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I think the internet is less fun now -- I can't decide if its from maturation of technology or maturation of people though. (Has anyone else felt like things be

I think the internet is less fun now -- I can't decide if its from maturation of technology or maturation of people though. (Has anyone else felt like things became less fun as they got older?) I felt a greater sense of community 10 years ago when I mostly used IRC and PHP BBs. The communities were smaller, and it was fun even if you disliked people. Flame wars and trolling were mostly for the audience's amusement, because even if you really disliked each other you had nowhere else to go aside from quitting entirely. Nowadays there are so many options that people don't really commit to communities anymore. I'm glad this thread was posted. It'll be interesting to read people's thoughts.

JimboOmega 8y ago
I don't know either but I have absolutely had the same experience. Although for me the heyday of IRC was 20 years ago, and even then (in the late 90s) it felt dated and quaint. People at that time were moving on from ICQ to AIM, and IRC was the old, weird place you went to get anime DivX videos in particular. I do think the maturation of "troll culture" has really devalued a lot of the Internet. Virtually any event or topic has groups around it dedicated to being as loud as they possibly can, and that kind of sucks some of the air out of it. Loudness is way overvalued by the Internet. I enjoyed going into IRC chats and spamming offensive things when I was 14 (more than 20 years ago), but that phase lasted a few months, if that, for me. It seems to be almost a profession now - my idea of offensive was just repeated curse words and flooding. Trolls these days go all out. And it's not that I can't ignore them, but it feels the broader world can't, and we have to always fight about what to do about them, and how whatever asshole on twitter said whatever super offensive thing or how somebody doxxed somebody or whatever. Plus! Wikipedia has gotten old. When I was young I was curious about tons of things but going to the library to look them up was way too much work. Answers at the touch of a button? Links to related content? It was endlessly valuable and interesting but I've kind of exhausted most of the random topics I was interested in. I still spend a lot of time on wikipedia, and I'm still curious about new things, but the backlog isn't what it was then. It's sort of like 80's music. For a few years in the mid-2000's I kept being shocked how a favorite 80's station would find yet another hit I had never heard but now fell in love with. But the musical content of the decade was indeed finite, and I can't remember the last time I fell in love with a new 80's song (I've moved on to KPop but that's another story).
- arca_vorago 8y ago
  IRC is still alive and well, and honestly since so many have forgotten about it has become a much more tight knit community, depending on which ones you frequent... people should really try it out. Don't forget your cloaks! The real time nature, and the kind of people that hang out there, make it very worth it. I frequently get direct access to a dev on irc... you don't get that on twitter or a bug report.
  - grimgrin 8y ago
    I exist in an IRC channel of about ~40 nicks comprising some bots, some inactives, and maybe 20-25 that talk fairly frequently. Most of us are oriented on computers throughout the day, so there's really always someone chatting -- there are patterns to when people chat, based on timezones, etc. When any of us are in another person(s) city, we tend to meet up. Some of us sync and travel to certain conferences. There's been a few in-group marriages, a few deaths. This is a group where the bulk of us have been around for close to a decade or longer. Newcomers are rare, which is good for noise reasons among all else probably. The only thing I've had similar to this was the core group of friends I had on a MUD in the late 90s till the early 00s.
  - memco 8y ago
    I didn't get into IRC much until about 5 years ago where one of the frameworks I was using was just starting to pick up steam. The dev and several experienced users would hang out in there and would help answer questions. Now, I look for IRC channels as a primary source of support for coding questions and I'm slightly put off when I see a community or project doesn't have an IRC channel. I don't hang out in there as much as I used to, but it's a great place to meet people and learn, even today.
- 0xbadcafebee 8y ago
  Go to Wikipedia and press <Alt><Shift>X. Type it again. And again. And again... If you want obscure 80's music you can find archives of old 80's comp tapes from everything to folk to punk to experimental techno (https://contortyourself-cy.bandcamp.com/album/80s-underground-cassette-culture-volume-1-2xlp https://contortyourself-cy.bandcamp.com/album/80s-undergroun...). I think the 90s+ has way more to offer in terms of just massive amounts of raw weird shit from bands most people never knew to begin with. You can stretch out and find all the sub-genres of a particular type, like electronica (https://beat.media/obscure-genres-of-electronica-you-need-to-listen-to https://beat.media/obscure-genres-of-electronica-you-need-to...) death metal (https://www.listchallenges.com/the-obscure-us-death-metal-100 https://www.listchallenges.com/the-obscure-us-death-metal-10...) 90s UK indie (http://www.nme.com/photos/50-forgotten-90s-bands-who-prove-90s-indie-wasn-t-just-about-oasis-and-blur-1411042 http://www.nme.com/photos/50-forgotten-90s-bands-who-prove-9...) or random French bands (https://frenchcrazy.com/2014/04/popular-100-french-songs.html/ https://frenchcrazy.com/2014/04/popular-100-french-songs.htm...), or do what most music nerds do and visit a record swap. My interests have mostly shifted to history, cookery, materials engineering and gardening, so it's impossible to get bored. There's too much left to learn.
dchuk 8y ago
I’ve actually been thinking about this recently, as I was also a heavy forum user back in the day. Why don’t we just start a forum for the HN crowd? Not a new interpretation of the forum model or anything like that, literally any instance of vbulletin or phpbb or something comparable and “traditional”. If people are genuinely interested in this, I would be up for spinning something up over the weekend.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  That could be interesting.
  - dchuk 8y ago
    I’m going to try and fire something up this week. I’ll do some research on software for it, I’m fine spending money on xenforo or vbulletin but it looks like there are quite a few options out there. I’ll announce it here when it’s ready!
    - organsnyder 8y ago
      Use Discourse. It's not only the most advanced from a tech perspective, but it also aims to promote strong communities.
      - dchuk 8y ago
        No doubt that discourse is really nice software, and I will give it a go, but it does lack the “nostalgia” referred to by the original comment I replied to with this idea. All options are valid at this point though!
        varrock 8y ago
        I am a huge fan of Simple Machine Forums - https://www.simplemachines.org/ https://www.simplemachines.org/
      - eitland 8y ago
heckanoobs 8y ago
I imagined myself on a forum like the old days, freely typing my thoughts into the void. First thing that came to mind was who owns this content? Second thing was can I get a bigger audience posting it somewhere else? The internet's broken and it broke me with it
bfuller 8y ago
> felt a greater sense of community 10 years ago when I mostly used IRC and PHP BBs. that sense of community is present in smaller subreddits with subscribers in the low thousands
__alias 8y ago
I often fondly look back at my initial online gaming memories, where games like Runescape and the early Halo series offered a huge online community feel. As Runescape/Halo series developed and time went on the feelings of the games changed, and people in Runescape were more focused on efficient Exp gaining or competitive playing in Halo. I have yet to experience the same kind of online communities that were present on online gaming in 2006ish
- Dunedan 8y ago
  Runescape will always have a special place in my heart. Aside from its community it was the first browser-based game with really good 3D graphics, at a time where table-based browser games were the norm. And it was even free! For a non-native English speaker like me in hindsight Runescape helped me a lot with English vocabulary, granted a lot of it wasn't really helpful thanks to its fantasy setting, but still it helped to improve my English skills significantly.
gaius 8y ago
maturation of people If anything it’s the opposite. The old golden rule used to be “what goes online stays online”. Now people call the police if they are “offended”.
kk_cz 8y ago
I feel the same and I believe it's definitely because of age. When I was younger I had hours each day to invest into online interactions. sure it was fun, but it's over. Kids nowadays have it the same, they just use snapshat or instafram or something entire else to create their unique online experience (that they will miss in 15 years)
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
A big part of the change has been a mass influx of extremely low information users. In the early years of the internet people that were on it were high information tech enthusiasts. Now we've reached the point that there are more Facebook users than internet users... At least if you ask them [1]. The average level of intelligence on the internet has dropped dramatically. And I think this is bringing out the predators in mass. Those predators run the gamut from the guy feverishly hacking away in Eastern Europe to the greying man in the 25th story in NYC wearing Armani. Exploiting these people is the latest gold rush. That exploitation could be for financial ends, political ones, or just simply for the lulz. It all makes a lot of the internet very fake. Any community that gains any size starts to experience massive levels of astro turfing and various image management teams (professional and amateur) trying to sway opinion one way or the other. And then every site has to have voting features of some sort or another. Ostensibly it's about content prioritizing come filtering, yet go look at all of the extremely interesting things that get left to die in "new" even on here. Or the phenomena where something will get submitted 9 times, be ignored, and the 10th time explode. It has very little to do with content filtering. The vote systems are just a tool for growth as it creates an addictive feedback mechanism. But at the same time it also is like a dream come true for those that would like to manipulate or sway others artificially. Finally there is outrage culture. I'm still not sure if this emerged organically or not, but it's certainly been a drain on the internet. There are lots of people trying their hardest to be offended by anything, and spin everything is the worst possible way imaginable. And since a certain sort of people just thrive on drama, this nonsense spreads like wildfire. Did you hear a coffee shop called the police on two people that refused to buy anything or leave? "OH NO THEY DIDN'T!!?!? THIS WILL BE OUR TIANANMEN!" Or something... [1] - https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-using-the-internet/ https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
CookieMon 8y ago
> I can't decide if its from maturation of technology or maturation of people though. It was a place by and for enthusiasts, and now it isn't. So not just the people or the technology maturing, the demographic fundamentally shifted. I suspect it's also become the strongest whirlpool/second-life for people trying to fill a hole inside. People always say <thing> was better before it was popular, and I never really bought into that, but my assumption that 'gatekeeping is bad' causes cognitive dissonance in the face of how the Internet changed. But hey, I don't envy the kids who'll have to use this place once my generation is geriatric. Like hell I'm just going to sit in a chair and stare at a wall as I go senile - I'll be here, improving the place. Kids today will reminisce about the days when the Net wasn't a way of keeping senior citizens occupied.
bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
There was a joke being said frequently on online forums and messageboards about flame wars and trolls on the Internet, "the internet was serious business!", but now nobody even refers to the joke anymore, because it has actually been turned into one, or is not a fun place anymore.

JimboOmega 8y ago

I don't know either but I have absolutely had the same experience. Although for me the heyday of IRC was 20 years ago, and even then (in the late 90s) it felt dated and quaint. People at that time were moving on from ICQ to AIM, and IRC was the old, weird place you went to get anime DivX videos in particular. I do think the maturation of "troll culture" has really devalued a lot of the Internet. Virtually any event or topic has groups around it dedicated to being as loud as they possibly can, and that kind of sucks some of the air out of it. Loudness is way overvalued by the Internet. I enjoyed going into IRC chats and spamming offensive things when I was 14 (more than 20 years ago), but that phase lasted a few months, if that, for me. It seems to be almost a profession now - my idea of offensive was just repeated curse words and flooding. Trolls these days go all out. And it's not that I can't ignore them, but it feels the broader world can't, and we have to always fight about what to do about them, and how whatever asshole on twitter said whatever super offensive thing or how somebody doxxed somebody or whatever. Plus! Wikipedia has gotten old. When I was young I was curious about tons of things but going to the library to look them up was way too much work. Answers at the touch of a button? Links to related content? It was endlessly valuable and interesting but I've kind of exhausted most of the random topics I was interested in. I still spend a lot of time on wikipedia, and I'm still curious about new things, but the backlog isn't what it was then. It's sort of like 80's music. For a few years in the mid-2000's I kept being shocked how a favorite 80's station would find yet another hit I had never heard but now fell in love with. But the musical content of the decade was indeed finite, and I can't remember the last time I fell in love with a new 80's song (I've moved on to KPop but that's another story).

arca_vorago 8y ago
IRC is still alive and well, and honestly since so many have forgotten about it has become a much more tight knit community, depending on which ones you frequent... people should really try it out. Don't forget your cloaks! The real time nature, and the kind of people that hang out there, make it very worth it. I frequently get direct access to a dev on irc... you don't get that on twitter or a bug report.
- grimgrin 8y ago
  I exist in an IRC channel of about ~40 nicks comprising some bots, some inactives, and maybe 20-25 that talk fairly frequently. Most of us are oriented on computers throughout the day, so there's really always someone chatting -- there are patterns to when people chat, based on timezones, etc. When any of us are in another person(s) city, we tend to meet up. Some of us sync and travel to certain conferences. There's been a few in-group marriages, a few deaths. This is a group where the bulk of us have been around for close to a decade or longer. Newcomers are rare, which is good for noise reasons among all else probably. The only thing I've had similar to this was the core group of friends I had on a MUD in the late 90s till the early 00s.
- memco 8y ago
  I didn't get into IRC much until about 5 years ago where one of the frameworks I was using was just starting to pick up steam. The dev and several experienced users would hang out in there and would help answer questions. Now, I look for IRC channels as a primary source of support for coding questions and I'm slightly put off when I see a community or project doesn't have an IRC channel. I don't hang out in there as much as I used to, but it's a great place to meet people and learn, even today.
0xbadcafebee 8y ago
Go to Wikipedia and press <Alt><Shift>X. Type it again. And again. And again... If you want obscure 80's music you can find archives of old 80's comp tapes from everything to folk to punk to experimental techno (https://contortyourself-cy.bandcamp.com/album/80s-underground-cassette-culture-volume-1-2xlp https://contortyourself-cy.bandcamp.com/album/80s-undergroun...). I think the 90s+ has way more to offer in terms of just massive amounts of raw weird shit from bands most people never knew to begin with. You can stretch out and find all the sub-genres of a particular type, like electronica (https://beat.media/obscure-genres-of-electronica-you-need-to-listen-to https://beat.media/obscure-genres-of-electronica-you-need-to...) death metal (https://www.listchallenges.com/the-obscure-us-death-metal-100 https://www.listchallenges.com/the-obscure-us-death-metal-10...) 90s UK indie (http://www.nme.com/photos/50-forgotten-90s-bands-who-prove-90s-indie-wasn-t-just-about-oasis-and-blur-1411042 http://www.nme.com/photos/50-forgotten-90s-bands-who-prove-9...) or random French bands (https://frenchcrazy.com/2014/04/popular-100-french-songs.html/ https://frenchcrazy.com/2014/04/popular-100-french-songs.htm...), or do what most music nerds do and visit a record swap. My interests have mostly shifted to history, cookery, materials engineering and gardening, so it's impossible to get bored. There's too much left to learn.

dchuk 8y ago

I’ve actually been thinking about this recently, as I was also a heavy forum user back in the day. Why don’t we just start a forum for the HN crowd? Not a new interpretation of the forum model or anything like that, literally any instance of vbulletin or phpbb or something comparable and “traditional”. If people are genuinely interested in this, I would be up for spinning something up over the weekend.

PhasmaFelis 8y ago
That could be interesting.
- dchuk 8y ago
  I’m going to try and fire something up this week. I’ll do some research on software for it, I’m fine spending money on xenforo or vbulletin but it looks like there are quite a few options out there. I’ll announce it here when it’s ready!
  - organsnyder 8y ago
    Use Discourse. It's not only the most advanced from a tech perspective, but it also aims to promote strong communities.
    - dchuk 8y ago
      No doubt that discourse is really nice software, and I will give it a go, but it does lack the “nostalgia” referred to by the original comment I replied to with this idea. All options are valid at this point though!
      - varrock 8y ago
        I am a huge fan of Simple Machine Forums - https://www.simplemachines.org/ https://www.simplemachines.org/
    - eitland 8y ago

heckanoobs 8y ago

I imagined myself on a forum like the old days, freely typing my thoughts into the void. First thing that came to mind was who owns this content? Second thing was can I get a bigger audience posting it somewhere else? The internet's broken and it broke me with it

bfuller 8y ago

> felt a greater sense of community 10 years ago when I mostly used IRC and PHP BBs. that sense of community is present in smaller subreddits with subscribers in the low thousands

__alias 8y ago

I often fondly look back at my initial online gaming memories, where games like Runescape and the early Halo series offered a huge online community feel. As Runescape/Halo series developed and time went on the feelings of the games changed, and people in Runescape were more focused on efficient Exp gaining or competitive playing in Halo. I have yet to experience the same kind of online communities that were present on online gaming in 2006ish

Dunedan 8y ago
Runescape will always have a special place in my heart. Aside from its community it was the first browser-based game with really good 3D graphics, at a time where table-based browser games were the norm. And it was even free! For a non-native English speaker like me in hindsight Runescape helped me a lot with English vocabulary, granted a lot of it wasn't really helpful thanks to its fantasy setting, but still it helped to improve my English skills significantly.

gaius 8y ago

maturation of people If anything it’s the opposite. The old golden rule used to be “what goes online stays online”. Now people call the police if they are “offended”.

kk_cz 8y ago

I feel the same and I believe it's definitely because of age. When I was younger I had hours each day to invest into online interactions. sure it was fun, but it's over. Kids nowadays have it the same, they just use snapshat or instafram or something entire else to create their unique online experience (that they will miss in 15 years)

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

A big part of the change has been a mass influx of extremely low information users. In the early years of the internet people that were on it were high information tech enthusiasts. Now we've reached the point that there are more Facebook users than internet users... At least if you ask them [1]. The average level of intelligence on the internet has dropped dramatically. And I think this is bringing out the predators in mass. Those predators run the gamut from the guy feverishly hacking away in Eastern Europe to the greying man in the 25th story in NYC wearing Armani. Exploiting these people is the latest gold rush. That exploitation could be for financial ends, political ones, or just simply for the lulz. It all makes a lot of the internet very fake. Any community that gains any size starts to experience massive levels of astro turfing and various image management teams (professional and amateur) trying to sway opinion one way or the other. And then every site has to have voting features of some sort or another. Ostensibly it's about content prioritizing come filtering, yet go look at all of the extremely interesting things that get left to die in "new" even on here. Or the phenomena where something will get submitted 9 times, be ignored, and the 10th time explode. It has very little to do with content filtering. The vote systems are just a tool for growth as it creates an addictive feedback mechanism. But at the same time it also is like a dream come true for those that would like to manipulate or sway others artificially. Finally there is outrage culture. I'm still not sure if this emerged organically or not, but it's certainly been a drain on the internet. There are lots of people trying their hardest to be offended by anything, and spin everything is the worst possible way imaginable. And since a certain sort of people just thrive on drama, this nonsense spreads like wildfire. Did you hear a coffee shop called the police on two people that refused to buy anything or leave? "OH NO THEY DIDN'T!!?!? THIS WILL BE OUR TIANANMEN!" Or something... [1] - https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-using-the-internet/ https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...

CookieMon 8y ago

> I can't decide if its from maturation of technology or maturation of people though. It was a place by and for enthusiasts, and now it isn't. So not just the people or the technology maturing, the demographic fundamentally shifted. I suspect it's also become the strongest whirlpool/second-life for people trying to fill a hole inside. People always say <thing> was better before it was popular, and I never really bought into that, but my assumption that 'gatekeeping is bad' causes cognitive dissonance in the face of how the Internet changed. But hey, I don't envy the kids who'll have to use this place once my generation is geriatric. Like hell I'm just going to sit in a chair and stare at a wall as I go senile - I'll be here, improving the place. Kids today will reminisce about the days when the Net wasn't a way of keeping senior citizens occupied.

bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago

There was a joke being said frequently on online forums and messageboards about flame wars and trolls on the Internet, "the internet was serious business!", but now nobody even refers to the joke anymore, because it has actually been turned into one, or is not a fun place anymore.