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Back in the day, the internet was an escape from the TV. It allowed access to information, alternative views (real ones not insane made up ones), no ads, and a

Back in the day, the internet was an escape from the TV. It allowed access to information, alternative views (real ones not insane made up ones), no ads, and an escape from having to hear a dominant narrative. Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it. That makes my old hacker heart smile.

MarcelOlsz 2y ago
There is a notable vibe shift from when I showed a date my plex setup 5 years ago to now. Awhile back it was ick-inducing, now it's cool again to own your data / not pay for crap.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Ideally it will look from the outside like people are abandoning the internet when really what they're abandoning is the web (that's the sick part anyhow) and moving the rest of their digital lives into a vpn-mediated sub-internet made of the participation of people that each user knows via face-to-face interactions.
- donatj 2y ago
  When normies started asking me how to set up their own Plex, I knew something had shifted.
- kouru225 2y ago
  Anecdotal, but I’ve met like 3 or 4 new plex people in the last year. They’re all just starting out.
  - Carrok 2y ago
    You should encourage them to move to Jellyfin. It's better, and actually free.
    - MarcelOlsz 2y ago
      Better how? Lots of seedbox provides still don't offer Jellyfin.
      - defrost 2y ago
        Many do .. and many offer docker and howto guides. https://seedboxes.cc/ https://seedboxes.cc/ https://dediseedbox.com/wiki/knowledgebase/jellyfin/ https://dediseedbox.com/wiki/knowledgebase/jellyfin/ https://www.rapidseedbox.com/blog/jellyfin-vs-plex https://www.rapidseedbox.com/blog/jellyfin-vs-plex .. etc.
        MarcelOlsz 2y ago
        You're right. Plex is rolling out some plex-pass crap and jumping their pricing from 120 to 250usd for a lifetime pass. Hard pass for me, installed Jellyfin last night.
    - _factor 2y ago
      Bad play, move them to plex first, much easier and still converted. Once they’re used to plex, then have the Jellyfin discussion.
  - hattmall 2y ago
    Wow, that's funny I've heard a few of my friends lately talk about Plex servers and stuff. I'm just like, uhm Plex was like 10 yrs ago! But would be interesting to see how Plexs numbers have grown lately.
cogman10 2y ago
> real ones not insane made up ones There were plenty of insane views :). Let us never forget the timecube [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
- bitwize 2y ago
  There was never any doubt that not enough people would take TimeCube guy seriously enough to tip major U.S. elections. That is EMPHATICALLY NOT THE CASE for the racists, fascists, pedophiles, and other scum that formed the core of the 4chan edgelord set.
  - longbrass 2y ago
    TimeCube guy’s shtick was continuously improved upon and is now a TT meme about manipulating time by a “Global Entrepreneur & Bestselling Author Ranked #1 Speaker in the World.” So really we are all fools for not taking it seriously enough to self-help promote this into a side hustle.
  - foxglacier 2y ago
    That idea is kind of the problem with social media now. People found a way to justify its importance to pretend it's worth investing their emotions in. But just imagine how, say, satanic rituals looked to religious people back when that was a thing to worry about, or really anything where lots of other people disagree with your cultural beliefs. You can always imagine how it might be a disaster if you don't start a culture war to kill those "bad" beliefs. It happened again with covid where people turned on each other for their beliefs because other people disagreeing with you might have some bad consequence. Never mind that almost nobody critically evaluates their own beliefs and just assumes they're on the moral high ground because that's where they happened to land in life. People even found a way to justify fighting flat-earthers because anybody who believes such nonsense must be the same type of people who believe other non-mainstream things and those other things could be dangerous to society. At the end of the day though, it's just basic human bigotry which always has some sort of justification. You even mentioned pedophiles as scum without recognizing that pedophilia is a condition that people have beyond their control and is separate from child abuse which is an activity people do and is within their control. Back in the day, that was also how people justified homophobia. There was a famous case in my country of a kindergarten teacher who was wrongly convicted and went to prison for something like 20 years because of essentially the popular belief that gay + satanic = child molester. My father was that type of person. He thought gays were generally bad people - they obviously weren't following Christian teachings so they must have no morals and would be just the sort of people who might want to infect others with AIDS. Today, if you voted for Trump you must be just the sort of person who wants to lynch black people because you're obviously generally bad and have no moral compass.
YesBox 2y ago
There were definitely insane views. When I was a young teenager in the early-mid 00s, I surfed to an article explaining how the moon landing was faked, with photographic evidence and plausible logic (like the "last of dust on the lander"), blah etc. There was a brief moment when I thought what I was reading was real, because it was the first time I came across something fabricated communicated as fact.
- lurk2 2y ago
  It was definitely there, but the scale of it was different back then and it was decidedly less mean-spirited by the early 2010s. I can remember when I first started using YouTube, I had someone from my city threaten to kill my entire family. A few years later when the 2012 Mayan Calendar Apocalypse was trending, another guy tried to justify his beliefs that it was real by claiming to have “top contacts” in a federal intelligence agency. You would run into people like that maybe once every few months. These days you are basically guaranteed to run across multiple people like that every time you log on. YouTube figured it out with comments around 2013 or 2014, but it got a lot worse about recommending videos from low-viewership channels in the last few years, which exposes you to a lot of wackos.
  - Gollapalli 2y ago
    Being recommended low viewership channels is a positive. Having everything be polished, scripted and ad friendly is tremendously boring. My complaint over the last few years with YouTube was that I missed the wackos. They were the thing that made the web interesting to begin with.
    - lurk2 2y ago
      I used to feel the same way, but something changed in the last few years to make these videos less appealing to me; they are usually low-viewership simply because they aren’t very good. For certain subjects like religion and philosophy, the novelty-seeking factor is completely gone for me - the best channels are the biggest ones, and everything else is guaranteed to be a grift, an inaudibly-recorded lecture, or an embryonic cult. I do still occasionally get some good videos from smaller channels, but smallness is a lot more relative these days. A lot of channels that I have started following in the last few years begin to see growth within less than a year. YouTube has gotten really good at identifying quality content and amplifying it, with the end result being that the 300 view videos in your feed are just market testing. One thing you can do if you’re into the weirder side of YouTube is to append “before:2012” to the end of your searches; I’ve found some cool stuff doing that.
znpy 2y ago
> Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it. Not really. I see the stark difference when i visit my parents (in their 60ies). TV is always on and pretty much always repeating the same things. Little variability, really poor content. It's basically serving the same old thing to the same old people. The internet instead has much more variability. There's so much plurality of opinions they often clash against each other. > A lot of younger people I see are shunning it. What I see is younger people starting to shun social media, which is something that makes my heart smile as well. It seems we're finally shaking off this performative collective craze. Social media was definitely a mistake that made everything worse. I hope it dies soon.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  > Social media was definitely a mistake that made everything worse. I hope it dies soon. Ye. Hopefully from cultural change and not government bans though. Young people seem to prefer small private group chats nowadays?

MarcelOlsz 2y ago

There is a notable vibe shift from when I showed a date my plex setup 5 years ago to now. Awhile back it was ick-inducing, now it's cool again to own your data / not pay for crap.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Ideally it will look from the outside like people are abandoning the internet when really what they're abandoning is the web (that's the sick part anyhow) and moving the rest of their digital lives into a vpn-mediated sub-internet made of the participation of people that each user knows via face-to-face interactions.
donatj 2y ago
When normies started asking me how to set up their own Plex, I knew something had shifted.
kouru225 2y ago
Anecdotal, but I’ve met like 3 or 4 new plex people in the last year. They’re all just starting out.
- Carrok 2y ago
  You should encourage them to move to Jellyfin. It's better, and actually free.
  - MarcelOlsz 2y ago
    Better how? Lots of seedbox provides still don't offer Jellyfin.
    - defrost 2y ago
      Many do .. and many offer docker and howto guides. https://seedboxes.cc/ https://seedboxes.cc/ https://dediseedbox.com/wiki/knowledgebase/jellyfin/ https://dediseedbox.com/wiki/knowledgebase/jellyfin/ https://www.rapidseedbox.com/blog/jellyfin-vs-plex https://www.rapidseedbox.com/blog/jellyfin-vs-plex .. etc.
      - MarcelOlsz 2y ago
        You're right. Plex is rolling out some plex-pass crap and jumping their pricing from 120 to 250usd for a lifetime pass. Hard pass for me, installed Jellyfin last night.
  - _factor 2y ago
    Bad play, move them to plex first, much easier and still converted. Once they’re used to plex, then have the Jellyfin discussion.
- hattmall 2y ago
  Wow, that's funny I've heard a few of my friends lately talk about Plex servers and stuff. I'm just like, uhm Plex was like 10 yrs ago! But would be interesting to see how Plexs numbers have grown lately.

cogman10 2y ago

> real ones not insane made up ones There were plenty of insane views :). Let us never forget the timecube [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube

bitwize 2y ago
There was never any doubt that not enough people would take TimeCube guy seriously enough to tip major U.S. elections. That is EMPHATICALLY NOT THE CASE for the racists, fascists, pedophiles, and other scum that formed the core of the 4chan edgelord set.
- longbrass 2y ago
  TimeCube guy’s shtick was continuously improved upon and is now a TT meme about manipulating time by a “Global Entrepreneur & Bestselling Author Ranked #1 Speaker in the World.” So really we are all fools for not taking it seriously enough to self-help promote this into a side hustle.
- foxglacier 2y ago
  That idea is kind of the problem with social media now. People found a way to justify its importance to pretend it's worth investing their emotions in. But just imagine how, say, satanic rituals looked to religious people back when that was a thing to worry about, or really anything where lots of other people disagree with your cultural beliefs. You can always imagine how it might be a disaster if you don't start a culture war to kill those "bad" beliefs. It happened again with covid where people turned on each other for their beliefs because other people disagreeing with you might have some bad consequence. Never mind that almost nobody critically evaluates their own beliefs and just assumes they're on the moral high ground because that's where they happened to land in life. People even found a way to justify fighting flat-earthers because anybody who believes such nonsense must be the same type of people who believe other non-mainstream things and those other things could be dangerous to society. At the end of the day though, it's just basic human bigotry which always has some sort of justification. You even mentioned pedophiles as scum without recognizing that pedophilia is a condition that people have beyond their control and is separate from child abuse which is an activity people do and is within their control. Back in the day, that was also how people justified homophobia. There was a famous case in my country of a kindergarten teacher who was wrongly convicted and went to prison for something like 20 years because of essentially the popular belief that gay + satanic = child molester. My father was that type of person. He thought gays were generally bad people - they obviously weren't following Christian teachings so they must have no morals and would be just the sort of people who might want to infect others with AIDS. Today, if you voted for Trump you must be just the sort of person who wants to lynch black people because you're obviously generally bad and have no moral compass.

YesBox 2y ago

There were definitely insane views. When I was a young teenager in the early-mid 00s, I surfed to an article explaining how the moon landing was faked, with photographic evidence and plausible logic (like the "last of dust on the lander"), blah etc. There was a brief moment when I thought what I was reading was real, because it was the first time I came across something fabricated communicated as fact.

lurk2 2y ago
It was definitely there, but the scale of it was different back then and it was decidedly less mean-spirited by the early 2010s. I can remember when I first started using YouTube, I had someone from my city threaten to kill my entire family. A few years later when the 2012 Mayan Calendar Apocalypse was trending, another guy tried to justify his beliefs that it was real by claiming to have “top contacts” in a federal intelligence agency. You would run into people like that maybe once every few months. These days you are basically guaranteed to run across multiple people like that every time you log on. YouTube figured it out with comments around 2013 or 2014, but it got a lot worse about recommending videos from low-viewership channels in the last few years, which exposes you to a lot of wackos.
- Gollapalli 2y ago
  Being recommended low viewership channels is a positive. Having everything be polished, scripted and ad friendly is tremendously boring. My complaint over the last few years with YouTube was that I missed the wackos. They were the thing that made the web interesting to begin with.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    I used to feel the same way, but something changed in the last few years to make these videos less appealing to me; they are usually low-viewership simply because they aren’t very good. For certain subjects like religion and philosophy, the novelty-seeking factor is completely gone for me - the best channels are the biggest ones, and everything else is guaranteed to be a grift, an inaudibly-recorded lecture, or an embryonic cult. I do still occasionally get some good videos from smaller channels, but smallness is a lot more relative these days. A lot of channels that I have started following in the last few years begin to see growth within less than a year. YouTube has gotten really good at identifying quality content and amplifying it, with the end result being that the 300 view videos in your feed are just market testing. One thing you can do if you’re into the weirder side of YouTube is to append “before:2012” to the end of your searches; I’ve found some cool stuff doing that.

znpy 2y ago

> Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it. Not really. I see the stark difference when i visit my parents (in their 60ies). TV is always on and pretty much always repeating the same things. Little variability, really poor content. It's basically serving the same old thing to the same old people. The internet instead has much more variability. There's so much plurality of opinions they often clash against each other. > A lot of younger people I see are shunning it. What I see is younger people starting to shun social media, which is something that makes my heart smile as well. It seems we're finally shaking off this performative collective craze. Social media was definitely a mistake that made everything worse. I hope it dies soon.

rightbyte 2y ago
> Social media was definitely a mistake that made everything worse. I hope it dies soon. Ye. Hopefully from cultural change and not government bans though. Young people seem to prefer small private group chats nowadays?