Does anyone else feel alienated by the modern web?
The rate at which sites like Reddit and Tumblr have supplanted traditional forums, at which Twitter has grown and the fashion in which Facebook still exists as a de-facto standard feels incredibly disorienting to me as someone who hasn't used a pseudonym in years or real name outside of online purchases. Anonymous imageboards and textboards are still around, so I have some grounding - but even then a lot of the discussion (at least on imageboards) is strongly linked to things happening elsewhere on the web and there's a definite culture shift on imageboards as a result of that.
As someone with an interest in net culture (or at least historical net culture in light of this post) it feels like things have rapidly been swamped and I now understand very little of the culture of the modern web. This isn't helped by the fact that it's such a fluid thing, making it hard to give specific years that can be identified and classified. 2009 felt more natural than 2011, which felt more natural than 2014, which felt more natural than 2015 or early 16, and so on indefinitely.
It's perhaps stretching the word culture, as there's a feeling of disorientation far beyond culture shift, but it seems the closest to an accurate term.
Is there a solution, or do I just have to accept I'm a young old man and yell at kids about how things were back in my father's day?
I've recently concluded that all online communities are destined to become shit. It may be rulecuck mods, a swarm of new, naive users, or the community just generally losing interest; all boards will eventually die. This causes the community to split, and find refuge in communities more akin to their taste. These new communities will fall to the same fate as the old. The more we spread out, the more likely our communities will die. 4channel is lucky to have lasted this long despite most of its boards being barren. The only way we could return to the "glory days" of the internet is to unite under one community once again. Even if that did happen, we would just fall to the same fate again.
R.I.P. image/textboards 2003-2007
In today's world, the internet has only become an extension of real life. People are the same whether online or not. There is a huge lack of true anonymity now and it shows how bland things can be without it. The internet is now a tool for business, education, and narcissism, and not the pure, golden paradise of refuge it once was for us.
I believe that within the next couple of decades a new "refuge" has to appear. First, before the internet, it was phreaking and the BBS world. Only a group of people could access it. Then the internet.. Only nerds used it.
Now "normal people" can use the internet because there are no barriers to entry; they just grab an electronic appliance and touch the screen. Some kind of barrier has to appear again. Something that excludes the unworthy from the safe playground; maybe something to do with cryptography or just a new virtual dimension we can't imagine yet.
In time, it will open to the general public too, but for a while the magic will exist again. Maybe some of us will be left out though, if the barriers are strict enough.
Fuck this advertisement shit
Everywhere you go advertisements
I think what you're looking for is IRC.
>>5
The best thing I can recommend are obscure image/textboards and IRC like >>8 said.
Even then, it's full of plebs.
I also still lurk Usenet newsgroups because since they've fallen into obscurity the eternal September seems to have ended, and the only users are the ones who have been around since the beginning.
No not really. I don't like using 4chan for much outside of porn boards anymore because it's gotten so awful on the larger boards, but that's something that has been said since forever.
I don't mind large websites like reddit, tumblr, etc because they often have new queues or something similar and it's fun to dig through all the stuff that gets submitted. And they're convenient for seeing things you like quickly.
As for solutions I am not sure lurking dead chans and other places would bring much enjoyment. I think it's better to learn how to adapt to new things, while ignoring the stupid community parts.
>>10
Mostly in agreement.
It's better to try and live whilst still living than to hide. I'm glad places like this still exist but they will never be enough, even in multiplicity, to ever really fill the void.
> 2009 felt more natural than 2011, which felt more natural than 2014, which felt more natural than 2015 or early 16, and so on indefinitely.
I can definitely get behind this sentiment. Everything feels so incredibly unnatural and unreal now - the fake outrage over every non-issue, the insane amount of profiteering off of victimhood, the layers of snark and irony on top of every opinion, the short attention span of internet users, the constant clickbait at every turn, the narcissism, the rush to be offended... They've become so bothersome to deal with that I can't participate in mainstream, web 2.0 sites anymore, not even YouTube. Everywhere you turn, everything's homogenized. There is hardly any uniqueness to be found anymore and thank god chan culture is still here (kinda) or I'd have no real reason to keep using the internet.
I want things to return to sanity again.
Web 2.0, connecting mobile devices to the Internet, Motherfuckerberg's CuckBook-all those things are of the devil. That's why I spend lot's of time on the archive.org Wayback Machine, looking at lovingly crafted pages created by people with real passion back in the day. It's amazing to dig through the thousands of old anime pages you can find by following links from the archived Anipike-each one unique, quirky, and like a little treasure to be discovered by the intrepid digital Indiana Jones.
This old Web was far preferable to the cookie cutter template blogs, tumblrs, and social media we have now...it had heart.
>>13
I love sturf like that. Would you like to share some fool archived olf sites?
for some reason i just remembered britney spears teaches laser physics.. used to link people that as a joke. And bonsai kittens
i felt this perspective when the shift went from bbs'es, irc, or talk/email on unix boxes over to things moving into the browser. there's something unique and special about the anyonymous nature of text boards, though. they bring with them some level of garbage but if you sift them long enough, you walk away with an experience that just doesn't exist in the "modern" web where your identity is also your currency.
I barely use the internet anymore. It's ridden with kids from a certain board about politiks. The rest... i just don't fit in. Imageboards are my last hope. And IRC.
Anyway, along the path this thread is taking, I had an idea for imageboard stuff. I've noticed that while many of the different features between imageboard/textboard technologies are server-side, they all ship their own frontend layout. This is hardly ever questioned, and some (like Futaba) let you customize what you see to various degrees.
But traditionally, software has always had a clean distinction between the front and the back; the backend usually provides a sort of API and a standarized layout which then a client program manages. IRC is a good example of this.
I am thinking about making such a textboard. The clients could browse from, say Emacs, or an Ncurses client. Or the browser, through different options (a greasemonkey script, an regular frontend hosted in the user's pc, accesible through file:/// on their browser, or some client hosted independently).
Anyone think this is a good idea?
>>12
Laugh it off. It's depressing, but helps moral. I've been doing it since that day every news circuit in the US was re-reporting a facebook post about a dress.
the general sentiment of this thread seems to be that the old internet was better, and that everything went to shit after a certain point. I agree, to an extent, but at the same time, I also disagree.
I think that there's a place for social media, and that, in theory, it would be a good thing. In execution, however, most social media sites suck balls. Sites like Facebook actively promote vapid, ego stroking bullshit, rather then content for content's sake. In my mind, the best social media site is reddit, which encourages you to build a reputation based on content that people like. Sure, it might be ridiculously safe and unoriginal content, but people like it for what it is, rather then how much fame they can squeeze out of it.
>>18
I dunno, Reddit has basically killed off traditional forums for fandoms in favour of just using the subreddit.
It's definitely better than something like Facebook, a data-mining nightmare of virtue-signalling egotism, but it's still pretty mediocre. Reddit is formatted for content-sharing and commenting, not for discussion.
The whole idea of content-aggregation can be quite off-putting as well. You make something, someone else imgur's it, they get upvotes or Karma or whatever it is and you get fuck all. Unless you're the one who posts it to Reddit. In which case you're shamelessly self-promoting. (And I'll judge you for that if nobody else will.)
Is it any surprise that the content available via a communications method that relies upon a massive intake of energy and rare minerals and upon a global industrial base including both slavery and worker exploitation on which very few businesses can make a profit and are propped up by gobs of VC money and a very strange regulatory environment in the Western countries is declining in quality as the feeds which go into it dry up?
Extraction of oil from conventional sources which have a break even point around $30/barrel (the OPEC countries aren't having financial issues because their state owned oil companies are losing money, but because they promised their people such lavish social services spending to stem unrest that they need much more money), while the unconventional "tight" oil sources that the media is so excited about break even at above $70/barrel, peaked in either 2005 or 2006 depending on how you slice the numbers.
In the past, when faced with a mineral shortage, people have just invested more energy in mining to prevent a shortage. For instance, the iron ore mined today in much of the world contains much less iron, maybe 0.3% by mass, than the ore mined in 1900, with 2-3% iron by mass. The reason iron prices haven't risen is the use of more aggressive mining methods to gather up extremely large quantities of ore and then purify them more intensively. These require large amounts of energy to undertake, so a shortage of oil will automatically make the growing scarcity of most minerals readily apparent.
The United States, which has secured and sponsored free trade and an open market around the world after World War II when Britain abdicated the role, is undergoing relative economic decline, accounting for less and less of the world economy, and absolute industrial decline with output of consumer goods having become highly negligible. Meanwhile, Russia and China are moving much closer diplomatically after decades of alienation and each is becoming increasing aggressive. Can the US manage to maintain its end of all of the bilateral treaties and alliances it entered into decades ago and uphold the current international order? Probably not. The Chinese have supersonic anti-carrier missiles, the Russians have pretty decent fighter aircraft and surface to air missile systems with a range greater than that of the artillery and bombers which the US would use to destroy them. In fact, they have such a great range that the Russians have kept them well back from the front, under giant piles of concrete where they evidently believe the systems are still capable of doing their jobs.
Since the American strategy for the last 70 years has been 1) establish aerial superiority, 2) win, having either aircraft carriers or the aircraft themselves destroyed in large numbers by missiles the launch sites of which cannot be attacked means that the US will be unable to attack either of these powers conventionally. As for a nuclear deterrent, China's 150 missiles are sufficient to make a war unprofitable for the United States. Even with the THAAD interception system set up in South Korea, only around 10 missiles (and no interception system is good enough to allow only this many through) have to get through to American cities to destroy trillions of dollars in capital and kill millions of people, making it very difficult to continue a war.
The decline of the internet as more and more people rush to escape from reality on a network that people increasingly do not have the resources to produce content for and might not be able to maintain at all in the near future should not be a surprise.
I made a Twitter account. It's an okay experience. I talk to people less on it than I would expect. Having made it though, I feel comfortable saying that people make too much of a big deal about it for good or for bad.
>>20
It is surprisijg becaus eim not a not a god damn economics and foreign affairs genius like you. How do you learn so much. Im ashamed all my knowldge is abstract theoretical stuff when there is a whole world out there.
You just gotta find a way that's workable for you.
>>5
If you're going for something that's inaccessible to the layman then perhaps things like IPFS or ZeroNet would be of interest to you.
>>24 Not that guy but I've been craving something like this for nearly a year.
good post copied from another board:
â–¶Anonymous 08/31/16 (Wed) 10:24:27 No.645688
The mainstream web is too far gone by now to save. All that's left is various old sites that never "upgraded" to 2.0 and still work ok in old browser like Lynx or similar. But even those are constantly assaulted by subversive elements who want to (((improve))) them so they don't look like "embarrassing 90's shit". Check the openbsd-misc mailing list archives, and you'll see how often the subject comes up. But at least there the people in charge are more resistant to subversion. Other sites aren't so lucky, and day by day the web becomes more bloated with javascript and needs big bloated browser full of bugs and exploits to navigate.
And then people say "well you can just use these 10,000 add-ons to improve your privacy and security". Well fuck that, I can just use Lynx and not deal with all that to begin wtih. Plus, it even works in text mode, or an old Commodore 64, or that CP/M board like that arcade Jamma board some dude on SBC thread hacked on, with just a simple serial connection to a local *nix box to act as shell account.
The modern web locks you into ads & tracking, but it also locks you into constant upgrades (and thus backdoored hardware like AMT). It's a complete subversion of what the original web was about: something to display content in however manner your browser decided to format & display it. Not something to make the Internet into a second TV or fancy magazine with even more potential for mass brainwashing and propaganda.
But I know it can't be saved anymore, so I'm already using newsgroups (Usenet) more often, and also Gopher.
There was even a thread on /cyber/ where some dude keeps shilling for HTML 5, even though we keep saying it's overkill. That's why the web is not worth saving, because you would just waste all your time & energy arguying with people like that. Better to go in another direction entirely and not leave any room for subversion.