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I was with you until you said the depth and variety of content on the internet took a hit. that smacks of back-in-my-dayism and doesn't survive even the most ba

I was with you until you said the depth and variety of content on the internet took a hit. that smacks of back-in-my-dayism and doesn't survive even the most basic sniff test. I'll grant that perhaps you can't find anything that satisfies you, but I consider that a problem on your end. I find more that interests me than I could ever handle, and I don't even try. so sure, I'm not surprised you have a way you like to dismissively characterize how billions of people use the Internet, but all you're really doing is explaining your elitism in great detail.

cryoshon 11y ago
I'm talking about average user experience. The depth and variety is still all there thankfully,(and probably more profligate than ever) but it's more squirreled away from the facebook/netflix audience than it was before as a result of market forces. The audience effectively wanting a customizable and social TV is a different audience from the one chasing brain food-- and the internet as currently envisioned has endless opportunities for both, though in former years it wasn't as optimized for the much larger TV crowd.
lmm 11y ago
I'm normally enthusiastic about new things, but honestly I found it much easier to find deep interesting content back when Geocities was live and Yahoo Directory and webrings existed. In particular I find blogs encourage a throwaway attitude to content. Almost certainly more information is being written down in blogs now than was being written in people's webspace ten years ago. But webspaces were constructed as a permanent, indexed thing (people even made "site maps" telling you what page was where). Which made them worse for disseminating news or other time-sensitive information, but much better for the "long tail" of information that you now simply can't find, short of trawling through a complete archive.
eggie 11y ago
> basic sniff test Here's another whiff from a similar perspective. Back in the day people were using open social media (e.g. Geocities) and posting everything on a public web that was searchable (if poorly) and generally laterally browsable by "web surfers". It was an ocean of content that we meandered in, finding all kinds of goodness and weirdness. Then came myspace, which was like geocities v2, also wildly customizable and completely devoid of any access control. The standard of the day was "put it on the web in the open." Now, if we all were to go into the lovely walled garden of Facebook and keep our accounts private (AFAIK this is pretty standard), there will be no way for us to stumble into new things. We have to become vetted, to be friends, and then we can start to share. This can only reduce the relative amount of stuff on the open web, and in the extreme will completely destroy it. If we were all only on Facebook with our pages hidden then there would be 0 new things on the internet. From any perspective this would mean that there is less interesting content out there. This is basically the direction things are going. Yes--- there is a lot more stuff on the net. Yes, this is a good thing. Probably we are overstating things if we say that the internet is shrinking and getting worse, but just imagine if all those people were happily posting in the open. We'd all be surfing on that sea of content. EDIT: submitted my comment early by accident

cryoshon 11y ago

I'm talking about average user experience. The depth and variety is still all there thankfully,(and probably more profligate than ever) but it's more squirreled away from the facebook/netflix audience than it was before as a result of market forces. The audience effectively wanting a customizable and social TV is a different audience from the one chasing brain food-- and the internet as currently envisioned has endless opportunities for both, though in former years it wasn't as optimized for the much larger TV crowd.

lmm 11y ago

I'm normally enthusiastic about new things, but honestly I found it much easier to find deep interesting content back when Geocities was live and Yahoo Directory and webrings existed. In particular I find blogs encourage a throwaway attitude to content. Almost certainly more information is being written down in blogs now than was being written in people's webspace ten years ago. But webspaces were constructed as a permanent, indexed thing (people even made "site maps" telling you what page was where). Which made them worse for disseminating news or other time-sensitive information, but much better for the "long tail" of information that you now simply can't find, short of trawling through a complete archive.

eggie 11y ago

> basic sniff test Here's another whiff from a similar perspective. Back in the day people were using open social media (e.g. Geocities) and posting everything on a public web that was searchable (if poorly) and generally laterally browsable by "web surfers". It was an ocean of content that we meandered in, finding all kinds of goodness and weirdness. Then came myspace, which was like geocities v2, also wildly customizable and completely devoid of any access control. The standard of the day was "put it on the web in the open." Now, if we all were to go into the lovely walled garden of Facebook and keep our accounts private (AFAIK this is pretty standard), there will be no way for us to stumble into new things. We have to become vetted, to be friends, and then we can start to share. This can only reduce the relative amount of stuff on the open web, and in the extreme will completely destroy it. If we were all only on Facebook with our pages hidden then there would be 0 new things on the internet. From any perspective this would mean that there is less interesting content out there. This is basically the direction things are going. Yes--- there is a lot more stuff on the net. Yes, this is a good thing. Probably we are overstating things if we say that the internet is shrinking and getting worse, but just imagine if all those people were happily posting in the open. We'd all be surfing on that sea of content. EDIT: submitted my comment early by accident