I'm not even a millennial, but this is mostly the problem I've been having with the internet. Nothing feels genuine or "real" and what's posted isn't even unreal in a fun or exciting way. It feels...
The internet was once an illicit porthole into someone else’s life, rather than a proud declaration of their existence that might stoke enough engagement to get a sponsorship deal.
I'm not even a millennial, but this is mostly the problem I've been having with the internet. Nothing feels genuine or "real" and what's posted isn't even unreal in a fun or exciting way. It feels as if everyone decided they needed a face that wasn't their own, then decided to put on a equally bland, boring face. Who are my peers even trying to masquerade as at this point??? What's the point of playing pretend with everyone if you aren't having fun or enjoying yourself?
I really feel this on YouTube and Reddit. On YouTube, so many videos are made the same way in order to get picked up by the algorithm. Clickbait titles, thumbnails with the same "shocked" face,...
I really feel this on YouTube and Reddit. On YouTube, so many videos are made the same way in order to get picked up by the algorithm. Clickbait titles, thumbnails with the same "shocked" face, videos that should be 2 minutes but are padded with nonsense just so they get monetized. And so many of the comments on Reddit are just people making the same jokes since they get upvotes. I get having inside jokes and feeling a part of the community, but to your point, it feels at times like everyone is playing the same 10 characters in a show that should have ended 3 seasons ago.
You're on point on reddit there. The one liners, there was a time that i enjoyed that. Then it became repetitive then i noticed it was bots who posted them, copying from more upvoted previous...
You're on point on reddit there. The one liners, there was a time that i enjoyed that. Then it became repetitive then i noticed it was bots who posted them, copying from more upvoted previous comments on the same reposted post but in a slightly different subreddit.
The genuineness of the comments there are gone. I do not feel the sense of community anymore. It's just repost and karma whoring. For what? To sell the account to marketers and advertisers and political entities with agendas.
I think there's still some genuine conversation to be had on Reddit, but it is niche. The main subs seem to all be advertisements disguised as user generated content. Definitely lacks that early...
I think there's still some genuine conversation to be had on Reddit, but it is niche. The main subs seem to all be advertisements disguised as user generated content.
Definitely lacks that early internet 'magic'. I feel that a little here on Tildes. Maybe it's just nostalgia talking. Or we are that far off from where we started.
I'd posit that Tildes will remain a safe haven as long as there is no money to be made by interacting in the manner as described by the quote. Even if Tildes would open up the floodgates to freely...
I'd posit that Tildes will remain a safe haven as long as there is no money to be made by interacting in the manner as described by the quote. Even if Tildes would open up the floodgates to freely create accounts today, the obscurity of the site and small userbase would barely be worth the opportunity cost of botting comments as opposed to doing so on a bigger site like Reddit, let alone individual users trying to monetize their 'influencer account on Tildes'.
I tink it goes the other way too - as things die back, they stop being valuable targets for that machine. Flickr is a good example - its heyday was many years ago but it's still around and there's...
I tink it goes the other way too - as things die back, they stop being valuable targets for that machine. Flickr is a good example - its heyday was many years ago but it's still around and there's not much spam or manipulation because it's seen as not worth bothering with, though for legitimate users there's still some good interaction.
Honestly even the users on Reddit have started to feel like bots because of the random one liner phrases that get reposted on every post. AnarchyChess has really spread to everything, I see the...
Honestly even the users on Reddit have started to feel like bots because of the random one liner phrases that get reposted on every post. AnarchyChess has really spread to everything, I see the whole “holy hell” and “google en passant” replies all over Reddit now.
I understand joke replies and “in” jokes, especially on dedicated subs for “in” jokes and the like. It’s really started spilling out into other communities in the last 6-12 months. (At least from what I’ve noticed)
I think Reddit has always been like that with inside jokes leaking out of (popular) subreddits. I do think a lot of it is bots karma farming, however, and that is undoubtedly getting worse over time.
I think Reddit has always been like that with inside jokes leaking out of (popular) subreddits. I do think a lot of it is bots karma farming, however, and that is undoubtedly getting worse over time.
I completely understand (and have) inside jokes with friends and family. I even occasionally will join in on them on Reddit. I think you are right though, karma farming is a big thing. It wasn’t...
I completely understand (and have) inside jokes with friends and family. I even occasionally will join in on them on Reddit. I think you are right though, karma farming is a big thing. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I heard about people farming karma on their accounts to then sell to advertisers for astroturfing purposes.
I know this is an ancient comment, but I want to chime in and say the astroturfing has been a thing for a long time. /r/Hailcorporate was pretty popular a good number of years ago, and called out...
I know this is an ancient comment, but I want to chime in and say the astroturfing has been a thing for a long time. /r/Hailcorporate was pretty popular a good number of years ago, and called out shills masquerading as normal users. People would call an astroturfing OP out on it in the comments, but it tended to get buried. There were ad accounts everywhere, they were just more covert tbh.
I felt this very strongly when wikileaks came out with a sub and there was a great deal of discussion and momentum about the unfairness of Julian Assange's arrest. There was genuine indignation...
I felt this very strongly when wikileaks came out with a sub and there was a great deal of discussion and momentum about the unfairness of Julian Assange's arrest. There was genuine indignation that definitely felt like it could easily become a MOVEMENT, not just a bunch of upset people pounding their keyboards.
That would never happen on the reddit of today. Even r/wikileaks has few comments and the sense of community around someone like Assange seems to have almost entirely dissipated. The political forums are far too controversial to build any kind of consensus on anything.
Another thought: does anyone there now even remember influential figures like Aaron Swartz?
Yes, I feel the same about this. Once you incentivize quantity over quality (for that tasty ad revenue) everything becomes watered down and bland. Once you figure out what makes money (or gets...
Yes, I feel the same about this. Once you incentivize quantity over quality (for that tasty ad revenue) everything becomes watered down and bland. Once you figure out what makes money (or gets attention) you don't have to try to show anything new, exciting, or different to your audience. It starts to be a race to become a performer, not to share with others.
Yeah there’s a context collapse with social media. I used to maintain a “public facing” account that I wouldn’t mind employers seeing and then the stuff that my friends saw. But things revolving...
Yeah there’s a context collapse with social media. I used to maintain a “public facing” account that I wouldn’t mind employers seeing and then the stuff that my friends saw. But things revolving around having a social graph made it so people started crossing the streams. So now instead of having specific groups that you show a specific face to everything collapses on one performative public persona.
This context collapse is very frustrating to me. I think that it's also a result of 'the internet' as a whole becoming something mainstream. Once it became socially acceptable to talk about the...
This context collapse is very frustrating to me. I think that it's also a result of 'the internet' as a whole becoming something mainstream. Once it became socially acceptable to talk about the internet with people in public, it also sort of became expected that you have social media accounts that you can add people on as well. There used to be a clear split between 'online' and 'irl,' but I think that's gone now.
It honestly worries me. For example, I have to consider whether or not I'll be rejected from jobs in the future because they find it suspicious that I don't have personal social media for them to do a background check on.
At a certain point in my 30s, I stopped wearing suits to job interviews (disclaimer have never been laid off). If they won't hire me cause I wasn't "professional enough," then I probably wouldn't...
At a certain point in my 30s, I stopped wearing suits to job interviews (disclaimer have never been laid off).
If they won't hire me cause I wasn't "professional enough," then I probably wouldn't enjoy working there anyway and I can save myself a lot of time.
The people demanding the social media charade can pound sand. I have other Xennial friends that get very upset at people not taking Linkedin seriously, and I just laugh.
I'd like to say that you're better off not getting a job with a company that insists on creeping your social media presence, but of course there's a heavy dose of idealism in that statement.
I'd like to say that you're better off not getting a job with a company that insists on creeping your social media presence, but of course there's a heavy dose of idealism in that statement.
Honestly I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that millennials are just turning 30. What does turning 30 mean? You're getting married and you're having kids. And once you have kids in a...
Honestly I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that millennials are just turning 30. What does turning 30 mean? You're getting married and you're having kids.
And once you have kids in a career? You're done .
You're not coming home to spend time on the internet anymore, you're coming home and you're spending time with your family. Clean the house, take care of the kids, relax with television or video games or whatever else.
And once your age group is doing that, they're going to disappear. Welcome friends, you're the uncool parents now.
Personally, I saw a huge uptick in Facebook use among people in my age bracket when they started having kids; I would venture that it compensated for the sudden lack of energy and an external...
Personally, I saw a huge uptick in Facebook use among people in my age bracket when they started having kids; I would venture that it compensated for the sudden lack of energy and an external social life. Those people are largely gone from social media now, but it didn't coincide with them having kids - there was a good 5+ years between when my more... traditionally-minded peers started having kids, and when I really took note of people being absent online.
That's to say nothing of our parent's generation, who love social media. They're getting as much — if not more — information from it as we are. Or rather, we used to. And I think that's the crux of it.
Millenials aren't leaving the internet, we're leaving social media. We aren't disappearing, we're simply disappearing from mainstream spaces. It was in our tenure that we saw the internet turn into the loud, flashy, populist, instant-gratification machine that it is today, and most of us simply don't like it.
Older millennials grew up with the mainstream Internet in its infancy: we witnessed the birth of the search engine and the rise of social media. When we were teenagers, doing something as innocuous as watching a movie trailer was a multi-hour endeavour — those 100MB Quicktime videos took hours to download over 56k. Nothing about our internet was fast or easy (relatively speaking — I can hear the BBS crew gnashing their teeth already). Finding information took work.
The problem is that in the internet becoming more instantly-gratifying, it became more accessible, and that's when our parents' generation finally took to it. My mother, who went out and bought a typewriter because our first computer was "too hard", spends more time on Facebook in a day than I have in the last five years. Online misinformation is such a problem for our parents' generation because they never had to search for information online, and consequently, never learned to filter information online. Everything they see is taken as God's own truth — the internet is the Information Superhighway, and this is on the internet, so it must be true.
Constantly filtering bad content and misinformation is exhausting, and because, as you say, we now have kids and jobs and homes and bills, there's only so much time and energy we can devote to that, and we want to spend it on something more rewarding. So we just walk away and gravitate to other communities like Reddit. Not that that doesn't have its own problems, but at least we can open the homepage without having to hear about Aunt Deborah's latest MLM. We don't have to grit our teeth and silently let Uncle Bob continue his latest tirade because we're worried about decorum at the next Christmas dinner — at least Reddit's anonymous and we can deal with those people freely without having to explain to Mom why we keep blocking our relatives on Facebook.
Gen Z don't have this problem - the instant gratification machine is all they've ever known. They aren't getting frustrated with the enshittification of the mainstream internet because they've never seen it any other way.
To this day, I think the most genuine thing I could put on my resume is "learned to use a search engine like a librarian." My elementary/middle school education was still book-focused, the...
Older millennials grew up with the mainstream Internet in its infancy: we witnessed the birth of the search engine and the rise of social media.
To this day, I think the most genuine thing I could put on my resume is "learned to use a search engine like a librarian." My elementary/middle school education was still book-focused, the internet was not considered a reliable reference (hah! full circle!). It was used as a way to filter and find other more-reliable sources.
And this has paid dividends in terms of being able to pick up anything that doesn't require 4 years of intensive deep learning.
My rapid rise in my early career could be at least 80% attributed to "I know how to use a search engine and filter out the garbage."
To respond to your very first comment, I wouldn't say my point is contradicted by the number of millennial parents that are on Facebook and so on, because those people are old enough that their...
To respond to your very first comment, I wouldn't say my point is contradicted by the number of millennial parents that are on Facebook and so on, because those people are old enough that their kids have moved out now. They have time again.
I remember the days of being a kid and using Napster / Kazaa / Limewire and downloading music illegally (well, it wasn't illegal at the time, but I digress). Sharing those tracks on AIM (AOL...
I remember the days of being a kid and using Napster / Kazaa / Limewire and downloading music illegally (well, it wasn't illegal at the time, but I digress). Sharing those tracks on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger for you youngin's here) or MSN Messenger and playing Counter-Strike. That was the glory days of the internet and was just at the height of the whole "broadband" switch all of us were making at the time. Exploring the internet back then was like a gateway into America's wild-west...it was uncharted territory and now those territories have become civilised. It's not the same place we grew up with. It's evolved and with it the ease of use and instant gratification.
It's not all bad nowadays, but the allure of just searching the internet and finding things out isn't as attractive as it used to be. Places liked reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram makes things easier to peruse and get satisfied on the content streams.
YouTube made it even easier to get our entertainment fix too. It's not the same, but I don't feel like that's a bad thing either.
You make a great point... so much of the popular media hook of "x is like x for x generation" is essentially just pasting labels on developmental stages that predate mass media. Not that some...
You make a great point... so much of the popular media hook of "x is like x for x generation" is essentially just pasting labels on developmental stages that predate mass media.
Not that some things don't change (millenials not skewing conservative as they age so far!) but mostly it's just stages of life.
The whole thing about people getting more conservative as they age has always been a myth. To some extent older generations start looking more conservative next to younger generations because...
Exemplary
The whole thing about people getting more conservative as they age has always been a myth. To some extent older generations start looking more conservative next to younger generations because views that were extreme when they were young became mainstream as they aged, but that's not entirely a one way street (especially not on a long enough time scale), and it doesn't apply equally to everything. If you transported your average 1930s union factory worker to the modern day, he'd simultaneously look far right socially and off the scale far left economically because the Overton window has shifted in opposite directions between social and economic issues since then.
More importantly, though, the whole thing is something mostly brought up by conservative boomers, and the truth is they were conservative when they were young, too. They called the hippies a counterculture for a reason, and most young boomers were what the hippies would have called squares. The hippies didn't move right, there just never really were that many to begin with. For most people, political views are pretty well fixed by your 20s.
The general consensus I’ve read is that people’s political views are generally solidified in their 20s, based on the period of time you grew up in. Millennials/Zoomers grew up in an era of...
The general consensus I’ve read is that people’s political views are generally solidified in their 20s, based on the period of time you grew up in. Millennials/Zoomers grew up in an era of instability and worse economic prospects, but also of strides in gay rights and racial justice, so it’s no surprise they are voting for liberal/left-wing candidates.
To add to your point on hippies, many of the original hippies stayed hippies. There are still communes out there with 60/70/80-year old folks, still doing what they’ve done since 1969.
The oldest ones for sure, but the younger ones who make up the bulk (or at least the largest fraction) of them are weighed young, in the early 30s now.
The oldest ones for sure, but the younger ones who make up the bulk (or at least the largest fraction) of them are weighed young, in the early 30s now.
The article is a bit dramatic, but I can understand the vibe. I get a similar feeling with online games. And I got called old man for a few times already - but back in my day - which is only...
The article is a bit dramatic, but I can understand the vibe.
I get a similar feeling with online games. And I got called old man for a few times already - but back in my day - which is only around 10-15 years ago, I opened up Counterstrike and joined my favorite server. Got rekt, or won the rounds and left. You get to know the people on it, the admins too. It was a small community in itself, sometimes they even had a forum or IRC. Also all the amazing fun server mods. For more interesting rounds we had the ESL.
Now everything is so competitive and serious, even the short unranked matches. The match making system brings so much problems with it (afk players you cant kick out, toxic players you have to win a match with to climb up the rank (who wants to stray bronze?)), waiting and waiting for a new game, locked in for 45-60 minutes. It feels like it is net - worse than just having a server browser.
The websites: a while ago, you could be assured that some bored person wrote a website you could just use for minimal things. I certainly wrote a few. For example, a stupid food generator. Basically just a random food generator if you don't know what you want to eat for the day. A month ago I googled for one and found 5 pages of companies that sell you a monthly membership just for that feature. Of course, AI supported.
It's less "Hey peeps, look what I have built while experimenting" and more "Buy my subscription, it's just 3.99$ bro"
Everything seems so milked to the last drop, overly optimized, controlled, overly tracked and ad infected.
I kind of miss the growing, broken phase of the internet. Even the insults had more substance than today. :D
Matchmaking ruined the fun in games. Yes, you no longer had to wade through a bunch of empty servers. But now everyone was a stranger. Look no farther than World of Warcraft. All those horrible...
Matchmaking ruined the fun in games. Yes, you no longer had to wade through a bunch of empty servers.
But now everyone was a stranger. Look no farther than World of Warcraft. All those horrible inconvieniences of 1.0 (walking to dungeons, having to spam chats to find a 4th/5th) helped foster social interaction...you got to know people on your server.
40 man raids were amazing. I was a warlock, and we had our own little side channel going with the other 5 locks where we shot the breeze in between bossfights. There was the rest of my party in the raid, we'd have our own chat going too.
They rolled out matchmaking and dungeonfinders....and a bit of that died. Raids got smaller and more manageable...but now with less downtime.
Everything chased the game aspects, and not the social ones. And thats part of why vanilla private servers are still going strong (well that and I've paid well over $500 to Blizz for WoW, I'll keep playing my OG copy for free thanks).
I really loved my small pop server on WoW when I played (Tarenis). After matchmaking became available nobody really talked on the server forum. Chat became a ghost town unless they were selling...
I really loved my small pop server on WoW when I played (Tarenis). After matchmaking became available nobody really talked on the server forum. Chat became a ghost town unless they were selling something or a gold farmer. And then cross server matchmaking came and it was over. You don’t even really need to be in a guild to play WoW. The sense of community is just gone. I haven’t played since Wrath. I guess Classic brought some of that back, but I haven’t been playing so I don’t know.
I have been complaining about matchmaking since Halo 2. Pretty much every popular multiplayer game has stupid problems with the way multiplayer is handled. I remember trying to play some COD game...
I have been complaining about matchmaking since Halo 2.
Pretty much every popular multiplayer game has stupid problems with the way multiplayer is handled. I remember trying to play some COD game or another and I found myself so incredibly frustrated with the mode there were player rankings but no segregation between rankings so newbies were not only being put in matches with elite players, but those elite players also had access to better weapons than what was available to those newbies. Combine that with the fact that nobody wanted to play any of the cooperative modes cooperatively was also very anti-fun because you could have been an elite player yourself but still be stuck with a losing team because everyone is doing their own thing.
Absolutely everything being turned into SAAS is one of the worst things to happen in recent years. Like, I get that there are ongoing development costs, but is a basic recipe manager, todo list,...
found 5 pages of companies that sell you a monthly membership just for that feature
Absolutely everything being turned into SAAS is one of the worst things to happen in recent years. Like, I get that there are ongoing development costs, but is a basic recipe manager, todo list, or workout tracker all really worth paying $5/mo for, which I have to keep paying for as long as I keep using the app? Hell no! And the worst part is that the SAAS app model is clearly successful since nearly every app is SAAS now, and so it's getting harder and harder to find pay-once, full featured apps anymore. :(
The problem is users really like freemium. If it was easy to get people to pay a one time fee for a todo app then that model would be popular among solo developers.
The problem is users really like freemium. If it was easy to get people to pay a one time fee for a todo app then that model would be popular among solo developers.
I think its more users have been conditioned to accept monthly fees over one-off purchases. You Need A Budget used to be a full-fledged, one-off purchase for like $45. A solid piece of personal...
The problem is users really like freemium.
I think its more users have been conditioned to accept monthly fees over one-off purchases.
You Need A Budget used to be a full-fledged, one-off purchase for like $45. A solid piece of personal budgetting software.
Now it's a $15/month subscription. It's outrageous for a piece of sotware targetted at helping people get their finances in order.
Oh man, I remember the days of YNAB desktop just before they went hard into subscription. YNAB 4 I think? Was a great app. But when they started going SAAS I dumped it and just bought one of those...
Oh man, I remember the days of YNAB desktop just before they went hard into subscription. YNAB 4 I think? Was a great app. But when they started going SAAS I dumped it and just bought one of those budget journals. Which works great.
Yep. It's a physical journal. It's pretty feature rich. Maybe a little too much sometimes. Like, I don't use the stickers or the pie charts but I like the calendar and expense tracking. It's this...
Yep. It's a physical journal. It's pretty feature rich. Maybe a little too much sometimes.
Like, I don't use the stickers or the pie charts but I like the calendar and expense tracking.
You can still do freemium with pay-once (to unlock the full features) apps... it's called shareware. But everything becoming freemium + SAAS really sucks, and in most cases can't really be...
You can still do freemium with pay-once (to unlock the full features) apps... it's called shareware. But everything becoming freemium + SAAS really sucks, and in most cases can't really be justified, IMO.
Yes, some stuff is actually well suited to becoming SAAS, especially software that would otherwise be exceedingly expensive to buy, or that really does have ongoing costs for the devs... but not every damn thing needs to be SAAS, and I hate that so many devs (esp mobile app devs) are turning everything they make into SAAS!
I mean, in the end, prices aren't things that are to be "justified". If Bob makes a basic notepad app, and wants to charge $5/month, who should be able to tell him no? It's his problem when, if...
I mean, in the end, prices aren't things that are to be "justified". If Bob makes a basic notepad app, and wants to charge $5/month, who should be able to tell him no? It's his problem when, if his pricing is too expensive, no one subscribes and he has no money. The creator has their right to price whatever they want, and the buyers have the right to tell them to pound sand.
Basically, it's just that app prices have increased, by a lot. That seems more of a market correction. In the beginning, app developers had no business acumen and were propelled by an exponentially growing market. But smartphone sales hit the top part of the S curve eventually, and people realized how little money they're making, and how much people were actually willing to pay.
It's natural to dislike this as a consumer - after all, it's technically best for the consumer if everything is free - but it tends to go into something about "justifications" or how it may be even "unethical" for things to be subscriptions. In the end, it is what it is. When you're priced out of an app, it is not a failure of you or the developer. It's just a thing that happens.
I mean, sure. Ultimately developers can do whatever they want with their own work, and if enough people are willing to pay for the monthly subscription then more power to them, I suppose. And...
I mean, sure. Ultimately developers can do whatever they want with their own work, and if enough people are willing to pay for the monthly subscription then more power to them, I suppose. And everyone can and probably will interpret "justified", when it comes to pricing, differently; developer, customer, potential customer, casual observer, etc.
But IMO "justified" pricing essentially boils down to "it costs this much to maintain so I (as the developer) need to make at least that much, and I also want a fair amount of money in exchange for the time I already put into developing it, and intend to put into it in the future"... and I'm fine with that. However, I can't help but feel like the problem with most SAAS apps (that probably shouldn't be SAAS) is that it's more like the devs simply want to make as much money as possible, even if they don't actually have much maintenance costs to worry about, and don't actually intend to work that much on adding more features, fixing bugs, etc., which is why they have gone the SAAS route (since nickle & diming people is more effective at maximizing profit)... And that, to me, isn't justified.
The costs of making and maintaining the app is, in the end, only one half of the story, though. It's just the case that some things are more useful than others - that is to say, demand is equally...
The costs of making and maintaining the app is, in the end, only one half of the story, though. It's just the case that some things are more useful than others - that is to say, demand is equally a part of price. If I spend 200 hours to make a bubblewrap popping app, where the bubbles are stored in a server that has constant cost, that doesn't mean it is in any way more deserving of costing more money than, say, a calendar app without any continual costs written in 100 hours. The latter is, for most people, more useful, which would imply that it "should" be worth more, even if it required less effort, or has less costs.
Furthermore, how much something is useful is different to every person. For example, I use to be a Fantastical user. But, in the end, I have a work calendar for work events, and in my personal life I just don't have that many things that really go onto calendars. Google calendar works fine, even if it is worse.
As they made it a subscription, and a more expensive subscription, it priced me out. I no longer derived more value than I was spending, because I'm not a heavy calendar user.
On the other hand, someone who was doing gigs, or had their own small business, and had a lot of calendar related management to do, would find easily more value than they pay in Fantastical.
And to preempt some things, the fact that "price" is not correlative with effort is a common element in all economic models that have limited, and scarce, resources. Some things are just more useful than others, and those things get more resources to make those things.
You may be interested in listening to some of the recent episodes of Accidental Tech Podcast. One of the hosts, Casey Liss, is making a new app and trying to figure out a pricing model. The 3...
You may be interested in listening to some of the recent episodes of Accidental Tech Podcast. One of the hosts, Casey Liss, is making a new app and trying to figure out a pricing model. The 3 hosts ended up talking about the benefits and drawbacks of different pricing models for a good chunk of time.
Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, Tumblr, and Overcast, argues very hard that almost all apps should have some sort of ongoing revenue. I can’t say I fully agree with him, but he does support his point well. As he describes it, the modern development landscape has changed such that ongoing development is required. You can no longer make an app once and have it work indefinitely, like how you could with windows programs. Users want your app to support the latest OS features, have bug fixes, and generally have some ongoing improvement.
The ATP podcast has chapters in their episodes, so it is really easy to hop in and just listen to the section. In 537, the section is called “no subscriptions == not paying?”. The previous 3-4 episodes have some other discussion about this topic.
If it’s something that will make me change my mind about SAAS, then no, I am not interested! /jk Sigh, I guess I should give it a listen. It’s gonna take a lot to convince me, but I’ll give it a...
If it’s something that will make me change my mind about SAAS, then no, I am not interested! /jk
Sigh, I guess I should give it a listen. It’s gonna take a lot to convince me, but I’ll give it a fair chance. Thanks for the rec.
To be fair I’m not sure to what extent you could ever expect applications to work “forever.” Realistically stuff just broke after ~5 years (at most) without updates. Unless you’re running very old...
To be fair I’m not sure to what extent you could ever expect applications to work “forever.” Realistically stuff just broke after ~5 years (at most) without updates. Unless you’re running very old OSes without upgrading software would just age out. People would try to patch or fix abandonware themselves, but that’s not really tenable now either as it’s all gotten more complicated and reliant on external dependencies and network resources.
That’s basically the crux of Marco Arment’s argument in the podcast. Software cannot work forever, but if you sell something once, people expect it to work forever. The general populations don’t...
That’s basically the crux of Marco Arment’s argument in the podcast. Software cannot work forever, but if you sell something once, people expect it to work forever. The general populations don’t realize that modern development is an ongoing effort, not a one time thing. His conclusion is that development work will be ongoing no matter what, so financial income for the dev should be ongoing in some way, wether through ads, subscriptions, or some other method.
I haven't listened to the podcast, but as a developer the main reason why things break if left unattended seems to be because the upstream giants that smaller software relies on keep making...
I haven't listened to the podcast, but as a developer the main reason why things break if left unattended seems to be because the upstream giants that smaller software relies on keep making breaking changes to their APIs for no reason I can fathom.
A little dramatic perhaps, but I think there's really something to this. This is as much an expression of the felt experience of generational change as it is the death of web 2.0 / "the social...
A little dramatic perhaps, but I think there's really something to this. This is as much an expression of the felt experience of generational change as it is the death of web 2.0 / "the social web". The internet is really entering a new era - facebook has an older and aging userbase (at least in the US/west), twitter is permanently altered for the worse and has an uncertain future, instagram is mostly about influencers and selling you stuff, reddit is trying to make more money and killing the user experience in the process, etc etc. TikTok is seemingly the new social media platform of choice, but it's not for everyone and skews young, and there's a low chance that the US bans it in some fashion (not betting on it, but also not impossible).
The platforms of the future may end up being decentralized - Mastodon/ActivityPub/Fediverse, Bluesky, etc. IIRC tumblr is implementing ActivityPub? We'll see what ends up happening.
And then there's YouTube. Which seems to mostly be doing just fine.
YouTube made the amazing, absolutely most amazing decision that they could have ever made when they decided to share money with the people who contributed to the platform and align their interests...
YouTube made the amazing, absolutely most amazing decision that they could have ever made when they decided to share money with the people who contributed to the platform and align their interests with their users.
As a result, despite everything they've messed up with stuff like removing down votes from their platform, issues with advertisers pulling out because of different dramas with content in the videos, YouTube just a continues to endure all of the crises.
Reddit, and here to a degree this very website, have a venture capital mindset where they want to make money off of users but they don't really know how.
And you know what, I bet you this change across the internet has to do a lot with the fact that interest rates started going up in about the same time frame.
I wonder how close we are to platforms like Twitter and reddit being forced to charge users for access. I also wonder if that sort of requirement for payments leads to a more decentralized system of web forms where individual users contribute their own servers and bandwidth become more popular.
Yeah, Deim has been very critical of venture capitalism as a business model. I know the user donations help, but I hope the site isn't costing him too much! I'd feel bad if he were working extra...
Yeah, Deim has been very critical of venture capitalism as a business model. I know the user donations help, but I hope the site isn't costing him too much! I'd feel bad if he were working extra hours just so we could palaver here all day.
AFAIK the site hosting costs have been more than covered from donations since almost the very beginning. The code being exceptionally lightweight, and efficient helps with that. So there is likely...
AFAIK the site hosting costs have been more than covered from donations since almost the very beginning. The code being exceptionally lightweight, and efficient helps with that. So there is likely no risk of Tildes shutting down anytime soon due to lack of funds.
Can we all stop to appreciate how fucking fast this website loads? I hit F5 and half the time I think I didn't actually press it because nothing is loading.
The code being exceptionally lightweight
Can we all stop to appreciate how fucking fast this website loads? I hit F5 and half the time I think I didn't actually press it because nothing is loading.
This was the way of the old web. My first web-capable family computer was 100 Mhz, with 4 MB of RAM (later upgraded to 8), and a whopping 512 MB hard drive. And even on dialup at 22.4 kbps, half...
This was the way of the old web. My first web-capable family computer was 100 Mhz, with 4 MB of RAM (later upgraded to 8), and a whopping 512 MB hard drive.
And even on dialup at 22.4 kbps, half of the websites loaded as fast as Tildes because people just used text, css colors, and maybe an image that took 2 minutes to download but was then cached till you ran out of disk space (lol who would ever need more tham 512 MB? That's over 350 floppies!).
I seem to recall that too. I wasn't so much worried about a shutdown as us being a drain on our favourite admin. But if it's breaking even (or even generating a reserve), then all the better....
I seem to recall that too. I wasn't so much worried about a shutdown as us being a drain on our favourite admin. But if it's breaking even (or even generating a reserve), then all the better.
We'll have to see if this influx of users adjusts the calculus at all. I did notice a brief downtime earlier, but the site feels nice and speedy right now.
Again IIRC, Deimos said the current server could easily handle orders of magnitude more traffic without a problem. So the downtime was unlikely related to traffic. One thing I noticed is that...
Again IIRC, Deimos said the current server could easily handle orders of magnitude more traffic without a problem. So the downtime was unlikely related to traffic.
One thing I noticed is that around the same time Tildes went down, Beeper also had a big hiccup that their devs apologized for and said they couldn't find a cause for too. Could be coincidence, but there might have been a minor infrastructure issue that caused it.
It's very much my dream to find a niche I'm interested in, build a quality app, tend it like a garden and grow as my users grow, and earn a very excellent living for myself and my collaborators —...
It's very much my dream to find a niche I'm interested in, build a quality app, tend it like a garden and grow as my users grow, and earn a very excellent living for myself and my collaborators — but not succumb to the demands of endless growth to appease investors and kick off the cycle of enshittification.
That is fair. I don't mean to slander tildes as being out to make money here. What I mean to say is that I don't see the model being sustainable. You need money to run a platform and unless tildes...
That is fair. I don't mean to slander tildes as being out to make money here.
What I mean to say is that I don't see the model being sustainable.
You need money to run a platform and unless tildes never grows and it stays below the size that causes the developers to no longer be able to fund its continued existence, It's going to have to find a way to make money from its users eventually or else it's just going to collapse under its own weight.
Donations are cool, but they just don't happen often enough for it to work as a platform. You've got to make money somehow.
That's actually pretty close to the expectation at the moment. But I would expect that it won't be much more expensive to run the site even with 50x the current active user base. And plenty of...
unless tildes never grows
That's actually pretty close to the expectation at the moment. But I would expect that it won't be much more expensive to run the site even with 50x the current active user base. And plenty of users would be happy to chip in more if it was needed. Deimos has a full time job and does not expect Tildes to grow to support his personal expenses.
Basically - we've already hit cruising altitude. Set your expectations that what you see now is what the site will be in 10 years.
Who knows. The site can get big enough to require more than that. Bandwidth costs may go up, cloud hosting costs may go up. Legal liabilities become a possibility if anyone ever gets sued. You...
Who knows.
The site can get big enough to require more than that. Bandwidth costs may go up, cloud hosting costs may go up. Legal liabilities become a possibility if anyone ever gets sued. You need HR people to handle media.
Running a business is hard, and eventually your site gets big enough that those issues will start to occur.
Tildes has no employees (besides Deimos). Tildes has no investors. Tildes has no growth plan. Tildes has no costs besides hosting which is already covered. The site is complete. The community may...
Tildes has no employees (besides Deimos). Tildes has no investors. Tildes has no growth plan. Tildes has no costs besides hosting which is already covered. The site is complete. The community may grow a bit but take a look around and understand that what you see is what you get.
Is it “feature complete?” I thought Deimos had a lot of ideas he wanted to implement around a reputation system and community moderation that he hasn’t had time to get around to?
Is it “feature complete?” I thought Deimos had a lot of ideas he wanted to implement around a reputation system and community moderation that he hasn’t had time to get around to?
I mean, at a certain point, it seems the old fashioned 'slow growth, with solid moderation' outpaces any technical solution to the problem. Can we slay Eternal September? Tune in next week!
I mean, at a certain point, it seems the old fashioned 'slow growth, with solid moderation' outpaces any technical solution to the problem.
There are many suggested features on the Gitlab repo, so Tildes is not even close to be "feature complete". But it is certainly in a stable, comfortable position at the moment.
There are many suggested features on the Gitlab repo, so Tildes is not even close to be "feature complete". But it is certainly in a stable, comfortable position at the moment.
I think that's a poor distinction, because when this is a public facing service and you have people using it and your responsible for it and you're paying to keep it running and you're collecting...
I think that's a poor distinction, because when this is a public facing service and you have people using it and your responsible for it and you're paying to keep it running and you're collecting donations...
It's a business. You may have good motives, you may not be in it to make money, you might not have investors and you might not have all the crap that comes with most businesses, but you're still going to have to deal with all the complexity as things get bigger.
Welcome to Tildes! This place is a bit different from most other link aggregators. It turns out if you keep it text based, and are seeking community more than just another feed, there's no need...
Welcome to Tildes! This place is a bit different from most other link aggregators.
It turns out if you keep it text based, and are seeking community more than just another feed, there's no need for huge growth. Text is cheap...it would be shocking to me if Tildes was operating on more than 6 VMs, with 3 of those just for redundancy.
And if the site outgrows its ability to sustain itself? We take some archives and bid each other farewell. All good things come to an end and all of that.
You can have a website that has a stable community and doesn't grow insanely fast and is useable for years, like Something Awful. That system has worked for decades until the webmaster decides he...
You can have a website that has a stable community and doesn't grow insanely fast and is useable for years, like Something Awful. That system has worked for decades until the webmaster decides he wants the site to be his livelihood and legacy.
There is a Gargoyles fan page I used to go to in the late 90s. It has a rudimentary bulletin board/comment room. I check it every now and then to see if it’s still up. He hasn’t really changed a...
There is a Gargoyles fan page I used to go to in the late 90s. It has a rudimentary bulletin board/comment room. I check it every now and then to see if it’s still up. He hasn’t really changed a thing since then (although I assume there has been plenty of refactoring under the hood) and it’s kind of wonderful to see it still kicking around and still being usable.
I have no idea if the community is still the same people. I don’t even remember anyone who used to post.
It seems to be working for the signal foundation. To be fair they had quite a large founding donation and I'm not sure exactly how they're doing now. But they don't sell anything and they're quite...
It seems to be working for the signal foundation. To be fair they had quite a large founding donation and I'm not sure exactly how they're doing now. But they don't sell anything and they're quite scaled
You know, the whole Web 2.0 social media user-generated content thing was good while it lasted and we all have good memories of it, but it had some serious flaws and it's probably good in the long...
You know, the whole Web 2.0 social media user-generated content thing was good while it lasted and we all have good memories of it, but it had some serious flaws and it's probably good in the long run for it to have run its course and come to an end.
The Internet became a giant advertising machine. Everything is about monetizing the user experience. With that in mind, I remember when I started that used Apps (ICQ, MSN, IRQ) to speak with...
The Internet became a giant advertising machine. Everything is about monetizing the user experience.
With that in mind, I remember when I started that used Apps (ICQ, MSN, IRQ) to speak with friends, but the rest of the time was just regular browsing for learning, news and games.
This "social" focus (that is just advertising data collection in social guise) is just a big illusion.
I miss those times more with each passing day. It was always an adventure firing up the pc when I got home from work. The ratio of friendly, interesting people to rude narcissists was about 100 to...
I miss those times more with each passing day. It was always an adventure firing up the pc when I got home from work. The ratio of friendly, interesting people to rude narcissists was about 100 to 1. Now it feels reversed. The last time I made a real genuine friend online was 2015.
I think I've said this before, but: It's a walled garden run by people of dubious ethics and competence, and definitely overrun with younger people, but VRChat also has much of that wild west feel...
I think I've said this before, but:
It's a walled garden run by people of dubious ethics and competence, and definitely overrun with younger people, but VRChat also has much of that wild west feel too. All generations are actually represented. You will not like everyone in there, rude children and melodramatic young adults may have to be dodged here and there, but there are groups full of millennials hanging out and doing stuff . VR equipment is recommended, but not required. Start by looking into the Ancients of VRChat group (name is a joke).
I don’t think it’s necessarily hostile to us Millenials, it feels hostile in general. It feels competitive and aggressive in selling us things and telling us what we can or can’t do. When I...
I don’t think it’s necessarily hostile to us Millenials, it feels hostile in general. It feels competitive and aggressive in selling us things and telling us what we can or can’t do. When I started using the internet it was basically the wild west, everything was just full of surprises, niche corners, not a conglomerate of 5-6 commercial monopolies dominating everything, killing every other platform. It feels corporate now.
Back then it felt self made. We made the memes, the message boards, the small personal websites. Myspace was fun, because it was basically a collection of these small websites for people. Youtube was fun back then with its gif compilations and the first attempts at putting memes into video format. Nobody took anything too seriously, because the internet was basically dominated by teens and early twenty-somethings. Of course it was also a little more horrific, but to be honest, back then I found that thrilling even though I have a bit of a different opinion of it now.
Now the internet isn’t just crowded with our generation who shared a specific kind of humour and a similar outlook on life and similar interests, because most of us were nerds. Now there’s also older and younger generations we have to share the internet with. The older ones are on Facebook, the young ones on TikTok and us Millenials are scattered I think, not really feeling like ‚home‘ anywhere.
Sure, a lot of us are at a life stage now where they have kids and a career to take care of, like another user mentioned. But there‘s plenty of us who have neither, maybe just a dead end job, or just a career that isn’t too demanding. And to a lot of us the internet is a hobby we make room for. I‘m in my early 30s but I still love scrolling through message boards, finding niche little internet mysteries, discussing games and movies, because well… maybe I‘m still a kid at heart, or a nerd or both. But I feel like I can’t do that anywhere anymore. My humour is suddenly cringe, my interests boring and my opinions outdated.
Sorry for rambling, but I‘m just a bit passionate about the old internet culture, because it used to be my happy place and somewhere I could hide together with other awkward nerds from around the globe and we had our inside jokes and everything. I don’t need it like I used to, but sometimes it would be nice to be able to come back and visit. Hope my ramblings made sense.
I agree, but I think the effects are probably strongest for the generation that grew up in the more nascent era of digital culture when it wasn't. . .like this. It's a bit like the allegory of the...
I don’t think it’s necessarily hostile to us Millenials, it feels hostile in general.
I agree, but I think the effects are probably strongest for the generation that grew up in the more nascent era of digital culture when it wasn't. . .like this. It's a bit like the allegory of the cave where some of us were able to go out and see the sun but then we've been dragged down and shackled to the cave again forced only to see the shadows on the walls. Nobody believes us when we say there's a whole world out there!
It doesn't help that there are way fewer of us than we might perceive. I started using the internet in the late 90s, and a few years ago I did some numbers research and calculated less than 0.4%...
It doesn't help that there are way fewer of us than we might perceive. I started using the internet in the late 90s, and a few years ago I did some numbers research and calculated less than 0.4% of internet users had been using it for longer than I have. It's probably even worse now. My experience isn't representative of anything that matters to the 99.5%, it's just a curiosity, an outlier. What we have now is what the only global internet has ever been like. Unfortunately.
I’ve felt this my whole life and I’m 35. My dad was into computers as far back as I can remember and shared that with me from the beginning. My first laptop was a hand me down Toshiba with a...
I’ve felt this my whole life and I’m 35. My dad was into computers as far back as I can remember and shared that with me from the beginning. My first laptop was a hand me down Toshiba with a floppy drive that ran MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Our first family desktop computer was an IBM Aptiva running Windows 95. I remember upgrading across 3 or 4 other machines through 98, 2000, NT, ME, XP, 7, and 10. I remember my dad’s Palm Pilot and his HP 100-LX.
I knew there weren’t many of my generation that started as early as I did. But less than 1%… that explains some things.
I feel this way too. Tildes is scratching that itch for me sans the awkward meme culture we all secretly embraced while also looking down on it (looking at you nyan-cat esque humor). For the most...
I‘m just a bit passionate about the old internet culture, because it used to be my happy place and somewhere I could hide together with other awkward nerds from around the globe and we had our inside jokes and everything.
I feel this way too. Tildes is scratching that itch for me sans the awkward meme culture we all secretly embraced while also looking down on it (looking at you nyan-cat esque humor). For the most part this space feels very reminiscent of late 2000s reddit, or at least how I used reddit back then.
I also think this phenomenon is all too terribly common across all spaces. Change is inevitable and whether its the platform or us that's changed, its hard not to look back and feel nostalgic.
I've been thinking about this article the past few days. People sort of make things for those that came after them. The spaces millennials grew up on were made and refined by boomers and gen X...
I've been thinking about this article the past few days.
People sort of make things for those that came after them. The spaces millennials grew up on were made and refined by boomers and gen X (lots of capable folks across two generations in a rapid tech boom) the systems that emerged with millenials were adopted by gen Z, etc. The previous models died and/or faded away, and the new models are held by the new guard, leaving us as the admins of our domain, rather than the subjects of it, and few of us are actually capable or interested in administration.
I feel my opinion may be a bit fringe because I actuvely resist the urges of social media and am a late adopter of platforms, generally, and am generally inactive except for keeping in contact with friends/loved ones I talk to daily.
Yeah yeah social media….but You know what I miss? Music blogs. As A millennial age DJ who came up with vinyl and actual mixtapes, those first years of serato, mashups and music blogs were amazing...
Yeah yeah social media….but You know what I miss? Music blogs.
As A millennial age DJ who came up with vinyl and actual mixtapes, those first years of serato, mashups and music blogs were amazing hotbeds of wild creativity and access to music unseen before.
Now it’s just some rich kid on TikTok who gets shoved down our throats by every major media player and we’re right back to the 50s payola era.
Bring back dodgy blogger sites with hundreds of dead mediafire links you cowards!
While scrolling through a lengthy photo dump of a friend’s recent paddleboarding excursion in Cornwall, I was hit by a wave of existentialism. The toxic dopamine spikes from social media that once jolted my soul were now gone. In its place was a heavy shame. “This place used to be sexy and fun,” I thought, while opening, closing, then reopening the Instagram app. “How pathetic it is to be a millennial social media addict.”
Given the definition of a “millennial” encompasses both a 28-year-old Gigi Hadid and a 42-year-old Pitbull, it would be reckless of me to generalise the status of an entire generation. Yet due to fastidious research (scrolling until my eyes bleed) and my age group’s alleged predisposition to make literally every passing thought into a narcissistic melodramatic state of the nation essay, I can officially declare that millennials are done. Jettisoned. We have no place online in 2023.
Am middle of GenX, not a millennial, but this rings true for me too. I am a “digital native”, the only difference is that my first online experiences were BBSes and later services like Compuserve...
Am middle of GenX, not a millennial, but this rings true for me too. I am a “digital native”, the only difference is that my first online experiences were BBSes and later services like Compuserve and Genie, rather than the internet. I’ve had an email address and been on the internet since my first year of college in 1988.
Things have changed. Walled gardens, and fewer of them, and a general sense that corporations have taken everything over. Places like Tildes used to be most of the internet. Now you hardly hear about them. But that was always true - most people didn’t know about most things on the internet. Which now feels like what we should be striving for. Reddit was a pretty good compromise for a while, but a return to random people setting up random janky websites as the normal way to interact with the internet would be a welcome change.
I also agree the author is little dramatic, getting into the uncool midlife crisis and not fitting in new social media for younger crowd. It always has been younger demographic has the free time...
I also agree the author is little dramatic, getting into the uncool midlife crisis and not fitting in new social media for younger crowd. It always has been younger demographic has the free time to test and put alive social media, as Facebook was when it was available to college students, image blogs in Tumblr and share pictures on Instagram.
I have seen many millennials posting videos on TikTok, the author doesn't fit in.
Most millenials I know (which is... most people I know) are engaged in some form of social media, usually whatever the new hotness is. I sort of think the author may feel a bit alienated, possibly...
Most millenials I know (which is... most people I know) are engaged in some form of social media, usually whatever the new hotness is. I sort of think the author may feel a bit alienated, possibly as that sort of midlife crisis you're referring to.
I do feel like he's right in that there isn't exactly a "Millenial" space, because we think of Facebook as being taken over by our parents and TikTok being for current kids, but the reality is that everybody's basically everywhere, just with different representation across platforms.
I'm not even a millennial, but this is mostly the problem I've been having with the internet. Nothing feels genuine or "real" and what's posted isn't even unreal in a fun or exciting way. It feels as if everyone decided they needed a face that wasn't their own, then decided to put on a equally bland, boring face. Who are my peers even trying to masquerade as at this point??? What's the point of playing pretend with everyone if you aren't having fun or enjoying yourself?
I really feel this on YouTube and Reddit. On YouTube, so many videos are made the same way in order to get picked up by the algorithm. Clickbait titles, thumbnails with the same "shocked" face, videos that should be 2 minutes but are padded with nonsense just so they get monetized. And so many of the comments on Reddit are just people making the same jokes since they get upvotes. I get having inside jokes and feeling a part of the community, but to your point, it feels at times like everyone is playing the same 10 characters in a show that should have ended 3 seasons ago.
You're on point on reddit there. The one liners, there was a time that i enjoyed that. Then it became repetitive then i noticed it was bots who posted them, copying from more upvoted previous comments on the same reposted post but in a slightly different subreddit.
The genuineness of the comments there are gone. I do not feel the sense of community anymore. It's just repost and karma whoring. For what? To sell the account to marketers and advertisers and political entities with agendas.
I think there's still some genuine conversation to be had on Reddit, but it is niche. The main subs seem to all be advertisements disguised as user generated content.
Definitely lacks that early internet 'magic'. I feel that a little here on Tildes. Maybe it's just nostalgia talking. Or we are that far off from where we started.
I'd posit that Tildes will remain a safe haven as long as there is no money to be made by interacting in the manner as described by the quote. Even if Tildes would open up the floodgates to freely create accounts today, the obscurity of the site and small userbase would barely be worth the opportunity cost of botting comments as opposed to doing so on a bigger site like Reddit, let alone individual users trying to monetize their 'influencer account on Tildes'.
I tink it goes the other way too - as things die back, they stop being valuable targets for that machine. Flickr is a good example - its heyday was many years ago but it's still around and there's not much spam or manipulation because it's seen as not worth bothering with, though for legitimate users there's still some good interaction.
Honestly even the users on Reddit have started to feel like bots because of the random one liner phrases that get reposted on every post. AnarchyChess has really spread to everything, I see the whole “holy hell” and “google en passant” replies all over Reddit now.
I understand joke replies and “in” jokes, especially on dedicated subs for “in” jokes and the like. It’s really started spilling out into other communities in the last 6-12 months. (At least from what I’ve noticed)
I think Reddit has always been like that with inside jokes leaking out of (popular) subreddits. I do think a lot of it is bots karma farming, however, and that is undoubtedly getting worse over time.
I completely understand (and have) inside jokes with friends and family. I even occasionally will join in on them on Reddit. I think you are right though, karma farming is a big thing. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I heard about people farming karma on their accounts to then sell to advertisers for astroturfing purposes.
I know this is an ancient comment, but I want to chime in and say the astroturfing has been a thing for a long time. /r/Hailcorporate was pretty popular a good number of years ago, and called out shills masquerading as normal users. People would call an astroturfing OP out on it in the comments, but it tended to get buried. There were ad accounts everywhere, they were just more covert tbh.
I felt this very strongly when wikileaks came out with a sub and there was a great deal of discussion and momentum about the unfairness of Julian Assange's arrest. There was genuine indignation that definitely felt like it could easily become a MOVEMENT, not just a bunch of upset people pounding their keyboards.
That would never happen on the reddit of today. Even r/wikileaks has few comments and the sense of community around someone like Assange seems to have almost entirely dissipated. The political forums are far too controversial to build any kind of consensus on anything.
Another thought: does anyone there now even remember influential figures like Aaron Swartz?
Gosh, I hope people remember Aaron Swartz. There’s a great little documentary on him called “The Internet’s Own Boy”.
Yes, I feel the same about this. Once you incentivize quantity over quality (for that tasty ad revenue) everything becomes watered down and bland. Once you figure out what makes money (or gets attention) you don't have to try to show anything new, exciting, or different to your audience. It starts to be a race to become a performer, not to share with others.
It feels a bit like the natural end state of all social media is to devolve into a bland, soulless corporate mouthpiece and/or to become a ghost town.
Yeah there’s a context collapse with social media. I used to maintain a “public facing” account that I wouldn’t mind employers seeing and then the stuff that my friends saw. But things revolving around having a social graph made it so people started crossing the streams. So now instead of having specific groups that you show a specific face to everything collapses on one performative public persona.
This context collapse is very frustrating to me. I think that it's also a result of 'the internet' as a whole becoming something mainstream. Once it became socially acceptable to talk about the internet with people in public, it also sort of became expected that you have social media accounts that you can add people on as well. There used to be a clear split between 'online' and 'irl,' but I think that's gone now.
It honestly worries me. For example, I have to consider whether or not I'll be rejected from jobs in the future because they find it suspicious that I don't have personal social media for them to do a background check on.
At a certain point in my 30s, I stopped wearing suits to job interviews (disclaimer have never been laid off).
If they won't hire me cause I wasn't "professional enough," then I probably wouldn't enjoy working there anyway and I can save myself a lot of time.
The people demanding the social media charade can pound sand. I have other Xennial friends that get very upset at people not taking Linkedin seriously, and I just laugh.
I'd like to say that you're better off not getting a job with a company that insists on creeping your social media presence, but of course there's a heavy dose of idealism in that statement.
Honestly I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that millennials are just turning 30. What does turning 30 mean? You're getting married and you're having kids.
And once you have kids in a career? You're done .
You're not coming home to spend time on the internet anymore, you're coming home and you're spending time with your family. Clean the house, take care of the kids, relax with television or video games or whatever else.
And once your age group is doing that, they're going to disappear. Welcome friends, you're the uncool parents now.
Personally, I saw a huge uptick in Facebook use among people in my age bracket when they started having kids; I would venture that it compensated for the sudden lack of energy and an external social life. Those people are largely gone from social media now, but it didn't coincide with them having kids - there was a good 5+ years between when my more... traditionally-minded peers started having kids, and when I really took note of people being absent online.
That's to say nothing of our parent's generation, who love social media. They're getting as much — if not more — information from it as we are. Or rather, we used to. And I think that's the crux of it.
Millenials aren't leaving the internet, we're leaving social media. We aren't disappearing, we're simply disappearing from mainstream spaces. It was in our tenure that we saw the internet turn into the loud, flashy, populist, instant-gratification machine that it is today, and most of us simply don't like it.
Older millennials grew up with the mainstream Internet in its infancy: we witnessed the birth of the search engine and the rise of social media. When we were teenagers, doing something as innocuous as watching a movie trailer was a multi-hour endeavour — those 100MB Quicktime videos took hours to download over 56k. Nothing about our internet was fast or easy (relatively speaking — I can hear the BBS crew gnashing their teeth already). Finding information took work.
The problem is that in the internet becoming more instantly-gratifying, it became more accessible, and that's when our parents' generation finally took to it. My mother, who went out and bought a typewriter because our first computer was "too hard", spends more time on Facebook in a day than I have in the last five years. Online misinformation is such a problem for our parents' generation because they never had to search for information online, and consequently, never learned to filter information online. Everything they see is taken as God's own truth — the internet is the Information Superhighway, and this is on the internet, so it must be true.
Constantly filtering bad content and misinformation is exhausting, and because, as you say, we now have kids and jobs and homes and bills, there's only so much time and energy we can devote to that, and we want to spend it on something more rewarding. So we just walk away and gravitate to other communities like Reddit. Not that that doesn't have its own problems, but at least we can open the homepage without having to hear about Aunt Deborah's latest MLM. We don't have to grit our teeth and silently let Uncle Bob continue his latest tirade because we're worried about decorum at the next Christmas dinner — at least Reddit's anonymous and we can deal with those people freely without having to explain to Mom why we keep blocking our relatives on Facebook.
Gen Z don't have this problem - the instant gratification machine is all they've ever known. They aren't getting frustrated with the enshittification of the mainstream internet because they've never seen it any other way.
To this day, I think the most genuine thing I could put on my resume is "learned to use a search engine like a librarian." My elementary/middle school education was still book-focused, the internet was not considered a reliable reference (hah! full circle!). It was used as a way to filter and find other more-reliable sources.
And this has paid dividends in terms of being able to pick up anything that doesn't require 4 years of intensive deep learning.
My rapid rise in my early career could be at least 80% attributed to "I know how to use a search engine and filter out the garbage."
To respond to your very first comment, I wouldn't say my point is contradicted by the number of millennial parents that are on Facebook and so on, because those people are old enough that their kids have moved out now. They have time again.
That's fair, I'll rephrase.
I remember the days of being a kid and using Napster / Kazaa / Limewire and downloading music illegally (well, it wasn't illegal at the time, but I digress). Sharing those tracks on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger for you youngin's here) or MSN Messenger and playing Counter-Strike. That was the glory days of the internet and was just at the height of the whole "broadband" switch all of us were making at the time. Exploring the internet back then was like a gateway into America's wild-west...it was uncharted territory and now those territories have become civilised. It's not the same place we grew up with. It's evolved and with it the ease of use and instant gratification.
It's not all bad nowadays, but the allure of just searching the internet and finding things out isn't as attractive as it used to be. Places liked reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram makes things easier to peruse and get satisfied on the content streams.
YouTube made it even easier to get our entertainment fix too. It's not the same, but I don't feel like that's a bad thing either.
You make a great point... so much of the popular media hook of "x is like x for x generation" is essentially just pasting labels on developmental stages that predate mass media.
Not that some things don't change (millenials not skewing conservative as they age so far!) but mostly it's just stages of life.
The whole thing about people getting more conservative as they age has always been a myth. To some extent older generations start looking more conservative next to younger generations because views that were extreme when they were young became mainstream as they aged, but that's not entirely a one way street (especially not on a long enough time scale), and it doesn't apply equally to everything. If you transported your average 1930s union factory worker to the modern day, he'd simultaneously look far right socially and off the scale far left economically because the Overton window has shifted in opposite directions between social and economic issues since then.
More importantly, though, the whole thing is something mostly brought up by conservative boomers, and the truth is they were conservative when they were young, too. They called the hippies a counterculture for a reason, and most young boomers were what the hippies would have called squares. The hippies didn't move right, there just never really were that many to begin with. For most people, political views are pretty well fixed by your 20s.
The general consensus I’ve read is that people’s political views are generally solidified in their 20s, based on the period of time you grew up in. Millennials/Zoomers grew up in an era of instability and worse economic prospects, but also of strides in gay rights and racial justice, so it’s no surprise they are voting for liberal/left-wing candidates.
To add to your point on hippies, many of the original hippies stayed hippies. There are still communes out there with 60/70/80-year old folks, still doing what they’ve done since 1969.
It seems to track with asset accumulation (specifically homeownership) more than anything else.
Millennials are just turning 40 by the way. That doesn't detract from your main point, but we have been old for a while now!
The oldest ones for sure, but the younger ones who make up the bulk (or at least the largest fraction) of them are weighed young, in the early 30s now.
I’m only 34, do not call me old, haha. My bones and joints do enough speaking for me!
The article is a bit dramatic, but I can understand the vibe.
I get a similar feeling with online games. And I got called old man for a few times already - but back in my day - which is only around 10-15 years ago, I opened up Counterstrike and joined my favorite server. Got rekt, or won the rounds and left. You get to know the people on it, the admins too. It was a small community in itself, sometimes they even had a forum or IRC. Also all the amazing fun server mods. For more interesting rounds we had the ESL.
Now everything is so competitive and serious, even the short unranked matches. The match making system brings so much problems with it (afk players you cant kick out, toxic players you have to win a match with to climb up the rank (who wants to stray bronze?)), waiting and waiting for a new game, locked in for 45-60 minutes. It feels like it is net - worse than just having a server browser.
The websites: a while ago, you could be assured that some bored person wrote a website you could just use for minimal things. I certainly wrote a few. For example, a stupid food generator. Basically just a random food generator if you don't know what you want to eat for the day. A month ago I googled for one and found 5 pages of companies that sell you a monthly membership just for that feature. Of course, AI supported.
It's less "Hey peeps, look what I have built while experimenting" and more "Buy my subscription, it's just 3.99$ bro"
Everything seems so milked to the last drop, overly optimized, controlled, overly tracked and ad infected.
I kind of miss the growing, broken phase of the internet. Even the insults had more substance than today. :D
Matchmaking ruined the fun in games. Yes, you no longer had to wade through a bunch of empty servers.
But now everyone was a stranger. Look no farther than World of Warcraft. All those horrible inconvieniences of 1.0 (walking to dungeons, having to spam chats to find a 4th/5th) helped foster social interaction...you got to know people on your server.
40 man raids were amazing. I was a warlock, and we had our own little side channel going with the other 5 locks where we shot the breeze in between bossfights. There was the rest of my party in the raid, we'd have our own chat going too.
They rolled out matchmaking and dungeonfinders....and a bit of that died. Raids got smaller and more manageable...but now with less downtime.
Everything chased the game aspects, and not the social ones. And thats part of why vanilla private servers are still going strong (well that and I've paid well over $500 to Blizz for WoW, I'll keep playing my OG copy for free thanks).
I really loved my small pop server on WoW when I played (Tarenis). After matchmaking became available nobody really talked on the server forum. Chat became a ghost town unless they were selling something or a gold farmer. And then cross server matchmaking came and it was over. You don’t even really need to be in a guild to play WoW. The sense of community is just gone. I haven’t played since Wrath. I guess Classic brought some of that back, but I haven’t been playing so I don’t know.
I have been complaining about matchmaking since Halo 2.
Pretty much every popular multiplayer game has stupid problems with the way multiplayer is handled. I remember trying to play some COD game or another and I found myself so incredibly frustrated with the mode there were player rankings but no segregation between rankings so newbies were not only being put in matches with elite players, but those elite players also had access to better weapons than what was available to those newbies. Combine that with the fact that nobody wanted to play any of the cooperative modes cooperatively was also very anti-fun because you could have been an elite player yourself but still be stuck with a losing team because everyone is doing their own thing.
Absolutely everything being turned into SAAS is one of the worst things to happen in recent years. Like, I get that there are ongoing development costs, but is a basic recipe manager, todo list, or workout tracker all really worth paying $5/mo for, which I have to keep paying for as long as I keep using the app? Hell no! And the worst part is that the SAAS app model is clearly successful since nearly every app is SAAS now, and so it's getting harder and harder to find pay-once, full featured apps anymore. :(
The problem is users really like freemium. If it was easy to get people to pay a one time fee for a todo app then that model would be popular among solo developers.
I think its more users have been conditioned to accept monthly fees over one-off purchases.
You Need A Budget used to be a full-fledged, one-off purchase for like $45. A solid piece of personal budgetting software.
Now it's a $15/month subscription. It's outrageous for a piece of sotware targetted at helping people get their finances in order.
Oh man, I remember the days of YNAB desktop just before they went hard into subscription. YNAB 4 I think? Was a great app. But when they started going SAAS I dumped it and just bought one of those budget journals. Which works great.
What kind of budget journals? Like a physical one? I’ve been looking for alternatives to YNAB.
Yep. It's a physical journal. It's pretty feature rich. Maybe a little too much sometimes.
Like, I don't use the stickers or the pie charts but I like the calendar and expense tracking.
It's this one specifically(amazon link) https://a.co/d/2ILvcrw
You can still do freemium with pay-once (to unlock the full features) apps... it's called shareware. But everything becoming freemium + SAAS really sucks, and in most cases can't really be justified, IMO.
Yes, some stuff is actually well suited to becoming SAAS, especially software that would otherwise be exceedingly expensive to buy, or that really does have ongoing costs for the devs... but not every damn thing needs to be SAAS, and I hate that so many devs (esp mobile app devs) are turning everything they make into SAAS!
RAHH, get off my lawn!!! /rant :P
I mean, in the end, prices aren't things that are to be "justified". If Bob makes a basic notepad app, and wants to charge $5/month, who should be able to tell him no? It's his problem when, if his pricing is too expensive, no one subscribes and he has no money. The creator has their right to price whatever they want, and the buyers have the right to tell them to pound sand.
Basically, it's just that app prices have increased, by a lot. That seems more of a market correction. In the beginning, app developers had no business acumen and were propelled by an exponentially growing market. But smartphone sales hit the top part of the S curve eventually, and people realized how little money they're making, and how much people were actually willing to pay.
It's natural to dislike this as a consumer - after all, it's technically best for the consumer if everything is free - but it tends to go into something about "justifications" or how it may be even "unethical" for things to be subscriptions. In the end, it is what it is. When you're priced out of an app, it is not a failure of you or the developer. It's just a thing that happens.
I mean, sure. Ultimately developers can do whatever they want with their own work, and if enough people are willing to pay for the monthly subscription then more power to them, I suppose. And everyone can and probably will interpret "justified", when it comes to pricing, differently; developer, customer, potential customer, casual observer, etc.
But IMO "justified" pricing essentially boils down to "it costs this much to maintain so I (as the developer) need to make at least that much, and I also want a fair amount of money in exchange for the time I already put into developing it, and intend to put into it in the future"... and I'm fine with that. However, I can't help but feel like the problem with most SAAS apps (that probably shouldn't be SAAS) is that it's more like the devs simply want to make as much money as possible, even if they don't actually have much maintenance costs to worry about, and don't actually intend to work that much on adding more features, fixing bugs, etc., which is why they have gone the SAAS route (since nickle & diming people is more effective at maximizing profit)... And that, to me, isn't justified.
The costs of making and maintaining the app is, in the end, only one half of the story, though. It's just the case that some things are more useful than others - that is to say, demand is equally a part of price. If I spend 200 hours to make a bubblewrap popping app, where the bubbles are stored in a server that has constant cost, that doesn't mean it is in any way more deserving of costing more money than, say, a calendar app without any continual costs written in 100 hours. The latter is, for most people, more useful, which would imply that it "should" be worth more, even if it required less effort, or has less costs.
Furthermore, how much something is useful is different to every person. For example, I use to be a Fantastical user. But, in the end, I have a work calendar for work events, and in my personal life I just don't have that many things that really go onto calendars. Google calendar works fine, even if it is worse.
As they made it a subscription, and a more expensive subscription, it priced me out. I no longer derived more value than I was spending, because I'm not a heavy calendar user.
On the other hand, someone who was doing gigs, or had their own small business, and had a lot of calendar related management to do, would find easily more value than they pay in Fantastical.
And to preempt some things, the fact that "price" is not correlative with effort is a common element in all economic models that have limited, and scarce, resources. Some things are just more useful than others, and those things get more resources to make those things.
Yeah, I get it. You make a lot of good points. But damnit, stop making so many about why SAAS isn't bad. I want to vent! :P
You may be interested in listening to some of the recent episodes of Accidental Tech Podcast. One of the hosts, Casey Liss, is making a new app and trying to figure out a pricing model. The 3 hosts ended up talking about the benefits and drawbacks of different pricing models for a good chunk of time.
Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, Tumblr, and Overcast, argues very hard that almost all apps should have some sort of ongoing revenue. I can’t say I fully agree with him, but he does support his point well. As he describes it, the modern development landscape has changed such that ongoing development is required. You can no longer make an app once and have it work indefinitely, like how you could with windows programs. Users want your app to support the latest OS features, have bug fixes, and generally have some ongoing improvement.
The ATP podcast has chapters in their episodes, so it is really easy to hop in and just listen to the section. In 537, the section is called “no subscriptions == not paying?”. The previous 3-4 episodes have some other discussion about this topic.
If it’s something that will make me change my mind about SAAS, then no, I am not interested! /jk
Sigh, I guess I should give it a listen. It’s gonna take a lot to convince me, but I’ll give it a fair chance. Thanks for the rec.
To be fair I’m not sure to what extent you could ever expect applications to work “forever.” Realistically stuff just broke after ~5 years (at most) without updates. Unless you’re running very old OSes without upgrading software would just age out. People would try to patch or fix abandonware themselves, but that’s not really tenable now either as it’s all gotten more complicated and reliant on external dependencies and network resources.
That’s basically the crux of Marco Arment’s argument in the podcast. Software cannot work forever, but if you sell something once, people expect it to work forever. The general populations don’t realize that modern development is an ongoing effort, not a one time thing. His conclusion is that development work will be ongoing no matter what, so financial income for the dev should be ongoing in some way, wether through ads, subscriptions, or some other method.
I haven't listened to the podcast, but as a developer the main reason why things break if left unattended seems to be because the upstream giants that smaller software relies on keep making breaking changes to their APIs for no reason I can fathom.
A little dramatic perhaps, but I think there's really something to this. This is as much an expression of the felt experience of generational change as it is the death of web 2.0 / "the social web". The internet is really entering a new era - facebook has an older and aging userbase (at least in the US/west), twitter is permanently altered for the worse and has an uncertain future, instagram is mostly about influencers and selling you stuff, reddit is trying to make more money and killing the user experience in the process, etc etc. TikTok is seemingly the new social media platform of choice, but it's not for everyone and skews young, and there's a low chance that the US bans it in some fashion (not betting on it, but also not impossible).
The platforms of the future may end up being decentralized - Mastodon/ActivityPub/Fediverse, Bluesky, etc. IIRC tumblr is implementing ActivityPub? We'll see what ends up happening.
And then there's YouTube. Which seems to mostly be doing just fine.
YouTube made the amazing, absolutely most amazing decision that they could have ever made when they decided to share money with the people who contributed to the platform and align their interests with their users.
As a result, despite everything they've messed up with stuff like removing down votes from their platform, issues with advertisers pulling out because of different dramas with content in the videos, YouTube just a continues to endure all of the crises.
Reddit,
and here to a degree this very website, have a venture capital mindset where they want to make money off of users but they don't really know how.And you know what, I bet you this change across the internet has to do a lot with the fact that interest rates started going up in about the same time frame.
I wonder how close we are to platforms like Twitter and reddit being forced to charge users for access. I also wonder if that sort of requirement for payments leads to a more decentralized system of web forms where individual users contribute their own servers and bandwidth become more popular.
Tildes is a non-profit, will not be taking on any investors, not relying on advertising, and relies solely on donations. So not really. ;)
Um, no. This site is nothing like that. Tildes is built with the expectation of maybe breaking even with the help of donations.
Yeah, Deim has been very critical of venture capitalism as a business model. I know the user donations help, but I hope the site isn't costing him too much! I'd feel bad if he were working extra hours just so we could palaver here all day.
AFAIK the site hosting costs have been more than covered from donations since almost the very beginning. The code being exceptionally lightweight, and efficient helps with that. So there is likely no risk of Tildes shutting down anytime soon due to lack of funds.
Can we all stop to appreciate how fucking fast this website loads? I hit F5 and half the time I think I didn't actually press it because nothing is loading.
This was the way of the old web. My first web-capable family computer was 100 Mhz, with 4 MB of RAM (later upgraded to 8), and a whopping 512 MB hard drive.
And even on dialup at 22.4 kbps, half of the websites loaded as fast as Tildes because people just used text, css colors, and maybe an image that took 2 minutes to download but was then cached till you ran out of disk space (lol who would ever need more tham 512 MB? That's over 350 floppies!).
It's actually eye-opening. Shows just how bloated nearly every other website on the internet really is.
I seem to recall that too. I wasn't so much worried about a shutdown as us being a drain on our favourite admin. But if it's breaking even (or even generating a reserve), then all the better.
We'll have to see if this influx of users adjusts the calculus at all. I did notice a brief downtime earlier, but the site feels nice and speedy right now.
Again IIRC, Deimos said the current server could easily handle orders of magnitude more traffic without a problem. So the downtime was unlikely related to traffic.
One thing I noticed is that around the same time Tildes went down, Beeper also had a big hiccup that their devs apologized for and said they couldn't find a cause for too. Could be coincidence, but there might have been a minor infrastructure issue that caused it.
It's very much my dream to find a niche I'm interested in, build a quality app, tend it like a garden and grow as my users grow, and earn a very excellent living for myself and my collaborators — but not succumb to the demands of endless growth to appease investors and kick off the cycle of enshittification.
That is fair. I don't mean to slander tildes as being out to make money here.
What I mean to say is that I don't see the model being sustainable.
You need money to run a platform and unless tildes never grows and it stays below the size that causes the developers to no longer be able to fund its continued existence, It's going to have to find a way to make money from its users eventually or else it's just going to collapse under its own weight.
Donations are cool, but they just don't happen often enough for it to work as a platform. You've got to make money somehow.
That's actually pretty close to the expectation at the moment. But I would expect that it won't be much more expensive to run the site even with 50x the current active user base. And plenty of users would be happy to chip in more if it was needed. Deimos has a full time job and does not expect Tildes to grow to support his personal expenses.
Basically - we've already hit cruising altitude. Set your expectations that what you see now is what the site will be in 10 years.
Tildes is a non-profit.
Servers, bandwidth, costs money. It's possible tildes gets away with it on donations alone, but I'm very skeptical that will last forever that way.
A site like Tildes can easily be covered by $50-100/month. What do you think is going to happen to cause that price to go up?
Who knows.
The site can get big enough to require more than that. Bandwidth costs may go up, cloud hosting costs may go up. Legal liabilities become a possibility if anyone ever gets sued. You need HR people to handle media.
Running a business is hard, and eventually your site gets big enough that those issues will start to occur.
Tildes has no employees (besides Deimos). Tildes has no investors. Tildes has no growth plan. Tildes has no costs besides hosting which is already covered. The site is complete. The community may grow a bit but take a look around and understand that what you see is what you get.
Is it “feature complete?” I thought Deimos had a lot of ideas he wanted to implement around a reputation system and community moderation that he hasn’t had time to get around to?
I mean, at a certain point, it seems the old fashioned 'slow growth, with solid moderation' outpaces any technical solution to the problem.
Can we slay Eternal September? Tune in next week!
There are many suggested features on the Gitlab repo, so Tildes is not even close to be "feature complete". But it is certainly in a stable, comfortable position at the moment.
Tildes is not a business :P
I think that's a poor distinction, because when this is a public facing service and you have people using it and your responsible for it and you're paying to keep it running and you're collecting donations...
It's a business. You may have good motives, you may not be in it to make money, you might not have investors and you might not have all the crap that comes with most businesses, but you're still going to have to deal with all the complexity as things get bigger.
Welcome to Tildes! This place is a bit different from most other link aggregators.
It turns out if you keep it text based, and are seeking community more than just another feed, there's no need for huge growth. Text is cheap...it would be shocking to me if Tildes was operating on more than 6 VMs, with 3 of those just for redundancy.
And if the site outgrows its ability to sustain itself? We take some archives and bid each other farewell. All good things come to an end and all of that.
Sure, many things are the same. But actual business are expected to turn a profit and grow continuously. So there are many differences as well.
You can have a website that has a stable community and doesn't grow insanely fast and is useable for years, like Something Awful. That system has worked for decades until the webmaster decides he wants the site to be his livelihood and legacy.
There is a Gargoyles fan page I used to go to in the late 90s. It has a rudimentary bulletin board/comment room. I check it every now and then to see if it’s still up. He hasn’t really changed a thing since then (although I assume there has been plenty of refactoring under the hood) and it’s kind of wonderful to see it still kicking around and still being usable.
I have no idea if the community is still the same people. I don’t even remember anyone who used to post.
It seems to be working for the signal foundation. To be fair they had quite a large founding donation and I'm not sure exactly how they're doing now. But they don't sell anything and they're quite scaled
You know, the whole Web 2.0 social media user-generated content thing was good while it lasted and we all have good memories of it, but it had some serious flaws and it's probably good in the long run for it to have run its course and come to an end.
The Internet became a giant advertising machine. Everything is about monetizing the user experience.
With that in mind, I remember when I started that used Apps (ICQ, MSN, IRQ) to speak with friends, but the rest of the time was just regular browsing for learning, news and games.
This "social" focus (that is just advertising data collection in social guise) is just a big illusion.
I miss those times more with each passing day. It was always an adventure firing up the pc when I got home from work. The ratio of friendly, interesting people to rude narcissists was about 100 to 1. Now it feels reversed. The last time I made a real genuine friend online was 2015.
Discord can be really great like that. It reminds me of the old IRC in a good way.
I think I've said this before, but:
It's a walled garden run by people of dubious ethics and competence, and definitely overrun with younger people, but VRChat also has much of that wild west feel too. All generations are actually represented. You will not like everyone in there, rude children and melodramatic young adults may have to be dodged here and there, but there are groups full of millennials hanging out and doing stuff . VR equipment is recommended, but not required. Start by looking into the Ancients of VRChat group (name is a joke).
I don’t think it’s necessarily hostile to us Millenials, it feels hostile in general. It feels competitive and aggressive in selling us things and telling us what we can or can’t do. When I started using the internet it was basically the wild west, everything was just full of surprises, niche corners, not a conglomerate of 5-6 commercial monopolies dominating everything, killing every other platform. It feels corporate now.
Back then it felt self made. We made the memes, the message boards, the small personal websites. Myspace was fun, because it was basically a collection of these small websites for people. Youtube was fun back then with its gif compilations and the first attempts at putting memes into video format. Nobody took anything too seriously, because the internet was basically dominated by teens and early twenty-somethings. Of course it was also a little more horrific, but to be honest, back then I found that thrilling even though I have a bit of a different opinion of it now.
Now the internet isn’t just crowded with our generation who shared a specific kind of humour and a similar outlook on life and similar interests, because most of us were nerds. Now there’s also older and younger generations we have to share the internet with. The older ones are on Facebook, the young ones on TikTok and us Millenials are scattered I think, not really feeling like ‚home‘ anywhere.
Sure, a lot of us are at a life stage now where they have kids and a career to take care of, like another user mentioned. But there‘s plenty of us who have neither, maybe just a dead end job, or just a career that isn’t too demanding. And to a lot of us the internet is a hobby we make room for. I‘m in my early 30s but I still love scrolling through message boards, finding niche little internet mysteries, discussing games and movies, because well… maybe I‘m still a kid at heart, or a nerd or both. But I feel like I can’t do that anywhere anymore. My humour is suddenly cringe, my interests boring and my opinions outdated.
Sorry for rambling, but I‘m just a bit passionate about the old internet culture, because it used to be my happy place and somewhere I could hide together with other awkward nerds from around the globe and we had our inside jokes and everything. I don’t need it like I used to, but sometimes it would be nice to be able to come back and visit. Hope my ramblings made sense.
I agree, but I think the effects are probably strongest for the generation that grew up in the more nascent era of digital culture when it wasn't. . .like this. It's a bit like the allegory of the cave where some of us were able to go out and see the sun but then we've been dragged down and shackled to the cave again forced only to see the shadows on the walls. Nobody believes us when we say there's a whole world out there!
It doesn't help that there are way fewer of us than we might perceive. I started using the internet in the late 90s, and a few years ago I did some numbers research and calculated less than 0.4% of internet users had been using it for longer than I have. It's probably even worse now. My experience isn't representative of anything that matters to the 99.5%, it's just a curiosity, an outlier. What we have now is what the only global internet has ever been like. Unfortunately.
I’ve felt this my whole life and I’m 35. My dad was into computers as far back as I can remember and shared that with me from the beginning. My first laptop was a hand me down Toshiba with a floppy drive that ran MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Our first family desktop computer was an IBM Aptiva running Windows 95. I remember upgrading across 3 or 4 other machines through 98, 2000, NT, ME, XP, 7, and 10. I remember my dad’s Palm Pilot and his HP 100-LX.
I knew there weren’t many of my generation that started as early as I did. But less than 1%… that explains some things.
I feel this way too. Tildes is scratching that itch for me sans the awkward meme culture we all secretly embraced while also looking down on it (looking at you nyan-cat esque humor). For the most part this space feels very reminiscent of late 2000s reddit, or at least how I used reddit back then.
I also think this phenomenon is all too terribly common across all spaces. Change is inevitable and whether its the platform or us that's changed, its hard not to look back and feel nostalgic.
I've been thinking about this article the past few days.
People sort of make things for those that came after them. The spaces millennials grew up on were made and refined by boomers and gen X (lots of capable folks across two generations in a rapid tech boom) the systems that emerged with millenials were adopted by gen Z, etc. The previous models died and/or faded away, and the new models are held by the new guard, leaving us as the admins of our domain, rather than the subjects of it, and few of us are actually capable or interested in administration.
I feel my opinion may be a bit fringe because I actuvely resist the urges of social media and am a late adopter of platforms, generally, and am generally inactive except for keeping in contact with friends/loved ones I talk to daily.
Yeah yeah social media….but You know what I miss? Music blogs.
As A millennial age DJ who came up with vinyl and actual mixtapes, those first years of serato, mashups and music blogs were amazing hotbeds of wild creativity and access to music unseen before.
Now it’s just some rich kid on TikTok who gets shoved down our throats by every major media player and we’re right back to the 50s payola era.
Bring back dodgy blogger sites with hundreds of dead mediafire links you cowards!
Am middle of GenX, not a millennial, but this rings true for me too. I am a “digital native”, the only difference is that my first online experiences were BBSes and later services like Compuserve and Genie, rather than the internet. I’ve had an email address and been on the internet since my first year of college in 1988.
Things have changed. Walled gardens, and fewer of them, and a general sense that corporations have taken everything over. Places like Tildes used to be most of the internet. Now you hardly hear about them. But that was always true - most people didn’t know about most things on the internet. Which now feels like what we should be striving for. Reddit was a pretty good compromise for a while, but a return to random people setting up random janky websites as the normal way to interact with the internet would be a welcome change.
I also agree the author is little dramatic, getting into the uncool midlife crisis and not fitting in new social media for younger crowd. It always has been younger demographic has the free time to test and put alive social media, as Facebook was when it was available to college students, image blogs in Tumblr and share pictures on Instagram.
I have seen many millennials posting videos on TikTok, the author doesn't fit in.
Most millenials I know (which is... most people I know) are engaged in some form of social media, usually whatever the new hotness is. I sort of think the author may feel a bit alienated, possibly as that sort of midlife crisis you're referring to.
I do feel like he's right in that there isn't exactly a "Millenial" space, because we think of Facebook as being taken over by our parents and TikTok being for current kids, but the reality is that everybody's basically everywhere, just with different representation across platforms.
Thats boomer SIR Tim berners-lee