8 ms·

I anything actually good anymore? - Goodreads: Broken recommendation system, meh UI, review wars - Google Search: Pointless - Reddit: Overtly user-hostile, p

• pc86 3y ago
  My biggest complaint about Twitter is that the spam has gotten worse in the last year or so. I get 2-3 spam DMs a day, and probably once every week or two I go through and report all of them but it's never-ending. IMO the people who left Twitter (and haven't come back) were worse than anyone who's on it now. There hasn't been any meaningful change in discourse - for better or worse - that I've noticed.
  • memetomancer 3y ago
    | worse than anyone who's on it now. Bold claim about a site that is, in the last year or so, pivoted to explicit and quite public encouragement of Nazi/racist viewpoints.
• nindalf 3y ago
  Absolutely. May I add one more? - Hacker News: filled with old ~men~ people shouting at clouds, reminiscing about how things were better in the good old days.
  • pessimizer 3y ago
    The good old days like yesterday, when ad blockers worked on Youtube, and you could read through Twitter anonymously.
  • imgabe 3y ago
    Get off my lawn
  • effingwewt 3y ago
    Yes how dare we hold society accountable for bullshit. We should all just watch tiktok like good zombies and ignore the enshittification of the entire world. Damn clouds! =p
  • passwordoops 3y ago
    I live in the suburbs so no one comes by lawn, ergo this is where I shout at the kids to get off my website
    • nindalf 3y ago
      Same.
  • meepmorp 3y ago
    People like you are destroying the fabric of society.
    • nindalf 3y ago
      Thank you. It feels so good to be recognised. All this time I was toiling away, trying to destroy the fabric of society but no one noticed or cared.
      • meepmorp 3y ago
        FWIW, I admire your dedication.
  • WastingMyTime89 3y ago
• linuxlizard 3y ago
  "Medium: The TEDx talks of blogging" I just about coffee spit lol'd.
• sanderjd 3y ago
  I find that grilling out with friends and family is good. Books are really good, lots of interesting stuff to learn on the non-fiction side (and I honestly think the new AI stuff is making it even easier to learn things!), still more interesting fiction that I haven't read yet than I could ever read in a lifetime, not to mention re-reading books I already love. Similar thing with movies and tv; just finished the new season of The Bear and rewatching the first season now and it's great. Video games are pretty great; playing the new Zelda game with my daughter right now. Really enjoying museums and zoos and parks and pools and these trampoline places (which didn't exist when I was a kid) with my kids. Hiking and skiing trips and road trips are still great (though harder since I had kids). Meeting new people who live in different places and have different experiences is great. There's lots of great stuff! But yeah, none of it is really on the internet. Touch some grass!
  • ravenstine 3y ago
    Oh yeah, 100%! Most of my enjoyment these days is offline. Been going to different bars in the city and playing bar games with people for the last 6 months and it's a lot of fun. More expensive than hanging out on web forums, but also way more fulfilling.
  • teeray 3y ago
    > I honestly think the new AI stuff is making it even easier to learn things ChatGPT is the closest thing we have to A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
    • Cordivae 3y ago
      Exactly how I describe it to my wife.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • squirtlebonflow 3y ago
    [dead]
• ckardat123 3y ago
  RateYourMusic is a pretty nice site for finding movies and music. I wish that Goodreads was more similar to RYM.
  • rchaud 3y ago
    Sonemic has been pretty good about not turning RYM into an affiliate link ridden landfill like Goodreads.
  • SSLy 3y ago
    letterboxd is also alright for finding movies to watch and critique of them. OTOH you need to play whack a mole against the meme accounts and their 4 words long super popular "reviews". Or just find a way into RED and PTP.
  • lawgimenez 3y ago
    For movies or tv series I am using https://trakt.tv https://trakt.tv.
    • ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      I started using this about 6 months ago after a recommendation here and would recommend it to others. It particularly helps if you have access to multiple streaming services.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• hammock 3y ago
  ChatGPT: ???
  • smolder 3y ago
    ChatGPT: Ruined TV by causing a writers strike...
• twosdai 3y ago
  Google maps is basically the only app as I see it which is still amazing. Besides the whole tracking your entire location thing, but you can mitigate that.
  • gwill 3y ago
    i hate how they worked ads into directions. i know some people find it easy to hear "turn left at the mcdonald's" but i've been fine at estimating distance and don't need to hear the name of a chain.
    • skyyler 3y ago
      I now use Apple Maps for navigation because of this “feature”. Google Maps is still much better for searching, but the gap seems to be closing.
    • twosdai 3y ago
      You know it's funny that I never noticed this, I always turn off the voice directions since I found them annoying. But yeah that's an annoying experience if you use voice directions, and in some instances I could see it as really degrading the directions app, since "taking a left at the intersection" may be more clear than "turn left at the kfc"
• 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  personally would not add wikipedia, amazon or gmail. still useful for me. youtube ok-ish. but worse every day. goodreads useful for reading quotes.
• SxC97 3y ago
  I have to disagree with YouTube. Yes, theres a lot of garbage on there, but I've managed to curate a collection of subscriptions that make _extremely_ high quality videos. Even the reccomendation system thats so often criticised here has regularly served me new channels that are right up my ally. I get more value from YT than most other sites on the net (with the exception of HN, obviously)
  • vorpalhex 3y ago
    I've found that when websites start their decline what happens is that the barrier to getting good results from them goes up. It can still happen! It just takes more and more work, like a computer that is a bit underpowered and a bit overly bloated. I have my well curated youtube subscriptions.. but there is less content every day. Twitch died for me a while ago. Reddit was pretty fine for at least consuming stuff until this latest debacle (it stopped being a good place for discussion long ago). Lemmy seems promising. I have yet to have luck with mastodon. As the older apps die off slowly, new ones will appear.
  • matricaria 3y ago
    While I also think YouTube has great content, their war on adblockers annoys me very much. Also, YouTube Short was not a great addition. It entices garbage content in my opinion. There is a reason I’m on YouTube and not on TikTok.
    • SxC97 3y ago
      I’ve come around on shorts. Many of my favorite creators take weeks or even months to create a single video, vsauce comes to mind. Shorts allow them to create shorter form content that’s still interesting more frequently, without affecting their algorithmic ranking for main videos. I also think it works as a marketing tool. At this point, YT knows what I want and shorts act as a sort of teaser for new channels. 60 seconds of their most interesting content to see if I want to subscribe or not. It’s less commitment than watching a full (often 20 min +) video.
• julianozen 3y ago
  I feel like more it’s more interesting to discuss why everything got bad. These companies all grew up and reality hit - Goodreads: Never was going to be massive social network. Hard to monetize so little investment. - Google Search: SEO + ads obscures what people are looking for - Reddit: Too much investment for the companies current size and lack of growth. Poor new products offerings - YouTube: Taken over by engagement bate and need to monetize - Yelp: business model provides bad incentives - Gmail: promised everyone free stuff and doesn’t charge. Needs to cover costs - Netflix: doesn’t actually own most of the content users used to watch. Has no more subscriber growth - Instagram: Losing ground to new social network and must adapt to be more video+algorithmic - Twitter: makes no money. Had too many employees. Run by Elon who is controversial. Moderation is expensive - Facebook: for my generation at least, a combination of things led people to migrate to other places - Wikipedia: people who moderate for free have agendas - LinkedIn: business model makes for bad incentives - DuckDuckGo: hard to be the third place social network - Amazon: moderation is hard, too much seo and ads, direct from china allows for more cheap goods but introduces more fakes - Medium: nobody wants to pay for pretend news
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• samsquire 3y ago
  Creating something good requires a lot of effort and it's not just 1 thing you have to be good at but 1000 things. Any business has thousands of moving parts which all need to work properly or the website or operation shall fail.
• NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  The enshittification continues.
• pdntspa 3y ago
  I feel like this is overly cynical. Facebook is still the best social network for certain age groups. Instagram (and Facebook) engagement is dropping but it's (they're) still one of the best mediums for getting the word out about events (for me anyway). Reddit is fine as long as old-reddit still works, though with losing API access the mobile story is about to suck.
  • wlesieutre 3y ago
    > Facebook is still the best social network for certain age groups It's a great place to hang out for 65+ retirees posting crackpot conspiracy theories, that was the main reason I left. While I'm yelling at clouds, Facebook was better when it was more profile and people focused instead of turning the newsfeed into a twitter copy and optimizing for engagement bait content.
    • bluGill 3y ago
      > Facebook was better when it was more profile and people focused instead of turning the newsfeed into a twitter copy and optimizing for engagement bait content. Which is why I tell everyone to block every single group. If someone shares something (that is it isn't a photo they personally took, or a thought they personally wrote) hit the "block all from [whatever group it was shared from]" button. Leave all groups and market place. I did that almost a year ago and Facebook became a useful place again!
  • bluGill 3y ago
    Facebook is still a good social network so long as you limit it to friend you personally know only. Block marketplace and all groups. Use it to keep up on those distant friends and family that you are not ready to leave out of your life completely even though you don't get together often (that is they live far away from you so you can't visit in person often)
    • pdntspa 3y ago
      Agreed. I do not engage with groups all that much and the snippets/suggestions it shows me for some are just downright nauseating. On that note it has been useful for figuring out which of my friends are secretly assholes and which of them just like to shitpost.
• lawgimenez 3y ago
  You forgot to mention Stack Overflow.
• huimang 3y ago
  This is overly cynical. And what's the hate for tiktok? Google search is worse, twitter is becoming worse, but not unusable. I learn so much educational stuff from youtube/tiktok and connect with musicians on instagram, etc. These platforms can be useful if you want them to be.
• horsawlarway 3y ago
  I think the blunt answer is that it's irresponsible to outsource your social life to for-profit companies. It's easy, and it's addictive, and it's not all bad. But it's irresponsible. They will change your social activities in ways that you may or may not be ok with. They will treat you like a good to be sold in the most efficient way possible. Basically - These companies treat the social lives of people as though they are cattle, herded around so they see the right ads and sold off or butchered when it's profitable. They care about the cattle only in the sense that they are a means to an end, and that end is profit. There's a place for that kind of efficiency. Human relationships are not that place.
• guerrilla 3y ago
  This is the cost of the infinite growth model. You can't just keep things good because you have to change something and a lot (the majority?) of that change turns out to be for the worse.
• henrik_w 3y ago
  You forgot TikTok - Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting post on how platforms get bad ("enshittification"): https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
• pklausler 3y ago
  Wandering Powell's and reading the handwritten staff recommendations on the shelves still works just fine for books.