7 ms·

What 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 ot

What 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 ago
https://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 ago
IMO, 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 ago
    Most 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 ago
  Yeah, 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.
- qxmalloc 6y ago
  You own your car (modulo spyware and remote shutdown) after an oil change. The restaurant does not take away the meal from you after you ordered it, because you are not woke enough. If you buy a dress, you own it. On Wordpress, Instagram and YouTube you are just a sharecropper with no rights.
- bamboozled 6y ago
  You know what happens when I eat at restaurants though ? I lose money and get fat, maybe diabetes and or high blood pressure. I understand the sentiment, but convenience isn’t always the right thing for us.
bonoboTP 6y ago
In 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 ago
Having 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 ago
  Good point! I remember this period also as someone working in the industry.

propelol 6y ago

https://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 ago

IMO, 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 ago
  Most 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 ago
Yeah, 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.
qxmalloc 6y ago
You own your car (modulo spyware and remote shutdown) after an oil change. The restaurant does not take away the meal from you after you ordered it, because you are not woke enough. If you buy a dress, you own it. On Wordpress, Instagram and YouTube you are just a sharecropper with no rights.
bamboozled 6y ago
You know what happens when I eat at restaurants though ? I lose money and get fat, maybe diabetes and or high blood pressure. I understand the sentiment, but convenience isn’t always the right thing for us.

bonoboTP 6y ago

In 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 ago

Having 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 ago
Good point! I remember this period also as someone working in the industry.