Tell HN: I want to see the same moon as you
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UUnderABlueMoon about 17 hours ago 9 comments
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My wife was at home in San Francisco and I was in Mexico City for work.
She told me to go look at the moon.
Being 2000 miles apart we could look at the same object at the same time.
The Internet used to be like that.
A shared experience - “did you see what was on the front page of Instagram?”
I miss that.
Now we are off in separate algorithms like the Tower of Babel.
Doesn’t it feel like without a shared experience it’s basically offline?
Discussion (9 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I find people I have stuff in common with will also get a similar feed. I sent something to a co-worker last week, and he said he had just sent the same thing to another one of our co-workers and hour earlier.
There was a period of time where this happened so often it became a bit boring. Reddit about 15 years ago. Everyone has already seen everything we tried to bring up to talk about, so there wasn’t much to say. It was a lot of, “did you see…”, “yep”, “oh… what about…”, “yep”.
PS: Was there ever a front page of Instagram? Sounds weird!
It was a social media about real life. We don’t have anything like that.
Closest thing is maybe Yelp but it’s totally separated from being social. They have made it into a kind of Yellow Pages with comments.
But MySpace did ticket sales and music streaming and people were designing their profiles in wildly creative ways, there were games, news, gossip, and somehow it was all seamless with the real world.
I guess Big Media took over because, now it’s all individualized social media, a manufactured feed of random drama. Like the WWE shoved its way into websites and started setting up Trump and Joe Rogan, and COVID-19, Netanyahu, and “Black Lives Matter”, and all this heightened sensation totally unrelated to my actual real life. I’m not even saying it’s all fake or bad or anything - just that it’s now mostly information detached from my daily life.
I digress, offline is a shared experience, yes. But online could be too. It was.
Not really... Even back in the Web 1.0 days people didn't visit the same websites unless they had the same interests. And even today this exists – I'm seeing the same HN homepage for example, and this is true of most sites.
I think what you're describing was much more of a thing in the 80s and 90s with TV. People genuinely would tune into the same programs as each other every night and have these collective cultural experiences which don't quite exist in the same way they used to.
I don't miss it personally, but I suspect us losing that has led to some of our cultural divides in recent years.
I'm not the global shared experiences you're describing really ever existed.
You were probably too young and did not experience it.
What you said is not accurate.