I agree that the web has gone downhill, but I don't think it's just the web. It's software in general.
When we were new to computers, every application was new.
Now, every application is a rehash of a previous application, except with missing features and a more "modern" look that completely disregards decades of what we know about UI/UX.
One example that I think about a lot is how we have copy and paste and drag and drop, but that's it. That's been it for decades. Nobody has invented a new way of getting data from program A to program B in ages.
By the way, Neocities is a website that tried to capture the Geocities feel by letting anybody just upload a static website hosted in a subdomain. They do seem to have some Lain fansites there.
Everything just gets worse as you age.
Sure, my dad said it too back then, but he just didn't get how the world moved on and improved. This time around though it's real, everything gets more stupid and dumb and I hate it.
One of the advantages of getting older is you get to see the same dumb shit play out again and again, and that's how you realize it's dumb.
Mainstream culture has always been vapid, heavily manipulated by big corporations, and mostly a waste of time. Anyone bemoaning how social media has guard rails and is all about passive consumption, is not old enough to remember television I guess, which was at one point just three networks telling you exactly what you could watch and when.
And in the TV era there was this same class of would-be commentators and tastemakers who would complain about how the culture had now turned to shit... they are just trying to make a buck and a name for themselves, but I always thought they seemed like a particularly unhappy bunch.
The only thing that seems really unique about the current era to me is the smartphone/social media combo, it shovels all this crappy mass culture into your brain at a level of efficiency and comprehensiveness that was previously unimaginable.
But you can just turn that off. My phone was either switched off or out of sight for all but 2 hours per day last week. With that piece of junk out of my hands life basically just feels like a better version of the year 2000 or so, in the real world not much has changed.
I read it more as wry irony. "My dad was dumb and wrong, but I'm totally right when I feel the same way he did." I don't think the comment really means either one of them was right or wrong.
I think (hope) it was sarcasm, but one sign of this time and age is, that it is increasingly hard to tell. Often people themself don't know anymore ..
So anyway, in this case I think the bitterness is real and the awareness, that it might be "just subjective" and not objective but that doesn't change the bitterness and misery of watching all those idiots out there ..
Things that were confidently set in their ways for the entire life of the product almost, also ended up buckling in recent years. I'm pretty disappointed, just for one example, in how Apple walked away from good old System Preferences into this System Settings for no good reason at all, just to make it analogous to their messy iOS settings page. It's a Mac and not an iPhone, and shouldn't behave like one, but what do you know, they know what is best for us I guess as we are saddled with yearly updates that must change some thing we've grown familiar with just for the sake of change. Imagine if the hammer in your garage changed how it worked every year.
I don't like that change, either, but making "System Settings" analogous to Apple's (indeed messy) iOS settings has been a boon to the users I support. They're used to iOS's quirks, and now require much less hand-holding when they have to make changes to their MacOS systems. I've decided to let go of my irritation: learning new systems is a core part of my job description; it's not theirs.
There are various third-party and sometimes first-party clipboard managers that give you more visual access to the things in the clipboard.
But you hit a steep uphill conceptual climb for the average user pretty quickly: the better solutions for moving data between applications end up resembling type-agnostic virtual 'registers' or Unix-style pipes for more than just text, but these abstractions seem to be too complicated in practice for anyone who isn't a power user.
PowerShell actually implements the latter solution, a kind of pipes-with-objects IIRC. And of all things the late Terry Davis' TempleOS has an ability to treat all kinds of things as text, render them, and pass them around.
I was using ComfyUI recently and the docs told me to drag a screenshot of a node configuration to load it. I was in disbelief but it worked. I assume the metadata is in the image somehow.
To be honest... it doesn't feel like an improvement, more like another way to control users' behavior.
It is quite common that if program B competes with program A, program A will go to great lengths to make sharing cumbersome and keep the users in program A. (e.g. try to open a medium post in the medium app from a linkedin feed).
> Still, I think something more fundamental has been lost for all of us as social media has evolved. It’s harder to find the spark of discovery, or the sense that the Web offers an alternate world of possibilities. Instead of each forging our own idiosyncratic paths online, we are caught in the grooves that a few giant companies have carved for us all.
Matches up with my view, reasonably good captureance.
Yes, this happens when you don't curate your feed and accept the default feed provided by the companies. For example I checked out some artists in Instagram (that I don't use regularly) and I observed that closing the artist page will redirect onto main page instead of closing the app and this main page is filled with "engaging" garbage I really should not have any interest in.
If you are not actively seeking for something then you will not find it. There still exits very unique content but it indeed is very often hidden in some closed Facebook forum that is not visible for search (e.g. googling). There is interesting content that does not surface by itself because it is not shared by masses but a lot of such content has also died when people have shut down their personal web pages or have lost access to them or the service they used has ceased to exist.
The author was getting at the fact that you are on instagram or facebook, rather than a unique website with its own ideas and sensibilities. That used to be the norm a decade or two ago: people wouldn't have a smattering of accounts they'd follow on a single platform, but a smattering of independent websites they'd visit. At least for me, those days felt a lot more exciting on the web.
I certainly agree with you but a lot of that content got archived (and some of it is still directly available) but if for example Facebook would become extinct then a lot of content held there will follow without any rescue. A lot of niche content in now on Facebook in some groups or now even worse, in some group chats, or in closed groups or even worse, invite only groups. The content might be there but it is incredibly difficult to discover (it was once called a deep web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web).
Finding little nuggets of content feels totally different than what the author is talking about to me, where it feltmlile there were whole other worlds out there.
Parker had built her own little microcosm. The web was more distinct weird different experiences, poorly connected, than it was anything else.
In some ways this article is about the end of a digital dualism. There used to be different spheres, where the digital was it's own place & was voyaged into. Now the bleed over between the physical and information space is immense. Sure we can still have some voyaging and disocovery, but what you are describing is more like using a metal detector to look for anonymous bits, rather than jaunting around across little infospheres. There is no digital dualism.
A _Book of the Long Sun_ Gene Wolfe fan! I'm surprised he wasn't a _New Sun_ fan instead when he was in middle school. _Long Sun_ tends to appeal to older people.
Depends on why you didn't like New Sun. Long Sun is a rather different beast.
I loved New Sun for the intricate writing and picaresque SF dying earth, time loops, meta-fiction, cosmology and so on; but Long Sun is written in a much flatter 'late Wolfe' style, is more straightforward and introspective, more of an extended meditation on religion (even false ones) & leadership & personal integrity.
You can like both, but I don't think I've seen many people claiming to like them equally. (And Short Sun is even less popular - it's just a bit too weird in delving into Wolfe's subtle fixation on insects/vampires and memory loss/personal identity, and you have to get through Long Sun first which is almost as different from Short Sun as Long Sun was from New Sun... I'm not sure if anyone really likes Short Sun.)
I signed up to Nostr and it feels like an early version of the internet.
Being supposedly uncensorable, there is the same toxic content you'll find in the mainstream social networks e.g. Twitter. But unlike on those platforms, it's not algorithmically boosted as "engaging content". Only the small minority that actively seeks it out will find it.
On the mainstream sites I'm being regularly exposed to Russian/Chinese propaganda and content from other groups I did not sign up for. So far on Nostr, I'm getting none of this after following a few tags.
When we were new to computers, every application was new.
Now, every application is a rehash of a previous application, except with missing features and a more "modern" look that completely disregards decades of what we know about UI/UX.
One example that I think about a lot is how we have copy and paste and drag and drop, but that's it. That's been it for decades. Nobody has invented a new way of getting data from program A to program B in ages.
By the way, Neocities is a website that tried to capture the Geocities feel by letting anybody just upload a static website hosted in a subdomain. They do seem to have some Lain fansites there.