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The internet pre-'attention economy' was so much more wholesome and pure. It used to be exciting to surf the web; now it feels like dumpster diving. Now it's so
by haroldegibbons 6y ago
The internet pre-'attention economy' was so much more wholesome and pure. It used to be exciting to surf the web; now it feels like dumpster diving. Now it's something I try my best to avoid.
What happened?
- thunderbird120 6y agoYou answered your own question. Attention is essentially the currency of the internet and it's a finite resource. People got better at competing for your attention. Things are now optimized for "engagement" rather than enjoyment.
- bamboozled 6y agoWhat happened? People also got lazy, why bother hosting your own website when you can just upload to Instagram ? Why maintain bookmarks when you can follow others? I don’t think we can blame all of the current state of things on “attention grabbers”. Consumers and creators are also partly the issue.
- propelol 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September It happens when a service get too many users, and it ends up like everything else.
- netcan 6y agoIMO, you have to think of it structurally. Who was online then and now, for example. Instagram & facebook are a global scale economic mammoth that subsist on promoting the dynamics you are lamenting don't exist. Maybe people have a lazy tendency. They can use that to build structure. Once it exists, it also becomes true that if you want people to read your post, it needs to be on instagram, fb or whatnot. If you want people to see your video, it needs to be released on youtube. Even if people were willing to host their own video, youtube has all the viewers. A viewer/user on a centralised platform is worth more (economically) than elsewhere.
- SentientNo4 6y ago> People also got lazy, why bother hosting your own website when you can just upload to Instagram ? Why bother changing your car oil when you can take it to the service? Why bother cooking your own meal when you can just go to the restaurant? Why bother sewing your own dress when you can just go to the mall? It's not lazyness, it's convenience. Internet just got mainstream and popular, so people lacking time, interest or skills to create their own websites just use pre-built solutions. It's how everything works in real life.
- wott 6y ago> Internet just got mainstream and popular, so people lacking time, interest or skills to create their own websites just use pre-built solutions. They don't lack any of time or skills. Take the example of websites of local sport clubs: they all had a proper website with all info and news and stuff. Now they haven't any more, they've changed to a shitty Facebook page with everything mixed together into an incredible mess. (By the way, the traditional website is typically still running fine without maintenance, it just hasn't been updated since around 2015-2017.) I don't think the people from your small town random sport club, who built and ran the site in the 2000s, had special computers skills or time compared to those of today.
- parasubvert 6y agoMost local sports leagues (and some clubs) still run their own websites (and have systems that support mobile apps). I find the online presence far richer these days where little league teams collaborate attendance, schedules, practices this way. I think this “everyone got lazy” is overblown. Yes some folks are lazy, but they were the folks that used Microsoft Frontpage in 1998 :)
- krapp 6y agoYeah, if I'm a writer, is it "lazy" of me to also not want to manually do the formatting, cover, layouts and print work, as opposed to just sending a manuscript to an editor? It's not necessarily a bad thing that the web has evolved to the point that people who want to produce content for it, for the most part, only have to worry about the content and not the infrastructure.
- bonoboTP 6y agoIn 2003 I was in my early teens and we built a website for our classmates, to have a place for our class trip photos, photos from our parties, to have a list of contact details like phone numbers and email addresses for all of us and to have discussions. I was just an ignorant geek guy who was "good with computers". Well, in the sense of Microsoft Office, Paint, clicking Next, Next, Finish to install stuff, configure firewalls, use Napster and crack games (by which I mean I knew where to copy crack.exe). So we wanted a website. Previously I had already "made websites" by saving as HTML in Word, so let's go! But I figured we need to do better than Word, because Word's output was messy and often rendered broken in browsers, so I found an HTML tutorial and I managed to hand build a simple site, with the aid of shareware Windows software for creating button images with cheesy fonts and another one to generate thumbnails of images etc. We then wanted a discussion board, so I figured out how to install phpBB. I had no knowledgeable geeks to guide me in real life but through these experiences I picked up real programming skills in my teens, JavaScript, CSS, HTML and PHP (and probably actively contributed to PHP's meme reputation as a tool of kids and dilettantes). A few years later I learned Python to mod games. I learned to put computers together and had a rough but cloudy idea of how it all worked. I liked it and went on to study CS, where I first learned C and C++ and Java and a proper theoretical foundation which I also liked because I liked math. It was only in my mid twenties that I started to look into Linux. All my peers had been using Windows my whole life and I was a bit afraid of becoming a full on social outcast Linux nerd. But then in my twenties I lost my urge to conform so hard and overall came to like Linux. Overall I'm now quite comfortable with the command line, shell scripting and so on. My point is, I was nothing special of a geek and had no geek peers in my teens but through necessity I picked up geek skills to make a website, to fix computers, to pirate stuff, to mod games etc., which led me down the path of pursuing CS as a career. I know I wouldn't have enjoyed it if it was presented to me as some gameified app to learn programming with some upbeat cheerful mentor. I loved it for the exploration, for the "nobody told you you could or should do this but can you make it work?". Would I have become a CS person in today's climate where we would have just made a Facebook group to upload our class trip photos without learning any HTML? Perhaps, maybe through game modding. But do kids today have the same chances to mod games with all the DRM and always-online monitoring software? Would I have learned about TCP/IP if everything worked out of the box? Although I'd love to say I learned it all out of intellectual curiosity, in the moment I picked up these skills because I had something concrete in mind that I wanted to make, and learning these was the only way. If there was and easier way, I would have been lazy and in turn perhaps miss out on all the wonders of this field. On the other hand there's just so much helpful material out there today, you can buy electronics hobby kits on the cheap, Raspberry Pi, all kinds of programming tutorial. Any input from today's teens/early twenties how this works today? How and why do kids pick up tech skills nowadays that everything is so convenient and streamlined to consumption and locked down for inspection?
- Joeboy 6y agoHaving spent a few years as a web designer in the aughts, I largely blame web designers. We persuaded people your site had to be professionally and fashionably designed to be taken seriously. Learning to write HTML is pretty easy, attaining and maintaining the skills of a professional web designer is not.
- bamboozled 6y agoGood point! I remember this period also as someone working in the industry.
- stiray 6y agoI would say a bunch of average people came to the internet. Before that it was mostly reserved by geeks which valued information more than "form"/ux/beauty(irelevant pictures included)/... Now we have just another pop culture. Sad. But I still use IRC. It is interesting that most of (to me) relevant developers (system level development, ...) are still hanging there. IRC is all textual and it was never filled with all the garbage you can see on web, but they did invent alternatives where all the pop culture went (discord O.o) while I can enjoy my peace on IRC. I am really mourning about usenet. It was dying but still kicking, then google destroyed it with google groups.
- Aeolun 6y agoI don’t think there’s anything preventing anyone from setting up a usenet similar service? As long as the barrier to entry is high enough it’ll keep out all the average people.
- techslave 6y agowhy would you need a usenet similar service? usenet still exists and the barrier is, as you say, high enough.
- agumonkey 6y agoIt really wasn't geeks and information (unless you talk about early early web). Even in early 2000s lots of non geek boards with people just chillin. There were issues but less intense, less frequent, less invasive.
- laumars 6y agoEarly 2000 isn’t early web. By that point it had already been around for a decade, had been heavily commercialised and a lot of the fun independent portals were already starting to disappear. By early 2000 Yahoo! was already losing favour to Google and the MS buyout of Hotmail was already a distant memory. VRML2 had been and gone, XHTML was deprecated and FutureWave / Macromedia Flash was just about to move to it’s 3rd company, Adobe. By early 2000s the browsers wars had already been lost too Microsoft and the era of Internet Explorer. There’s so much history that had already been and gone by 2000 that it’s a real stretch to argue the middle third of the web as it’s early period.
- ajconway 6y agoKids today wouldn’t agree with this statement. What happened is you got older.
- stiray 6y agoWhole popular culture became a shopping mall. And if visitors of shopping mall don't agree with what I think, so be it. I cant change the product of our generation poisoning that make them attention junkies, perfect shoppers,... they just never went some other way to see it.
- ajconway 6y agoIf you could, what would you change?
- uniqueid 6y agoI'll answer: for starters, I want a protocol for articles that puts the dev into a straight-jacket: no dynamic features, no control of font or font-size, no ability to position text boxes. Basically, a protocol to present text articles Medium-style. Why? Faster loading, fewer chances to track me, less ability to show me ads, more legibility, minuscule footprint to hack me, no ability to show me share buttons.
- dantheta 6y agoTake a look at Gemini: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
- donbrae 6y agoAMP?
- neuromanser 6y agoGopher!
- 6y ago
- desipis 6y agoThose with power learned they could use the internet to control people and accumulate more power.
- netcan 6y agoWhat Went Wrong: Freedom and underculture. The internet circa 1997 was an unsupervised, all-summer festival for free spirits & adventurers. Skinny dipping, legumes, transcendental dance and chance meetings that change the course of your life. Now it's a residential school. 56% of the cultural machinery must be dedicated to dealing with behavioural problems in the cafeteria.
- artiszt 6y agonot sure the nets ever were at some point in time, even in the internet's early days, 'unsupervised'
- mlindner 6y agoI don't remember an internet ever being "unsupervised" it was more that there were thousands of independent fiefdoms run by one autocrat and his minions. If you were in agreement with the ideas of that autocrat, it felt like freedom. If you weren't, you got banned and you found a different fiefdom with rules you liked, but there were plenty to choose from. Nowadays a few megacorps run those fiefdoms so it feels like there's less freedom because there's less options.
- shoes_for_thee 6y agoincidentally, the rainbow gathering web site still uses FRAMES https://www.welcomehome.org/ https://www.welcomehome.org/
- austincheney 6y ago> What happened? Consolidation. Surfing the web used to be about discovery. I was into digital art back then and there were so many emerging artists with exciting personal sites. You actual found things through page links whether directly or though things like web rings. Now I visit a couple of sites routinely and ignore everything else. HN is the closet I come to social media.
- mattoxic 6y agoAgree totally - though I do very much enjoy the occasional long wikipedia tour. For millions, Facebook is the internet, there is nothing beyond. Sad.
- encom 6y agoThis is the case for my mother. Facebook has her thoroughly filter bubbled, and it's sad and worrying. I don't know how to wean her off the Facebook brain-rot. Her ipad is Facebook, and Facebook is the internet. She recently told me she wouldn't get a flu shot this year, and I know where she got that idea. I got mad, and gave her a lecture about the insane anti-vax people, and the many ways in which their beliefs are complete bullshit. But my anger wasn't at her, but rather frustration that Facebook might indirectly cost her her life. Some days I feel like null routing Facebook on her router. I won't do that of course, because it's not my job to interfere with her choices. But I'm becoming increasingly concerned.
- _the_inflator 6y agoAnd there was so much text! Old websites (90th) were so text-heavy, it almost hurts these days with videos in mind. Also people had more time to consume these amounts of text.
- agumonkey 6y agoI wonder that everyday. - old internet was the product of the previous generation culture, internet was a side piece, a tiny new button. It might influence the desires of users at the time. - economy trying to leverage internet as a new phase in customer access and higher business profits (never good.). Old economy was also not in the best shape and now everybody thinks or wants to make it's own little place on the web game. People are not here to chill they're here to win something. Vastly different mindset. - a false assumption that connecting everything with computers would make our lives lean, instead of separate programs, computers and persons.. you have one cloud thing where everything can be shared. Obvious idea in retrospect .. but releasing friction is also letting weird unplanned stuff happen without control. Look at how much things now have limits (smartphone time etc). - naivety regarding 'spaces'.. internet was a hippie thing kinda, but whenever systems grow they start to influence the whole thing (facebook,..)
- m463 6y agoI think it's just like writing a comment (like I am doing). There is no boldface (just italic). there is no javascript, no inline images, no html escapes. you_can_write_code_though(); The constraints make the information the subject. Also the "lens of money" does not distort things here (as much).
- Mr_T_ 6y ago> What happened. Capitalism came to the internet.
- a3n 6y agoAll things converge to ad supported TV. The web is million channel passive TV.
- pessimizer 6y agoSearch engines decided it was smart to reward the pages that got the most clickthroughs by pushing them to the front page, which quickly filled up with autogenerated pages from content farms, duplicated copy from wikipedia, and people trying to sell you shit. You can still find a lot of it on millionshort.com, where they remove the top million results from other search engines.
- oops33 6y agoMass software theft since the rise of the internet. Started with games like Ultima online and Meridian 59 in the mid 90's. We were getting mods, level editing tools and dedicated servers until the public started buying into the mmo scam of the mid 90's. AKA they were just regular RPG's rebranded mmo and had their networking code stolen. Games like quake had their networking code integrated into the game. Everyone was expecting RPG's to go the quake route and one did make it out before all rpg's were rebranded mmo to dispossess the computer illiterate PC gaming masses ... (neverwinterNights 2002) on gog. They killed dedicated servers and modding after they figured out the public had no idea how computers worked. Ultima online, Guild wars 1, Everquest, etc.... any client-server piece of software means you're being sold an incomplete piece of software. AKA it's just a game with the files and networking code held hostage on remote pc's. The public was too braindead to get the message and the whole tech community went wild to dispossess the masses and back-end all future software to remove control of software from the end user. After the coup Richard garriot pulled with ultima online, Microsoft, Adobe, and everyone in the industry was going to try and force all software client-server and steal software on mass. Why the hell would anyone buy an incomplete piece of software that required a remote computer in order to function unless they were braindead? Software as a service is the same as simply stealing the program files and adding some malware back end to remove ownership of the software. Microsoft saw what Valve got away with, with steam, and uplay, EA, ubisoft and now rockstar got away with social club and now Windows 10 has forced updates and client-server aspects where it requires a remote computer. The whole thing is fraud on a massive scale and the fact that even many people on hacker news have been eating up means many of you have been oblivious to the obvious fact we're being robbed. For those of us who were aware of the great incomplete software as a service scam by forcing us into the mainframe, dumb client terminal model. You can call the FTC.gov and blow the whistle on the last 25 years of game theft, and the fact that Microsoft is now trying to steal aspects of windows files and hold them hostage on a remote pc.
- api 6y agoMoney got into it. As soon as you can make money, everything starts getting gamed to make money.
- ozmbie 6y agoOnce the business model and psychology of content aggregation and habitual user feedback loops was discovered, there was no going back. That model is just too powerful and too economically successful. It sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Unless your community is paid for by some benefactor, you usually run out of money convincing people to pay for it, or end up copying the structure of Facebook/Pinterest/Twitter/Instagram etc.
- andrepd 6y agoExactly what you stated. The internet became a multi-trillion dollar business.
- xorcist 6y agoWhat happened was that pageviews gained monetary value, by way of advertising. Each and every one of those low quality pages you refer to is plastered with ads. That is the very reason for their existence. Of course, the old web wasn't perfect, but it was very different. What's surprising is how few the holdouts are. Wikipedia is one of those few.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoYou can already see an example of this happening at this site. All the "Go Tucows" "get winzip" buttons. That's where the internet turned to shit. So it's not quite 'the good old internet', that was before that :P
- drak0n1c 6y agoSmartphones. They started picking up critical mass by 2010. Within a couple years social sites in all corners of internet culture started going downhill in various ways whether Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, etc. The web had existed previously to that moment for 15 years, even with popular usage. It's nature changed significantly when people were no longer consciously sitting down at their desk to use the internet.