14 ms·
It's really interesting to have been on the internet for decades and have watched fads like this come and die so often. Like the one where everyone made their a
by novocantico 5y ago
It's really interesting to have been on the internet for decades and have watched fads like this come and die so often. Like the one where everyone made their avatars be simpson-style, or the one where everyone started putting their pronouns in their profile, or that time when half the internet switched to ICQ and I'm still not sure how it was better than AIM but I was convinced it was. It's such an odd feeling to be outside these fads and seeing them so objectively.
- eadonmachine 5y agoInevitably they get bored or the fad dies out, nothing is gained, but then people still excitedly go along with the next one every time as if they have no memory of the previous 1000 iterations. I suppose it's probably more fun than miserably judging everyone from the outside...
- novocantico 5y agoWhy not a third option of just enjoying life from any perspective you have, including sometimes being on the outside and sometimes on the inside?
- feoren 5y agoMany of the people involved in the new fad don't have a memory of the previous 1000 iterations because they are different people. Many new people are joining the internet every day. Also be aware of the obvious-in-hindsight bias: anyone can point out fads after they've come and gone. It's not as easy confidently identifying the fads that are going on right now.
- 0x20cowboy 5y ago> The vast majority of people who work in the tech industry are perpetually 5 years out of university. > So the vast majority of the time we get the same tools, the same frameworks, and the same ideas poorly reimplemented over and over. I heard that at a talk by a salty tech OG. My experience doesn’t disagree with his observation, but I do have slightly more hope than he had.
- davidw 5y agoI'm just waiting for Gopher to make a comeback.
- influx 5y agoHeck, I remember browsing public ftp sites out of boredom.
- jrockway 5y agosumex-aim.stanford.edu
- reaperducer 5y agocannot resolve sumex-aim.stanford.edu: Unknown host
- jrockway 5y agoYeah, it's dead. That was the InfoMac archive in the 90s. My middle school self would just download and run everything in there and found some very nifty shareware.
- InCityDreams 5y ago...and some not so public. And much, much quicker to load.
- exikyut 5y agoThe day I connected "hang on, Explorer can browse FTP sites directly" and "ftp.cdrom.com" was fun. A bit wall-of-folders and distractingly laggy, but fun.
- roywiggins 5y agoThat's kinda what gemini is: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ Also, there's a gopher hn mirror: http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?=hngopher.com+70+31 http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?=hngopher.com+70+31
- oneepic 5y agoSouth Park avatars still seem to be going strong. (at least, in the companies I've worked at)
- squidwardeffigy 5y agoprobably bc the show is pretty popular on netflix rn
- AdamJacobMuller 5y ago> It's such an odd feeling to be outside these fads and seeing them so objectively. I think we're just getting older.
- yokoprime 5y ago> or that time when half the internet switched to ICQ and I'm still not sure how it was better than AIM but I was convinced it was. Living in Europe, I never saw the AIM client in use anywhere. I've never heard of anyone locally who used it. It was all ICQ, or later MSN / Skype.
- maxwell 5y agoOf course. "America" is in the name.
- julianlam 5y agoTechnically it isn't, since AIM is "AOL Instant Messenger", where AOL happens to also be an acronym, but it isn't America On-Line Instant Messenger, since then it'd be AOLIM.
- drusepth 5y agoI wonder if there's a word for these kinds of nested or multi-layer acronyms. Acronyms in acronyms.
- ModernMech 5y agoIt's like a recursive acronym with a base case, so it terminates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym
- hoosieree 5y agoSomebody needs to make a recursive acronym in the shape of the Ackermann function.
- onaworkcomputer 5y agoIt's not recursive, though -- that would only be true if AOL stood for AIM On-Line. Maybe "nested acronym" is a better term?
- Karrot_Kream 5y agoThe one constant of being human is change. There's design fads, architecture fads, media fads, music fads, internet fads...
- patorjk 5y ago> Like the one where everyone made their avatars be simpson-style This takes me back. A decade ago I paid someone $5 on Fiverr to draw me as a Simpsons character. She was one of several people on the site doing this. I just checked and she's still at it, with over 8k reviews. A niche market but one that doesn't seem to have completely dried up yet.
- hotpotamus 5y agoI did the same thing and I've used it ever since including for all company chat/email. I guess some fads have a long tail.
- novocantico 5y agoJust like Willie Nelson's hair. (Meant on both levels.)
- tlavoie 5y agoI use Beaker (from the Muppets) with his hair on fire for my work pic. I'm in security, just seems to fit.
- datavirtue 5y agoI totally missed this Simpsons avatar thing.
- memish 5y agoThink DALL-E will eat that market?
- ALittleLight 5y agoThere will be a sweet spot where people on Fiverr use DALL-E to programmatically fulfill their orders.
- seanhunter 5y agoI know someone with a Simpsons-style profile pic but the kicker is a) He got Matt Groening to do it b) I'm not sure he realises that other people with Simpsons-style profile pics didn't
- milicat 5y agoI'd not call pronouns a fad. They're just helpful info to talk about others.
- anildash 5y agoYeah, there’s a reason they don’t describe the (far more common) public announcement of religious affiliation a fad, even though that’s far beyond social media profiles and even goes to people wearing weird jewelry. It’s just that that’s a form of identification that confirms to the commenter’s political goals.
- babyshake 5y agoPronouns are not a fad. The idea that everyone should be very publicly announcing their pronouns IMO is a fad that won't last for more than a few years as a mainstream phenomenon. I do understand the motivations to do it though.
- after_care 5y agoPronouns in profiles is at least four years old is some mainstream contexts [0]. I'm unsure that it is a fad because on the internet there can be very little other signaling of someone's gender. [0] https://blog.asana.com/2018/05/new-profile-setting-pronouns-asana/ https://blog.asana.com/2018/05/new-profile-setting-pronouns-...
- ZoomZoomZoom 5y agoDon't you consider revealing any personal information about yourself, including gender, a fad?
- after_care 5y agoI think that's a long enough running practice that it cannot be classified as a fad.
- viraptor 5y ago
- toast0 5y ago> that time when half the internet switched to ICQ and I'm still not sure how it was better than AIM but I was convinced it was I had a six digit ICQ, and I knew some people with 5 digits, so you could instantly tell how cool people were. Also, ICQ would say uh-oh when you got new messages, and AIM just dinged. On a technical side, ICQ did offline messages forever and AIM didn't do offline until after AOL bought ICQ. ICQ also needed UDP to work and did peer to peer messaging when possible (coordinated through the central server) and I think you could send files sooner. Otoh, AIM servers responded on all tcp ports, so if you had a derpy corporate firewall that just looked at ports, and you had any ports open to the internet, you were golden; the java applet client was convenient too. I think ICQ is still around, AOL sold it to some Russian company a decade ago, but AIM is dead; Verizon didn't want to keep it running, or Yahoo Messenger either.
- ryzvonusef 5y agoAh reminds me of the digits in your Slashdot UID, anything less than 5 digits used to cause a kefuffle in the comments, like as if the gods had descended. I miss Slashdot, not the same after Malda left.
- compsciphd 5y agomid 5000s here ;) (plenty of people with less, surprised I still remember my password, my karma is apparently still excellent).
- ZoomZoomZoom 5y agoICQ was completely killed on the protocol level (including numerical UINs) by the current owners around 2018 and later was relaunched as a complete rewrite and an easy and direct way of delivering your messages to your FSB curators.
- toast0 5y agoWell I guess I can stop being grumpy about my 6 digit id being canceled for running a bot.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoICQ launched a year before AIM. And the implication of choosing your own pronouns being a "fad" just feels like casual transphobia.
- zomglings 5y agoOP didn't say that choosing your own pronouns was a fad, but rather that displaying them on your profile was a fad. Personally, I'm not sure it's a fad, and I still see it plenty in the wild.
- novocantico 5y agoI still see people with simpsons avatars. Fads follow a steep bell curve.
- hatefulmoron 5y agoAt the risk of sounding transphobic: non-trans/gender conforming people including their pronouns to signal legitimacy or support for trans people choosing their pronouns does feel like a fad. It reminds me of Blackout Tuesday, equally faddish but perhaps casually racist to suggest.
- rainonmoon 5y agoNormalising pronouns in bios is a way of protecting trans/NB people, not signalling legitimacy. It's like the easiest way anyone could possibly make lots of unwelcome-feeling people feel a bit more welcome in society.
- hatefulmoron 5y agoThis goal of "protecting trans/NB people" is accomplished by signalling your support for normalizing trans people indicating their pronouns. If you think that describing it as "signalling" sounds weak or trivial compared to "protecting", it's because it is.
- orls 5y agoUserbars in forum signatures.
- johnisgood 5y agoBack when websites had their own banner, too? Awesome!
- anyfoo 5y ago> hat time when half the internet switched to ICQ My impression as a European was rather that AIM was not well know outside the US, while ICQ was. (It was the "America Online" instant messenger, no? So while AOL became available to other countries, I don't believe it reached the same market share and notoriety). So I assume the rest of the world was adopting ICQ "from the beginning", and then maybe there was a phase in the US where, in the interest of international communication, they started to adopt ICQ as well? Just conjecture, I wasn't in the US at that time.
- Izkata 5y agoIn the US, I remember it as ICQ coming first, then the next generation (mine) all used AIM, then at some point AIM and ICQ gained the ability to chat across networks (I think AOL bought them?).
- peteforde 5y ago101919
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoThen MSN, then skype. For 5 years, people were pestering you about giving them "your facebook". Then came the photo era, with filters, emojis, morphing, animations, etc. With insta, and the likes. Last years, you would have been a paria for not having a whatsapp account. Now of course, you got the occasional signal, telegram, teams and zoom, thanks to covid. But you know what was working in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020 and will work and 2025, with everybody, and everywhere ? SMS and emails.
- satyamkapoor 5y agoemails are so phenomenal. However email security is so so bad. User experience of pgp is crap. :( But agree emails still work as standard. SMS not for me. The number might change :)
- culturestate 5y ago> you know what was working in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020 and will work and 2025, with everybody, and everywhere ? SMS and emails. I genuinely can’t recall having had a single standard SMS conversation with anyone in the last ~10 years. It’s all WhatsApp, Line, Telegram, IG, or WeChat. I realize my perception is skewed by living outside the US, but the only people who SMS me these days are delivery services and banks.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago> but the only people who SMS me these days are delivery services and banks. So they still work. If anybody would send you an sms, without you having to create any new account, they would reach you, and you could answer. No need to "add contact", no need to login. In fact, it this person will still be able to send you a text in 10 years. But in 10 years, most people will have moved on from whatsapp, line or IG to the new sexy thing. Not WeChat I guess, because it's becoming the credit card for 1 billion chinese. And yet, you will still have an email address.
- culturestate 5y ago> If anybody would send you an sms, without you having to create any new account, they would reach you, and you could answer. No need to "add contact", no need to login. Honestly, as a consumer I would prefer that this not be the case. I want to be able to control the ways in which people can contact me; I actually keep a separate number for WhatsApp specifically so that people who have my voice number can’t find me on there. > In fact, it this person will still be able to send you a text in 10 years. Assuming my number doesn’t change, which anecdotally feels way less common now. When I was a kid it was normal for eg my parents to have the same phone number for 30 years, but these days people seem to switch much more freely.
- Febra33 5y ago> or the one where everyone started putting their pronouns in their profile I think that lots of people still do that. At least from what I've been seeing