The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

well you can get people to subscribe, can't you

yes! almost as if it were an...... rss feed!

flopson’s characterization isn’t at all unfair. maron, simmons, fucking barstool - those are all wildly popular. plus all the godawful comedians out there. i also kind of hate the light smirkiness of a lot of big time podcast network shows, especially when i’m interests in the meat of their content - that sort of uneasy “ha ha don’t want to appear too SERIOUS because it would muss my carefully curated brooklyn aesthetic” just falls so flat

ta for the nudge re feedreader ...
welcome back rss feeds.
i loved google reader, and this seems to do everything i need.
now to go find my archive of rss feeds that i used to subscribe to.

xpost i totally agree. that said you can break out of that bubble and once you do there are a ridiculous number of frankly miraculous podcasts right now. top of my list at the moment are rumble strip and first day back, both produced and presented by women, neither of them smirky or annoying, both with an incredible facility for channelling stories into your ear. but yeah it's also a totally different mode of engaging with something, it takes longer. it's not a substitute for reading. although for some people it kind of is now??

i also can’t listen to anything while i’m working, especially people talking while i’m trying to write. and i don’t commute. so that knocks out a lot of my podcast listening time

flopson otm

I need to take a break from the internet for a while, this thing has become a beast. When I was younger and spent all my time online, late 90s/early 2000s, it was still a relatively hidden place. I was on it because I had made really good, close friends with people who I'd have real conversations with everyday, and around hobbies (making music and sharing it, writing and sharing that, drawing, etc.)

Now it's turned into this abomination taken over by corporations. Just about every website I use has been made with addictive design, and it's getting pretty bad for my health.

It's hard to admit it's not the same place it used to be, but it's not.

Now it's just mindless, repetitive clicking over and over again, and it's like that by design, like being a slot machine addict. Talk about something going from life-changing to life-screwing so quickly.

A lot of popular podcasts sucking doesn't feel like a particularly strong condemnation of the medium to me, I mean how good were the most popular sites of 2006, or 1998? At this stage you could listen to podcasts 24/7 without listening to a single man, or a single comedian; there's a very low barrier to entry in terms of cash and technical skills, chances are there's a podcast for any interest you could think of.

I think this is fundamentally different from twitter or facebook, where the problem isn't (only) who's popular but the actual medium itself and what it's trying to do with you. Closest podcasts have to that is Apple constantly fucking up their podcasts app but plenty of ppl listen by other means and the bad shit in iTunes feels more about incompetence than insidiousness in general.

Google search is becoming more and more useless, often I'll get pages and pages of results from fucking quora.com or thedailymail.com

i agree w that. quora's ok but yeah these are not really definitive sources.

too heavily weighted toward newness as well - anything more than like a week old gets crowded out if it's a name in the news. the "news" tab should favour newness but the main results should be more even-handed

I googled 'outback' the other day because I needed information about rural Australian climate and the first few pages of results were for Outback Steakhouse and the Subaru Outback.

it's hot btw

Also Google Image Search which these days returns a slurry of contextless Pinterest sludge with the occasional genuine image on a useful site.

i use duck duck go but it's just as bad tbh

longing for the prelapsarian non-SEO'd web

googling "prelapsarian" now

Yeah, Pinterest has fucking destroyed image search.

Agreed that both google search and image search are noticeably worse than they once were. Image search is muuuuuuch worse, I can’t believe it. Even the “visually similar” search is somehow worse. Possibly a truck full of tartar sauce crashed into their algorithm room

FUCK PINTREST FOREVER for polluting Google image search results with useless garbage.

^^^

it’s the worst

youtube thumbnails in GIS results are also deeply fucking aggravating. it's getting to the point where you have to start using elaborate filters to get viable results, ex.:

cute pigs
(9 of the top 20 results are facebook, pinterest, or youtube images)

cute pigs -inurl:pinimg -inurl:ytimg -inurl:twimg -intitle:facebook
(problem solved!)

site:ilxor.com cutest pigs
(pretty decent if you can put up with the occasional giant isopod and/or Thom Yorke headshot)

https://gizmodo.com/100-websites-that-shaped-the-internet-as-we-know-it-1829634771

i don't think i'm much of an outlier here, but it was really odd to scroll through this list and know EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM already

Ha, same

ILX was robbed!!

the screenshots should really go below the headline, not above....

interview w/ jill leopore about her new book, 'these truths':

https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Academy-Is-Largely/245080

Q. For democracy to work, of course, the people must be well informed. Yet we live in an age of epistemological mayhem. How did the relationship between truth and fact come unwound?

A. I spend a lot of time in the book getting it wound, to be fair. There’s an incredibly rich scholarship on the history of evidence, which traces its rise in the Middle Ages in the world of law, its migration into historical writing, and then finally into the realm that we’re most familiar with, journalism. That’s a centuries-long migration of an idea that begins in a very particular time and place, basically the rise of trial by jury starting in 1215. We have a much better vantage on the tenuousness of our own grasp of facts when we understand where facts come from.

The larger epistemological shift is how the elemental unit of knowledge has changed. Facts have been devalued for a long time. The rise of the fact was centuries ago. Facts were replaced by numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries as the higher-status unit of knowledge. That’s the moment at which the United States is founded as a demographic democracy. Now what’s considered to be most prestigious is data. The bigger the data, the better.

That transformation, from facts to numbers to data, traces something else: the shifting prestige placed on different ways of knowing. Facts come from the realm of the humanities, numbers represent the social sciences, and data the natural sciences. When people talk about the decline of the humanities, they are actually talking about the rise and fall of the fact, as well as other factors. When people try to re-establish the prestige of the humanities with the digital humanities and large data sets, that is no longer the humanities. What humanists do comes from a different epistemological scale of a unit of knowledge.

i often think about the mixture of humanistic and scientific/technical cultures that seemed to me to characterize the aspects of the internet i liked back in the 90s. i don't know fully what lepore has in mind here but i imagine that in my 90s internet even the technical stuff was sort of on an even footing with humanistic 'fact' because of the way the gears were relatively visible and lots of people had knowledge of how they ran things. dealing with a compiler error is something on the same scale as close-reading a poem; having a debate on usenet is something on the same scale as holding a city council meeting. comparatively speaking, 'numbers' and 'data' held little sway in the sense lepore apparently has in mind.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/log-off-facebook-twitter-social-media-addiction

👍

Things I was shockingly old when I learned: the internet had a golden age. Here I thought it was always something of a hot mess.

https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/12/19/18148701/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-year-in-review

max: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html

yeah it's good

max links to this on tw too, which is good value in the "post it directly into my veins" school of internet ire

Amazing thread https://t.co/bLxjIaNgGJ

— Max Read (@max_read) December 26, 2018

What I liked about the internet in the past was that websites from regular folk populated the search results. Blogs, niche websites created by one person, user groups... Nowadays you are lucky if you can go through all the google search results for something specific and come across a site that isn’t mainstream - which has plenty to do with search engine algorithms. This keeps the little guy from wanting to make their own (non-commercial) site in the first place.

had an argument with my spouse who didn't understand why i was so upset about tumblr. no, i don't look at tumblr porn, or much of anything on tumblr really, but my impression was that a lot of tumblr was what i now think of as the "wikipedia internet" - knowledgable enthusiasts sharing their knowledge, what that ny mag article would characterize as "real". and it's become increasingly clear to me that the corporate internet dislikes this model and favors shouty internet, people angrily yelling about anything and nothing, because it's more profitable than genuine information.

i don't know. obviously there are still pockets of value. my dream is to one day be able to treat the internet the way i did facebook, as something that does more harm than good and something therefore to be avoided at all costs, but i don't actually believe we'll ever get there.

man I love all these articles about the internet eating itself.
I'm quite happy to have been a teenager online during the Golden Age. when I started cybersurfing the information superdotmotorway I used to chat to the only other people online: teen manics fans, German goths, American nerds and music journos

"Why do I need a 4Ghz quadcore to run facebook?" This is why. A single word split up into 11 HTML DOM elements to avoid adblockers. pic.twitter.com/Zv4RfInrL0

— Mike Pan (@themikepan) February 6, 2019

fuckin lol

well this Instagram egg thing just totally fuckin passed me by

j. that post from a few months back (epistemology) is great, thanks.

a moment of looping silence for YTMND, which quietly shut down yesterday

— 🍀🌳 eevee 🌳🍀 (@eevee) May 15, 2019

funny to read the OP of this thread, which is like, "am i onto something?" when it seems so clearly obvious now, four years later.

sorry, not the OP, the M@tt H3lg3s0n post from 2015

we call him ums, man

a moment of looping silence for jaymc.xls

one type of guy you don't hear much about anymore is the Linux Guy. if you were on the internet in the '00s you knew all about the Linux Guy. you had to. for your own safety.

— Jingleghost (@JeremyMonjo) October 16, 2019

it's sad, i miss their can-do spirit

A lot of Linux guys are now trans women

wait wut?

yeah um