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1. There is a 4chan meme that goes approximately like this: Newbie: "Remember the time when 4chan was good?" Veteran: "4chan was never good." "4chan" can be
by Eerie 9y ago
1. There is a 4chan meme that goes approximately like this:
Newbie: "Remember the time when 4chan was good?"
Veteran: "4chan was never good."
"4chan" can be easily replaced with "Twitter" or "The Internet" here.
2. There's a universal tendency for people to reminisce fondly about the good old days and contrast them with the ostensibly bad present. It has nothing to do with the truth. It is simply a syndrome of getting old. People were doing it 3000 years ago.
- jknoepfler 9y agoBBS being the slightly more dated version of this, yes.
- LoSboccacc 9y agoEternal september is a thing tho
- rtpg 9y agoThe thing is 4chan's raison d'etre is to be kinda shitty (or rather, a bit of a rough wasteland). Twitter could clean itself if they weren't so afraid of the wannabe Nazi crews + follower bots, and the effects cleaning up would have on their already bad-looking user metrics.
- cgag 9y agoIm not convinced there isn't a universal tendency for communities to get worse over time.
- Eerie 9y agoThere isn't. There's a tendency to paint the past in gold. “I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.” ― Alan Moore, Watchmen
- wfunction 9y ago>> Im not convinced there isn't a universal tendency for communities to get worse over time. > There isn't. Cool, I'm sure you managed to convince him now.
- steinuil 9y agoThere is, but it has more to do with the people joining later and not understanding/respecting the unwritten laws of the community. Here's an interesting essay about this effect: http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
- dragonwriter 9y agoThey either grow (and change) or die. For those who liked the way they startedn, both of these.tend to look like forms of “get worse”, which is, of course, entirely subjective.
- wfunction 9y ago> 2. There's a universal tendency for people to reminisce fondly about the good old days and contrast them with the ostensibly bad present. It has nothing to do with the truth. It is simply a syndrome of getting old. Nothing to do with the truth? Maybe in your cases, but in others it very much does. In the good ol' days Democrats and Republicans weren't as hostile and unwilling to work together as they are now. In the good ol' days it used to snow way more in some places than it does now. In the good ol' days many places were less polluted than they are now. In the good ol' days people had to learn to actually ask each other out instead of swiping right on their phones. In the good ol' days businesses had longer-lasting relationships with their employees and didn't view them as disposable goods. Yeah, totally nothing to do with the truth, just people imagining things.
- ethanhunt_ 9y agoI think the specific psycho phenomenon is that if there were 5 good things and 5 bad things about dating in the 50s, we generally remember the good things and talk about the good things. Now with tindr there's also 5 good and 5 bad and we say "wow all these bad things suck, back then it was just [the 5 good things that they remember]". Remembering the good vs the bad probably aligns with someone being naturally upbeat or sad (glass full vs half-full personality). Also I'm skeptical of that Democrats and Repubs line. In the good old days they got into fist fights on the congress floor.
- wfunction 9y agoYes, people don't tend to reminisce about bad things. They prefer to leave them behind and focus on maximizing the good parts. That's normal, expected, generally healthy, and also not what the parent comment was saying. As for the last part, it's hard to tell if you're referring to the 1800s or the 1900s as the "good old days" where Congressmen got into fist fights, but anyway, some digestible material: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/polarized-politics-in-congress-began-in-the-1970s-and-has-been-getting-worse-ever-since/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/polarized-po...
- 9y ago
- wyager 9y agoExcept for the fact that both sites (twitter and 4chan) have both become substantially worse over the years. In both cases, a lot of it has to do with increased censorship. A large number of people left 4chan for 8chan after moot started engaging in fairly aggressive political censorship. Who knows what his motivation was - maybe an effort to appeal more to advertisers, maybe a change in beliefs about freedom of expression - either way, the effect was the same. There was a big exodus to other chan sites. Twitter has a similar censorship problem; many of the twitter accounts I followed, which were mildly offensive but nothing compared to the worst of the site, were silently banned without justification. The only connection I can find between them is that they were political in a way Twitter didn't like. Unfortunately, twitter is too big for there to be an effective exodus, so the whole internet is just worse off. Not all nostalgia is misplaced. The internet is unquestionably changing, and the trend seems to be that as a system becomes more popular, it becomes more hostile to viewpoints too far from its median. Reddit, twitter, Facebook, etc. have all been extremely ban-happy in recent years, moreso than ever before.
- Eerie 9y ago>Not all nostalgia is misplaced. The internet is unquestionably changing, and the trend seems to be that as a system becomes more popular, it becomes more hostile to viewpoints too far from its median That's not a current trend, that's just statistics. The larger the sample is, the closer it's median is to the median of the whole set of data. It was always this way. However, people can still build their own smaller on-line communities. With sites like Reddit, it's easier than even. You have r/TumblrInAction, r/ShitRedditSays, and everything in between.
- bnegreve 9y ago> It is simply a syndrome of getting old. I think there is more than just this: any community/social network that grows from thousands to millions of users has to make changes in order to scale (for example, changes in the moderation). Whatever they are, these changes are likely to be a disappointment for the oldest users who join the community for what it was in the first place. Another plausible explanation is that, as these communities become more popular, the goal of the companies supporting them often shifts from the original goal of creating a nice and attractive community, to a new more ambiguous goal of keeping the growth high while generating profit (thus adding ads, tracking etc.)
- realworldview 9y agoNostalgia isn't an affliction of the elderly. Its presence for all ages shows it's more a recurrent lack of consideration of reality, or many other such memory and coping mechanisms. That isn't to say it's bad, but needs to be understood as limiting in context.
- glaberficken 9y agoI recommend Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen for a powerful depiction of this "syndrome". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_in_Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_in_Paris
- endorphone 9y ago"Getting old" is perhaps a bit prejudicial in this case. I think a better observation is that the novelty is lost for the individual, and this is true about virtually anything -- that show they liked, the club they went to, the activity they took part in, a forum on the internet: Once it loses novelty, the ugly parts become more obvious, and for those that are on the edge of benefit opinions can turn rapidly. And to those claiming that this author is making concrete points about twitter, I would add the observation of an outsider who never understood the draw of twitter that it was always overwhelmingly a) cynical sarcasm that can be easily encapsulated in few characters, b) public disagreement. The medium itself favored caustic commentary. The purpose of Twitter has always been negative and pandering to the choir.
- ygaf 9y agoThings can be better in the past. A meme is not some piece of wisdom.
- sr2 9y agoOr better phrasing: Halcyon Days: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/halcyon_days https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/halcyon_days Days of Yore: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/days_of_yore https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/days_of_yore
- thinkfurther 9y agoI find it extremely ironic that when concrete criticism about how a specific thing used to be "better" by some metric, this old chest nut is brought out, displaying the shallowness it claims to speak out against. The people who think everything "used to be better"? They're a straw man, while they may exist neither you or I even talk to them, and not one of them ever posted here or elsewhere on the internet. But they're trotted out alllllll the time. I first noticed that when I was like 20 or 21, so what was the reason then? My high IQ artificually inflating my age, me getting old before my time? Heh.
- thinkfurther 9y agoYou know, back in the day people actually responded when asked something. Granted, a bullshit response was always a possibility, but not a blank and yet shameless stare.
- bartread 9y ago> 2. There's a universal tendency for people to reminisce fondly about the good old days and contrast them with the ostensibly bad present. It has nothing to do with the truth. It is simply a syndrome of getting old. People were doing it 3000 years ago. I'm afraid that whilst there's some truth in what you've said, I think you're far wide of the mark here. It's not about getting old. It's about the fact that, and I wouldn't pretend to understand the mechanics here, for whatever reason when too many people get involved in something it changes. It might get better, or it might get worse, or it might get better and then get worse, or whatever. In this case I think the point that twitter, or whatever, somehow gets "spoiled" is perhaps valid. I would argue I've seen a similar thing with facebook. It used to be people posting updates about themselves and was a good way to keep up with people; now it's largely people sharing pre-created content - 10th rate jokes and memes, political petitions, news - real or otherwise - from a parasitic ecosystem of sites predicated upon social sharing. That spoiling can manifest itself in a variety of ways, and can take either a short or a long time to happen. The point is that a large influx of newcomers into an existing community, business, special interest group, or whatever, can radically alter the dynamics of that group in a way that is unpredictable, and sometimes not good. And I apologise for the slightly rambling nature of this comment - haven't had time to edit it into shape.
- wvh 9y agoPerhaps. But there is some truth about signal to noise ratio. Just like us "old-timers" saw happening with email (spam and on mailing lists) and later on forums. The flood of average – both posters and responses – is drowning out value. Hollow emotions (and offence) are winning from uncoloured intelligence and rationality. There's a tipping point, and I guess Twitter has gone over it.