowns! - you can't hold a conversation for five fucking minutes without someone interrupting you with advertisement. As a result, people use that avenue nowadays strictly to commute.
I've ditched TV when I was 14. (I don't regret it.) But plenty people told me that open TV, and then cabled TV, became unbearable due to the sheer amount of advertisement.
Unless I recognise the number, I'm not bothering to pick the phone up any more. I'm probably not the only one doing it.
Are you noticing the pattern? Perhaps the internet suffers a bit more with it because people are a bit freer to do what they want here, but the problem is not exclusive to the internet, it's everywhere advertisers appear. The world has become less fun due to advertisers ("how do people DARE to have fun and ignore our «marketing opportunities»?").
Wait. So, like a person interrupts you? Can you explain this like I don't understand it?
Wait. So, like a person interrupts you?
The thing in my city? It's like this, but each 5~10 minutes. Each time it's a different person advertising something else. It's frequent enough that you can't hold a decent conversation, even if your only "mistake" was to sit on a bench in a public space. If you ignore the advertiser, they'll insist and use a slightly louder tone, as if you were assumed to be deaf; and if you ask them to leave you alone [even politely] they'll babble about "trying to help you so you don't miss this amazing opportunity".
Just to give you an idea: once, my then girlfriend and me decided to count it. We sit on a bench, drinking some booze, and we got twelve advertisers bugging us in a hour and half. Including: eyeglasses stores, phone providers advertising "number portability", local popular restaurants, handcrafted accessories sellers, gold buyers, so goes on.
It's basically an offline example of the same thing that happens on the internet. Everybody and their dog wants your attention, and they'll make sure to be heard against your will. The text doesn't directly acknowledge that, but note how everything there ties it to advertisers, from "S.E.O. hackers have ruined the trick of adding “Reddit” to searches to find human-generated answers" (why? For ad views!) to Tiktok "pushes us to scroll through another dozen videos of cooking demonstrations or funny animals" (why? Ad views.)
Wtf that's nuts and sounds like it breaks several laws, like harassment and disturbing the peace or sum. I'd definitely have a stern word with them.
I never looked for potential laws against that, because... well, Latin America. But I think that it would be hard to classify it as either - it's multiple independent and uncoordinated agents, and the disturbance/harassment is not due to one of them interacting with you, but all of them.
I think that the city needs to pass some law specifically against selling and advertising stuff on public places.
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Well, in my country you can call the police when the person doesn't leave you alone when told so. But given the US police and US Freedom of Speech (TM) I'm not so sure...
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Not comment OP, but I assume its similar to mine. People will approach you to give you flyers of their buisness, free samples, or otherwise smooth talk you to enter their shop/stand.
When you're sitting in a restaurant or bar chilling with friends. It is a thing that happens.
It's "a thing that happens" when it's sporadic. But when it becomes frequent, annoying or obtrusive enough, it becomes a reason to avoid the space, it makes the space less fun. Same deal with the internet.
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It's not fun anymore because instead of just doing stupid, fun shit for the fun and weirdness of it, everyone is just trying to make money.
Yep, instead of it being a playground to have fun and community, it's a Very Serious Thing^TM^ where everyone is either striving for that cash or trying to produce domestic terrorists. It's so shit.
With kbin and lemmy, there’s a spark of the good ol’ days, but the players are all scattered across so many disconnected grids. I’m sure there are some great communities popping up, but they may be fleeting, or instances might crash and disappear. Mastodon is good, and growing every day and also has some of that Ye Olde Twitter Feels, but — BUT! — I don’t have a lot of fun on it.
Has anybody found any fun communities to share?
You can always try searching on Trending Communities or New Communities, that's where I've found many new interesting communities to follow and I have both of them on my RSS feed to ensure I don't miss any news. In related topics, the main Wordpress.com site is finally enabling ActivityPub so expect many blogs to start interacting with the Fediverse and, who knows, directly cross-posting to Lemmy.
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The algorithms killed the platforms. They've become vapid, empty holes that only attract people addicted to them like junkies.
The internet can be fun, but you're not going to find it on the platforms. You're only going to find fun in places where people talk to each other. And even then, if you're thin skinned you're going to wind up in an outrage filled circlejerk. If you loosen up and go where the algorithms don't exist you can have a good time.
The algorithms killed the platforms
And somewhat ironically, the lack of algorithm is what killed the Web. The Web has a huge problem with discovering new content, it's essentially impossible unless you already know exactly what to search for, but than of course it isn't new content anymore. Meanwhile the Facebooks, TikToks and the Youtubes are actually quite good at discovering content, the later two especially can dig up extremely niche interests content with only hundreds of views.
The crux is that they give you no direct way to interact with the algorithm, it's all guesswork based on your view history and clicks. There is no "show me less clickbait garbage"-button.
The solution should be algorithms that are transparent, switchable and under the users control, but so far I have never seen anybody developing anything like that. It's either all one algorithm maximizing engagement and ads or some federated thing without any algorithms at all and complete garbage discovery and search.
The algorithms made me bored of these platforms. I used to scroll twitter for 10 minutes then close the app because I would come across content filled with negativity. Then on youtube it seems like the videos suggested are those I am not interested in. Now that I have switched to newpipe, I find that I have so many more videos to watch. Recently I have started using Mastodon and I am liking it so far since I can tune my feed according to what I like to see using hashtags, following people and blocking/muting people. At least I haven't got bored yet. These secret algorithms don't seem to work for me. I wonder how people get addicted.?
The article should be titled 'Why social media isn't fun anymore', because that's all the author is talking about.
It's equal to "the internet" for people who don't work in IT. Super sad actually.
There are entire counties where Facebook is "the internet".
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I too get irrationally annoyed when writers fail to make the distinction. There was an episode of Reply All a while back where they analyzed the "emotions of the Internet" ... using Twitter. Twitter literally exists to maximize negative emotions! In no way was it representative of the experience (unless you're a tech writer).
I still feel like the social web has sucked in a lot of things that used to exist outside of it.
Like blogs. I feel like the blog world was much healthier before most of the content moved out of independent websites to a unified dump of social shit.
The author wants to bring light to the issue, but they're also part of the problem and actively making it worse. They pretty much only talk about Twitter because that's pretty much all they use. They're not even trying to explore the internet. Lemmy and Mastadon are big exceptions to his conclusion, but he probably has no idea about them because he's not actually fighting to take his control back from Twitter's algorithm.
I'm good with this. A big part of the appeal of Lemmy - and of Reddit around 2009-2014 is that it's under the radar. Not quite a secret club that's full of people and not companies trying to sell stuff.
Lemmy is in its infancy. It is not at all prepared for 100 million users taking the Fediverse mainstream.
I'm pretty happy with Lemmy and still ok with YouTube. It feels like old times, BEFORE social media sites and apps re-centralized the Internet.
What we need is a searchable database for the fediverse. The ways to find communities in lemmy and individuals to follow on Mastodon could be better.
I can remember the first time I thought there was something seriously wrong with all the social media habits people were getting sucked into; that was probably like in 2008 or so, when some of my colleagues and I used to joke about how we could never get through any kind of interaction with another colleague of ours without her constantly scrolling her phone like 25 times a minute. It only got worse from there...
The biggest sigh of relief I have had in a long, long time was deleting my Google apps and account. I also deleted Facebook, Twitter, and lastly Reddit account over the summer. The only "social accounts" I have today are this one and my new e-mail account. I now use Startpage for searching if I need it, so no more "googling" things. I haven't subbed to cable since 2010, but I do sub to HBO (er... "Max" now ffs... I am considering dumping that too...), and The Criterion Channel which is still awesome. Rest of the time, I work, game, hike, or swim.
Getting rid of Google is sort of like trying to get all the fish out of the sea. They are everywhere, hooked into everything, and they constantly nag you. I had to give them another e-mail address before I could even delete the one I had with them, which really annoyed me. None of their business where I got off to... except it is. According to them. So, I had to trash that email account too afterwards just so I could stop getting stupid Google spam.
Anyway, it is definitely possible to unplug just takes some effort. The internet is a lot more pleasant without all that nonsense. :)
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