The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

make homebrew software for an old Nintendo console

pick up cross stitching or weaving

make an independent film with a friend; use stuff from your kitchen as props

find a borderline functional instrument at your local thrift store

write a 1 page short story in pen

it's not enough anymore to merely criticize this bad time we're having

But that time has clearly ended. With climate change, the erosion of the social safety net, decay of faith in institutions, economic inequality, politics, etc., we are in an extremely tense time with a pervasive sense of scarcity. In some fundamental ways, it feels like there isn't enough to go around and people are scrabbling to get what they can while they can.

That psychological environment is not conducive to art and fun. It sucks.

It's funny because I knew lots of people in the early 2000s who were mourning the loss of the "old Internet" then. Kind of like how everyone thinks the music they listened to as a teenager is the best and it's all been downhill since then.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)

Old, pre-internet AOL is also in the same category.

These are what I refer to as "walled garden" services, that existed up to and (for a short time) through the commericialization of the net in the early 1990's. They offered built-in private services for chat, news, forums, games, etc. As direct competitors, they had an interest in keeping their userbase coming back to just what they were offering, and how they offered it. They also fell by the wayside for cost-competitive (free) online services that offered broader and more interesting stuff.

Anyway, we're circling back to this. Big companies like Meta have a vested interest in locking folks in and keeping them blind to alternatives.

Bringing the fun back simply means offering something better by providing an unmet need. It worked before. Last time it was the humble web browser that broke their near-monopoly on computer-gazing eyeballs. Perhaps we need something new that's just as potent?

By the mid/late 2000s, the UX for surfing the Web was mostly pretty good. Navigating to another site was as easy as typing in its URL or issuing a quick search.

Navigating the Web on mobile is much more difficult -- even 15+ years later simple things like browser tabs are a nuisance on mobile. Typing URLs is still a pain. Etc. That extra friction for more traditional Web browsing led to users preferring simpler apps that they didn't have to navigate from, including content that was less interactive. And social media companies were quite happy to exploit that and create endless feeds of content. People who create content followed suit and went were the eyeballs were.

Also, before mobile, using the Internet largely meant sitting down at a computer and browsing the Internet somewhat interrupted for a period of time. With mobile, Internet use became more far more disjointed. You might browse for a series of 2 minute spurts in between other activities, rather than having a dedicated sitdown browsing session. This also rewarded the 'feed' that instantly provided you something to do, without you having to put in effort to find it.

just don't participate in it and do your own thing.

Start your own blog. Without ads, not to be "monetized", just for the fun of it.

Write for yourself, not for "engagement".

Do your thing.

I promise you this is not true. It's just all buried under a mountain of crap now.

https://randomdailyurls.com

I'm a millennial. It occurred to just the other day, the language they use, they say "dough" a lot. They need dough. Where's the dough. Any criminal across this time period is always involved with gambling, and gangs and they need dough! And the normal working people storylines are pinned to their lack-of-dough situations.

I remember the internet very fondly too. There's always an age of innocence but it just takes time to realize everyone just really needs dough. And that's what happens.

The internet may have changed, but the human spirit hasn't.

People are still having a blast online, but they’re mostly kids or teenagers.

Garrys Mod got replaced by Roblox, forums got replaced by Discord, blogs got replaced by vlogs.

There’s still lots of fun and community still to be found online, people wouldn’t spend so much time on it if there wasn’t.

Fair bit of quality yt channels, some corners of reddit, hn, some niche forums.

Reddit is coming to the end of it's shelf life though. AI creeping in, people peddling things covertly dressed up as organic content...the signal/noise ratio is dropping.

yt still seems ok, though I'm getting a lot of doom & gloom videos lately. Unsure whether that's just my feed that shifted or the platform as a whole. e.g. I watch a lot of economics/geopolitics so lately seeing videos like "why norway/belgium/germany is in trouble"

There's something special to the loss of promise. That's the thing most often mourned, the potential.

There was a period when information wanted to be free and the web wanted to be something that makes people better... one way or another. Maybe it would make democracy better, or bring down bad regimes. Maybe make people smarter. Maybe it would democratize education or commerce or something in some way... "heals the world."

That period is a different period for everyone... maybe overlapping with one's optimistic youth. The promise was also a different promise, for different people. Early social media. Wikipedia. FOSS.

Wasted potential is a mournful thing.

I miss the old forums the most. The group mind on Reddit is just regression to the mean.

The rest I tried to cut back as much as possible for my own mental health.

I can't get of YouTube completly even though most of the time I hate myself after doom scrolling. Sometimes I still find genuinely interesting stuff there.

In my case, I really enjoy games. So I built a gaming platform where I can find fun, independent games. I find it to contribute to the "best of the internet" mentality.

It's really up to the people around who discover and can award the people contributing to the culture that they want to see.

The internet has, to some, become a place. But what these people don't realise is that this place is just the medium, so it's not going to 'do anything' for you passively, you have use it to find an 'ends', rather than just sitting there waiting for the phone to ring or the art to draw itself.

I'm doing the same right now. I should be sleeping but I'm sitting in the medium of HN waiting for distraction to come to me, rather than pursuing my own active goals.

Good night, go and find your 'ends' stop waiting for false ones to come to you.

It would be great if I could read the news like this, but it is heavily disincentivised for media and publishing companies to provide plain information unfiltered of ad-bloat. I don't say this so as to float a viable idea, but more as an expression of what I would really like in the web and in my web browser.

I won't go down the route of ‘CSS was a mistake’ or something like that. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But sometimes you need to clip branches so the old tree can keep growing.

People don't see any point in "creating content" in the form of a website or an irreverent blog site anymore. It takes too much time away from school or work obligations. Their friends couldn't care less about it. Worst of all, there isn't a guestbook to receive feedback from like-minded internet strangers that isn't riddled with spambots.

If someone is doing it, it's because they want fame; that's the only worthwhile payoff for putting yourself out there, and it creates misaligned incentives that result in inauthentic expression: generic meme pages, terrible video skits, standup comedy clips that are 90% tedious "crowd work" because they don't want to reveal their actual stage material.

- [0] https://spacehey.com/ [1] https://mmm.page/, https://neocities.org/

On the other hand, the algorithmic schelling points starve weird-ish corners of scale. The network effects + psychological draw of the single stream feeds is a powerful force.

The algorithmic spaces still have lots of weird. Maybe more weird than ever. But they also feel more bled of community (or even iterated contact with the same people).

It's a strange combination of facts. Maybe OPs post is not true in the literal sense, but it feels correct in the spiritual sense.

All the little niches can be your personal Web.

There are innumerable thoughtful, cute, interesting bits out there, probably more than ever before.

Craigslist is alive and well.

PayPay is weird but who cares.

The 'Grotesque Skyscrapers' of the web actually don't impair your view.

That's the beauty of it. Go where you want.

I would argue that's the darn point of the web, it's not for Curators it's literally for 'Whatever'.

It's to be seen whether any remnants of the "old" internet come back to the mainstream though. I wouldn't know though, wasn't alive then. For anyone that was, what was it like?

The fun places are out there aplenty. People just have to go out and find it because no algorithm or advertisement is going to point the way. I get tons of fun in all sorts of small and specialized ultra-nerdy communities.

I think early Facebook was the writing on the wall for the demise of fun on the internet. It was like a prison, or private school forcing everyone into a uniform layout. Especially compared to the wonderfully chaotic mess that was Myspace, livejournal, geocities, and hundreds of others.

I remember the day I gave in and started using facebook, hundreds of people I knew in real life learned my real name for the first time. I feel like a part of me died then, but that could have also just been growing up.

Here's the correct link for all to enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI

Used to be just a Flash animation on Weebl's stuff, but preserved on YouTube by the OG :)

Guys, we got old.

This is what happens when you extract value -- anything of value is extracted, leaving behind things devoid of value.

You can hoard "wealth" all you want, but the consequence is that there is nothing left that is worth buying.

I'll grant you: Flash is a hole that never fully healed back. Search engines might not be especially great for discovery now either. They weren't especially great for Geocities shrines either, though.

It was not without its dark sides. I remember at a young age seeing beheading videos, which were super easily available, even if not looking that hard, predators going wild in irc chats and the primitive online gaming of that time, several incidents of people on a webcam being encouraged to kill themselves via overdose, then that going viral, gore sites, etc. Addictive flash game sites riddled with porn ads. All of that stuff is still out there but a little harder to find. Back then there was a certain kind of exhibitionist spirit with the content, which wasn't all "fun" necessarily. But even with all of that, I do believe the web was better.

Left off, and what we really want to know, is... ok, so what now?

it feels like the folks who lament about the good ole days grew up, got a corporate job, and forgot how to have fun.

I just updated my iPhone and now it’s demanding I scan a credit card to “prove” my age. Everything is so sanitised now supposedly for the sake of the children, but we know that’s not the real reason. Surveillance is becoming more and more overbearing that I think everyone is self censoring at some level.

Every site I linger on is riddled with bots trying to manipulate me into getting angry about something, into buying something, or just otherwise feeding the numbers engine. YouTube especially has become ultra-corporate, so many channels are just ruthlessly chasing money and stamping out the grassroots passionate creators.

I hate the internet now. It doesn’t feel like home anymore, it’s just a distraction.

Step 1: Avoid algorithmic feeds of content.

Step 2: Avoid services that tend to collect, highlight, or exhibit AI slop.

Step 3: Read more books.

Step 4: Create more things and then share them on the Internet. This step directly addresses your concerns.

Rephrased: If you're not creating things and sharing it on the Internet, you are part of the problem.

PS: There are a small but healthy collections of RSS feeds with actual humans writing. Discover them at places like:

https://pinboard.in/popular

https://minifeed.net/

I'm sure it's an age thing. Author must be younger than I. But really, with the benefit of hindsight, the gates of evil opened with web 2.0. "Democratization" lead to strong platforms, walled gardens and the rest of it.

It's too easy to blame the algorithms when the algorithms are a necessary evil. TikTok has millions of videos uploaded per day. You are not going to sort through all of those on your own. The algorithm is designed to show you more of what you interact with. If you're not finding joy in what you're seeing, it's because you're not interacting with content that gives you joy. Stop watching the slop, search for the things you like and follow good creators. There are a lot of them out there, depending on what you like. That applies to any social media, not just TikTok.

It sucks the fun out of pretty much anything.

Google controls the search engine and they heavily modify the results.

Shows over, go outside. Hang with your friends. Or be really rebellious and do nothing for a while but watch the clouds (and never tell a soul you did it!)

I was just thinking the other day that I wish someone had told me that "golden ages" are always coming and going. As an adolescent and young adult in the 90s, I thought that simply was how things were, and that they would continue to improve in the same way indefinitely.

I would say that we're in a golden age of AI, in that LLMs seem to be heavily subsidized. We're in a golden age of porn (sort-of-democratization via OnlyFans and similar), gambling (DraftKings), insider trading (PolyMarket), and private equity. We're probably at the end of the Golden age of social media influencers and crypto(scams), as most of the juice has been squeezed.

I think our recent golden ages have just kind of sucked compared to those of the past, by most people's subjective preferences and ethics.

What we’re seeing is the over capitalization of everything, everyone is stressed out about making money due to rising inequality and rising costs of core needs like housing and healthcare.

The Renaissance happened because there were enough people with wealth that they felt free to explore art or give their money to artists without expecting a return on their investment. No one does things today as an expression of their soul, they do it to make money. Like the article suggests, people made things because they were happy, sad, horny, or mad. Now they do it for money.

We need to loosen up society’s obsession with accruing wealth, it ruins everything. What we’re witnessing is well described by the term Late Stage Capitalism, or what I like to call The Great Enshittification. It’ll only change when we decide to create something like a social safety net that lets people feel more free to create art that doesn’t need to provide an income.

Been doing this for 20 years.

I have less dev energy as an adult and dad, but I know what I want and how to make it.

All of my ideas I'm able to make not only a proof of concept but an entirely polished app, all thanks to AI.

I wouldn't say it's more or less fun than coding manual, apples to oranges, but it's certainly entertaining.

People aren't nihilist - social media is.

People aren't shallow - dating apps are.

The world isn't shit - late capital is.

But of course, people are also nihilist, shallow and shit; and those same people are hopeful, complex, patient, kind and loving - but the internet rarely brings those stories to you.

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

I don't think the fun is gone from the internet, you just have to look much, much harder to find it. It's the needle in the haystack of attention and profit-seeking content. And the platforms aren't as neutral as the might have been in the past in helping you search.

Sometimes I swear the algorithm has learned it keeps me more engaged with incredulously dissatisfactory search and discovery rather than anything actually stimulating.

Maybe it is time for an internet divorce. Permanently cut it in half between those who are ok with AI and those who are not. If it were up to me, I'd never want to hear from the latter group again.

I bet people older than me disliked the 90s web and preferred the days of gopher and newsgroups. No one is wrong and everyone is wrong.

Part of the reason things felt better when you were young is because it was; for you. Fewer responsibilities. Less understanding of the nuances and intricacies of the world. More room for idealism. Another part of the reason is that time tends to fade away the bad parts of life while retaining the things you enjoyed. This is good.

Nostalgia is great for reconnecting yourself to a simpler time in your life. Nothing wrong with that. But when you start making comparisons you're only fooling yourself.