4 ms·
Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?
- skulk 5y ago> We — the programmers, designers, product people — collectively decided that users don't deserve the right to code in everyday products. Users are too stupid. They'd break stuff. Coding is too complicated for ordinary people. Besides, we can just do the coding...so why does it matter? Is this really what happened? Did MySpace's model fall out of favor because "we" decided that FB's model was superior? Or was it just the free market reacting to FB's better capitalization strategy (social graph discovery, algorithmic content presentation).
- krapp 5y agoThe internet is more fun and more weird than it ever has been. There are entire genres of fun and weird spawned from the modern internet that could never have been imagined on the old web. The modern web gives us unfiction and multidimensional fandoms and niche fandom and remix fandoms and the A E S T H E T I C. People are making their own music, their own art, their own movies, sharing their passions, opening windows to their universe. Writing code and running it in compilers that run in the browser. Rediscovering forms of cultural expression the old web would never have preserved because it wasn't interesting to MIT computer lab nerds and angsty teen boys. The web is about content and communication, and has matured from the gilded and hand-painted age of scribery (everyone writing their own HTML) to the Gutenberg press and centralized publishing (SAAS and social media.) Presentation matters but it's not everything. I'd rather have a good steak on a boring paper plate than junk food in a wacky container.