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What are your internet time sinks?
Where do you all waste away most of your time on the internet? I hate to sound like a hipster, but I've come to avoid and/or dislike most main stream content aggregators. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are all platforms I no longer participate in because of privacy and quality reasons. I like Tildes and all, but the community is small (and I like it this way) and that means the content isn't always fresh. So where else do you all hang out?
I wrote my own meta-aggregator at news.t0.vc.
I pretty much browse only that. It helps me limit my time scrolling.
Very cool! Is it open source?
Nice, bookmarked that.
Ooh, that's really slick. It reminds me of another meta-aggregator I used to use back in the day, that I unfortunately can't remember the name of anymore, that used to show links from digg (before it collapsed), metacritic, reddit, and a few others.
Popurls or alltop? I used to also and forgot as well. I had to search for popurls, used to use it a lot. But news reading can be very time consuming and sometimes disparaging so probably better off my reading's limited.
Popurls!! That was it, and apparently it is still alive and well too. Thanks, trying to remember that was going to drive me nuts. I wonder if I should reach out to the creator and send them a Tildes invite? :P
oh man, alltop -- that was so cool before they added the entire internet.
Reddit - reading, commenting, and moderating.
Tildes.
Facebook.
The Sydney Morning Herald.
A puzzle page that someone posted on Tildes.
And I've just started using BoardgameArena with my boardgames group.
I have realized that the worse I feel the more I spend time on "hate-browsing" (not a word in English, but you get the expression I hope).
I have Facebook because of family who otherwise never tell you shit any more, assuming that Facebook is some kind of magical messenger and the work I get through it is pretty surprisingly high and I honestly don't know why. I have reddit because its my main source of news concerning a specific area of Open Source and I tend to try to answer user questions there to help out. Reddit is the lesser of those two evils but still it's crap (maybe I too sound like a hipster?).
The issue is when I feel like crap I tend to go into my local area group on Facebook and just troll hard. Or just read comments from people who - I would avoid saying "are dumb" but there are no other ways of describing them - as a way to feel worse. So these last weeks I have made a rule written out on a note next to my monitor that I need to check how I feel and if that is "less than ok" - no Facebook, no reddit, no nothing. It's like I THINK its gonna make me feel better, but when I do it I just feel worse.
Aside from that I also got in to a bad habit years ago to watch Minecraft Lets Play's from the Hermitcraft group as a way to mellow out if I had anxiety attacks - something I don't have any more but I keep watching them, just staring straight ahead doing nothing.
I quit Mastodon mostly because it was basically just social media with all the worst bits, but trying to avoid the technically crap bits. I spent a ton of time there before until I realized I hated the people I agreed with for how they talked, and loathed the people I didn't for what they said.
I think I am very much the archetype for "Awkward Lefty Do-gooder" but being raised in, and part of for a long time, working class people - I have a problem with enforced wokeness as a way to define who is what, a sort of middle class academical code language without any wiggle room for errors. At the same time I hate the people swooping in to scoop up the victims of those interactions and trying to persuade them that the issue isn't the code language but the actually fundamentally good ideals it is ment to convey
Hey! I relate with the hate-browsing! For few years reddit was my main source of open source news as well, but over years I've found that reddits signal-to-noise ratio dropped too much.
So I diversified. Most news I get from Hackernews. I use RSS feed for it, so there's a cap on how much time I sink.
For smaller news or events about smaller projects, best way is to subscribe to their blogs, again using RSS. Some projects, like KDE get their updates delivered on various contributor's blogs, but RSS makes managing all that so easy, it is setup and forget.
Assuming your focus is news and not comments, this removes distraction, increases SNR, and if I ever want to discuss something, I can always hop onto reddit. But most news are just fyi, and it helps to not go through a dozen random posts.
Well KDE is my jam, but at the same time thats where I like to help out with strange questions if I can. Although that could probably be better served some other way.
Will take your ideas and let them stew for a while, ty <3
As a mostly passive reader, thank you for actively answering questions!
Thank you for actively reading <3
Tildes, Neocities, Lainchan, Mastodon (weirder.earth), YouTube (through snopyta's invidious instance), RateYourMusic, AniList, Librarything, Letterboxd (gave in to friend pressure finally).
Oh my i didn't knew about Neocities. It's so awesome. Feels like going back in time.
rym
Letterboxd
I don't rate art anymore (beyond maybe a dislike/indifferent/like scale in some places, I use the like feature on letterboxd and might start using tags on rym to do this), so now I mostly document what I've heard using the collection features. Feel free to add me :)
Reddit. IRC, mostly tilde.town. I mean I love chatting on there though. Mastodon. Here, HN, Lobsters. That's the main ones I chuckle through, lol
Honestly if you get a good IRC chat going you can spend a lot of time doing that.
OH and if you count Netflix def Netflix. I watch it on my TV tho so I didn't think of it at first.
oh man, could you imagine life without IRC?! It's been such a fixture in my life over the years. Almost anything else can be replaced.
Haha I'm a bit of a latecomer but yes I love it. I wanted to suggest my DND group use IRC when we switched to online but we went with Discord instead.
your group will eventually be on IRC... IRC is eternal :)
It's funny. I got started on the internet with IRC and Usenet. I left usenet for many years, but always stayed on IRC. Over the past five or six years I got back into Usenet and everything feels right with the world.
IRC is great. I hate the lack of customization with Discord and the other services. I run weechat -- so its exactly how I want my client to be, which also means that most people would completely hate the layout.
Do you play DND online with a tabletop sim?
Funny...I just pimped my weechat today! It looks great so far as I'm concerned. I've done only a little of Usenet but it seems really cool.
We just play over voice chat on discord, with some dice rolling bots to help out. We listen to the dm describe stuff and then take about what we want to do. We're all pretty green so we don't know how else I guess? But it's been fun so far. Just realized we haven't played in a few weeks
re: DND -- that's awesome! I've never played, but I've always wanted to. But I'd rather play in person, at least for the first few times. It seems fun.
There is very little that is more rewarding than tweaking weechat. I really like
chatters.pl-- but you need to edit it to take out the title and the ugly separator. Add it in yourweechat.bar.nicklist.itemsand it'll show a list of active users above the normal nicklist in whichever interval you want.Since I use tiling window managers, I really like to change
weechat.bar.nicklist.conditionsto"${nicklist} && ${window.win_width} > 70"-- with this it will automatically hide the nicklist if your window is fairly small (70 chars in this case.) Pretty handy.I also like to rename channels using
buffer_autoset-- I have an alias for/buffer_autoset add irc.$server.$channel short_name $1then I simply use/rename blahto rename the current channel toblahautosort.pyis also handy. You can reorder the channels with ease. For me, I keep my main channels up top, then set some specific channels to be at the bottom of that server's list (e.g. ##werewolf and that channel's bot)I love weechat.
re: Usenet, its mostly binaries these days, but there are still some active newsgroups, and not just tech. Its fun to dig around.
I'd def recommend DnD in person for the first bit.And thanks for the weechat tips! Esp. the nicklist conditions :)
IRC is still alive? Oh, man I used to live in IRC channels.
Where are you all venturing to in IRC these days? Maybe I'll get back into it if people are still using it.
IRC is hopping! Just google a subject you're into with
"irc"and you should find something. Even if a channel is dead, stick in it and eventually someone will chit chat -- then before long you may have an active channel again. There are so many servers, but freenode is a great place to start.I used IRC as my main chat in the early 2000’s but essentially every channel I join now is dead. I’ll have to dig around.
I use ZNC as an IRC bouncer, so I'm not actively on IRC, but I do enjoy reading chat logs and chiming in from time to time. Here's some of the channels I frequent:
irc.freenode.net:
open.ircnet.net:
irc.darkscience.net:
irc.cyberia.is:
Alternatively I also frequent some Discord servers:
Overall, all the chats coming in real time can be overwhelming, so I typically just review chat logs after the fact once I've done my usual rounds on Tildes, HN, Reddit.
it also depends on the time of day -- its not like the ol' days, but its not totally dead. Everybody has their little treehouse. :)
I'll PM you a place to start!
Reddit, Tildes, Lobste.rs, Hacker News, and Head-fi are my big ones.
Reddit
(r/politicalcompass and r/politicalcompassmemes, sometimes r/politicaldiscussion, r/imaginarymaps, maybe r/mapporn or r/trueaskreddit.)
Tildes
(the amount of content in this site is directly proportionate to the amount of time I will spend here, but more seriously we can't be the only people in the Internet who can do high-quality commentary)
Add in a few NSFW sites and subreddits, the occasional check at the Atlantic or 538 for news and an hour or two in YouTube and that's kinda my entire Internet routine.
Tildes, Google News, Feedly, YouTube. I've mostly kicked Reddit except for a few specialty interests, (specific TV shows, self regulation of blood pressure) but the ability to scrub around YouTube and not feel like you've missed anything or not committed to a beginning, middle and end is pretty nice.
I'm a hardcore online window shopper. For example, I spend a lot of time on Sweetwater and Guitar Center browsing gear and making imaginary purchases. Though, lately most of my time sink is reading.
what gears you currently have?
hmm, let's see...
guitar stuff:
Amp: Fender Princeton 65 DSP
Guitar: Takamine G-116
Guitar: Fender Pawn Shop '51
Guitar: Seagull Coastline Folk Cedar
Guitar: Guild Starfire IV ST
Effect: Electro-Harmonix Flanger Hoax
Effect: ProCo RAT 2
Effect: Dunlop Crybaby BB535 (NOT the 535Q!)
Effect: Digitech TimeBender Delay
Effect: Electro-Harmonix Freeze
Effect: Digitech JamMan Solo XT
Effect: Lexicon MPX 100
Utility: Custom Live Electronics SyncMan
recording stuff:
Mics: Rode M5 matched stereo pair
Interface: Steinberg UR22
Monitors: JBL LSR305
Headphones: AKG K240mkII
Well, I think that's about it.
Here, Reddit, Youtube and window shopping Amazon.
Reddit, YouTube, Hacker News, Telegram, The Guardian
I'm also trying out tilde.club (waiting for an account) and the general tildeverse.