I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore(nymag.com)
nymag.com
I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-time-on-the-internet-anymore.html
7 comments
This poor soul has never heard of Hacker News.
LOL, yeah many around the internet had never heard of HK as well!
I have the same feeling. The author’s description of Twitter is accurate, though I would add that is an ad-filled wasteland.
I deleted Reddit when it was clear they wanted to commercialize everything that was good about it and introduced a terrible and slow redesign, with tons of tracking.
HN, a couple newsletters, and some RSS feeds are what I have left.
I deleted Reddit when it was clear they wanted to commercialize everything that was good about it and introduced a terrible and slow redesign, with tons of tracking.
HN, a couple newsletters, and some RSS feeds are what I have left.
I hadn't used Reddit for a number of years. Recently I checked it out again because of a link from HN, and I couldn't believe how incredibly slow and cumbersome the site has become.
You can go back to the original views, but they were hideous. OTOH at least they were responsive.
You can go back to the original views, but they were hideous. OTOH at least they were responsive.
I feel the same. If you go back even further, "surfing the web" was a thing. You'd get into a rabbit hole on a topic, visiting a bunch of "personal" home pages in the process, finding a gem or two. That's not a thing anymore.
How did he forget about flash games? Now when I see a new indie game I get nostalgic for the old flash game that was just like the new one. My kids will never know how fun those games were.
The only real negative i have on this other than the rampant abuse of the data machine and the dangers coming in regards to all that, is that for quite a lot of us who lived through this transition, we are left with this compulsion to explore and "unearth" something magical.
We dig every day and are left grasping only at a memory. An imprint left on us of something real. Something magical, raw and unfettered.
Deep human connection for a brief moment was found in cyberspace once. Oneness was found in this place. Unity was seen as acheivable.
We were all one. The revolutionary underground. The hackers, punks, and script kiddies.
Whether or not you went into computer science is irrelevant. If you pulled Warez files off AOL chat servers before punting Bobwit1975 offline via an IM, before booting up napster you remember "that world" and it shaped you.
What we're left with is a hole. a sadness of the end of a major transition. Like when a startup scales and the ceo gets bored and steps down its because its all been built. He was the architect.
We were the architects.
Inused to get paid to break websites.
If i did what i did in 1998 now id be arrested. I almost have been tbh due simply to these drastic changes having taken place so fast.
I guess what im getting at is this...
We lived it. It was wonderful.
We can't sit here all day wishing we could roll back time. We got cozy here, but now its uncomfortable and there's cobwebs all over us.
We have to do the hardest thing ever and go out into the world and find activities and joy in the physical world again somehow and im not sure how we do it.
I fucking miss the OG internet.