The internet is vast. But if your attention is fully absorbed between twitter and substack (like the author is), you feel trapped, because, well, you are.
Maybe try to venture out of your internet comfort zone. It's not all spam out there, nor is it worthless because it was not recommended by someone cool. Just don't be lazy
This comment doesn't offer any practical advice on where to find content of higher quality, it just condescends people who don't feel like they have high quality options.
my comment is condescending to people who don't put the effort for searching needles in the haystack, but instead spend their whole online time in the well beaten path.
The content wont always be of "higher quality" , because quality is subjective. Here are two nearby sources of such content:
> my comment is condescending to people who don't put the effort for searching needles in the haystack, but instead spend their whole online time in the well beaten path.
Another way of saying this is that your comment is condescending to… most people.
Most people used to have an easy way to find forums on the internet, even if they were AOL chat rooms, where they could find moderated content that was interesting to them. That was the well beaten path.
Nowadays, that’s no longer the case, and most people don’t seek out those needles in the haystack.
My contention is that they shouldn’t have to, just as they didn’t have to before the 2010s.
A corollary: “just don’t be lazy” is almost never good advice, as there is almost always a reason people are “lazy.” People make similar arguments about the impoverished and how “if they just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and stopped being lazy” they could easily get out of it, but that’s really hard to do with two kids, three jobs, and no time to think about anything other than survival. They’re not lazy, they are overwhelmed.
I’d say that applies to a lot of facets of life, including time spent on the internet; amid the firehose of nonsense, and given that most of the internet (read: where most people spend time now) is literally rigged against moving away from it, by using human psychology to generate hits of dopamine in the form of likes and views, it is hard to find a better path, and the people who don’t aren’t necessarily lazy. They just don’t live on the internet, and it shouldn’t be that hard.
I think you re making the argument that people should stick to the mainstream of every medium (in this case the internet) because it's easy. That's why i called it lazy. I 'm not saying it's bad, but people shouldn't complain that everything looks alike, when they literally only stick to things that are alike
forums are just as hard to find today, as they were before. In fact many of them are back in the places where they used to be, it's just people have forgot about them because they chose to sell their attention elsewhere
I’m not saying they should stick to the mainstream, but I’m saying that a majority will. What has changed isn’t most people’s behavior, but the internet around them, and I’m arguing it’s changed for the worse.
no, really people's behavior has changed. Did you care about your online profile in 2002 (if you were around?). Now people primarily care about how they are seen online
The internet is in a feedback loop that both facilitated and is facilitated by this change.
Been around the internet for a very very long time :)
And sure, people absolutely cared. That’s why AIM profiles were a thing, and why people were so excited when they could build web pages easily with Frontpage or Dreamweaver or with Angelfire or Geocities, etc.
What’s changed is arguably that it is less acceptable to be anonymous now, but the concept of wanting to share and be seen is not new.
it feels very different. back then my 'profiles' were avatars, virtual personas, and people were careful to never dox themselves. Now the proportions are reversed
Maybe try to venture out of your internet comfort zone. It's not all spam out there, nor is it worthless because it was not recommended by someone cool. Just don't be lazy