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> To be clear, this is not just a case of me being old and uncool Ha. The author’s journey is a standard realisation of growing up. You think you can keep up

> To be clear, this is not just a case of me being old and uncool Ha. The author’s journey is a standard realisation of growing up. You think you can keep up with everything popular when “popular” is judged based on the 200 people you know and the occasional others you meet in similar demographic groups. As you are exposed to more influences it becomes harder to keep up. You think it’s because times have changed. But people have been making this statement for hundreds of years across every mass media in existence. There was too much internet for any person to keep up in 1993 before most of the world was on the internet. Eventually you realise that there isn’t one definition of popular. There are literally hundreds. Maybe millions. For every billion viewed thing on Website X, where surely everyone “popular” has viewed this thing, you can eliminate duplicate viewings and find out that 99% of the world has never looked once. They’re doing something you never thought had mass appeal on a website or service you didn’t realise was huge. They’ve never heard of Website X and are astounded anything on it has a billion views. You don’t know about each other because even the ways you discover “popular” things are different. Because most people grow up in a relatively narrow niche. People think they’re trying everything the world has to offer but they’re not even close. And that’s not even counting the fact that people who don’t chase the popular thing probably outnumber those who do. But don’t feel bad that the concept of a single unifying “popular” doesn’t exist because the reality is better. You don’t need to keep up with anyone else’s definition of popular and you can just pursue what you enjoy and you get so much more out of hobbies if you specialise instead of trying to do everything.

rightbyte 4y ago
> There was too much internet for any person to keep up in 1993 before most of the world was on the internet. There were a couple of hundreds webpages in 1993. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_before_1995 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_bef... Guessing 90% were "Hello world personal pet fansites", you had to know about 60 pages to know them all.
- tom_ 4y ago
  The internet then was, by and large, elsewhere. There was less of it, but still enough that you'd struggle to keep on top of all of it.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Oh. Ye.
- greenyoda 4y ago
  > There were a couple of hundreds webpages in 1993. The internet existed before there were websites. For example, there were thousands of newsgroups[1] in 1993, and my ISP provided access to them. There were also mailing list servers, public FTP servers, etc. Even if you were only trying to keep up with technical topics, there was too much content available for any person to keep up with, even then. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup
  - angry_octet 4y ago
    Even in the mid 90s there were more newsgroups than you could meaningfully keep track of, and thousands of messages a day on popular topics. Sadly message threading has only gotten worse since that time, and now conversations are incredibly shallow, commonly being restricted to a single reply. Twitter copied thread forking as re-tweets, and blocklists, but hashtags are too amorphous to be compared to newsgroups. Instead it's like having the latest message from every thread and newsgroup delivered in one thread.
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      I am really hopeful because I have seen some resurgence of classic forums. The meme-ification and Karma hoarding of e.g. Reddit does not seem to cater adults very much. And Facebook groups are still bad as a forum replacement and only had their strength when "everyone" used Facebook.
moffkalast 4y ago
"I used to be with 'it', but then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I’m with isn’t 'it' anymore and what’s 'it' seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to youuuu!"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

rightbyte 4y ago

> There was too much internet for any person to keep up in 1993 before most of the world was on the internet. There were a couple of hundreds webpages in 1993. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_before_1995 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_bef... Guessing 90% were "Hello world personal pet fansites", you had to know about 60 pages to know them all.

tom_ 4y ago
The internet then was, by and large, elsewhere. There was less of it, but still enough that you'd struggle to keep on top of all of it.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Oh. Ye.
greenyoda 4y ago
> There were a couple of hundreds webpages in 1993. The internet existed before there were websites. For example, there were thousands of newsgroups[1] in 1993, and my ISP provided access to them. There were also mailing list servers, public FTP servers, etc. Even if you were only trying to keep up with technical topics, there was too much content available for any person to keep up with, even then. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup
- angry_octet 4y ago
  Even in the mid 90s there were more newsgroups than you could meaningfully keep track of, and thousands of messages a day on popular topics. Sadly message threading has only gotten worse since that time, and now conversations are incredibly shallow, commonly being restricted to a single reply. Twitter copied thread forking as re-tweets, and blocklists, but hashtags are too amorphous to be compared to newsgroups. Instead it's like having the latest message from every thread and newsgroup delivered in one thread.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    I am really hopeful because I have seen some resurgence of classic forums. The meme-ification and Karma hoarding of e.g. Reddit does not seem to cater adults very much. And Facebook groups are still bad as a forum replacement and only had their strength when "everyone" used Facebook.

moffkalast 4y ago

"I used to be with 'it', but then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I’m with isn’t 'it' anymore and what’s 'it' seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to youuuu!"

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]