[HN Gopher] Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet
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       Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet
        
       Author : cocacola1
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2024-01-13 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
        
       | gwern wrote:
       | A _Book of the Long Sun_ Gene Wolfe fan! I'm surprised he wasn't
       | a _New Sun_ fan instead when he was in middle school. _Long Sun_
       | tends to appeal to older people.
        
       | jauntywundrkind wrote:
       | > _Still, I think something more fundamental has been lost for
       | all of us as social media has evolved. It's harder to find the
       | spark of discovery, or the sense that the Web offers an alternate
       | world of possibilities. Instead of each forging our own
       | idiosyncratic paths online, we are caught in the grooves that a
       | few giant companies have carved for us all._
       | 
       | Matches up with my view, reasonably good captureance.
        
       | squigz wrote:
       | https://archive.is/Ku8hd
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | Based on/part of a forthcoming book by the author:
       | 
       |  _Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture_
       | 
       | https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/695902/filterworld-...
        
       | AlienRobot wrote:
       | I agree that the web has gone downhill, but I don't think it's
       | just the web. It's software in general.
       | 
       | When we were new to computers, every application was new.
       | 
       | Now, every application is a rehash of a previous application,
       | except with missing features and a more "modern" look that
       | completely disregards decades of what we know about UI/UX.
       | 
       | One example that I think about a lot is how we have copy and
       | paste and drag and drop, but that's it. That's been it for
       | decades. Nobody has invented a new way of getting data from
       | program A to program B in ages.
       | 
       | By the way, Neocities is a website that tried to capture the
       | Geocities feel by letting anybody just upload a static website
       | hosted in a subdomain. They do seem to have some Lain fansites
       | there.
        
         | sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
         | Everything just gets worse as you age. Sure, my dad said it too
         | back then, but he just didn't get how the world moved on and
         | improved. This time around though it's real, everything gets
         | more stupid and dumb and I hate it.
        
           | waldothedog wrote:
           | Not clear if this is sarcasm or not?
        
         | sfRattan wrote:
         | There are various third-party and sometimes first-party
         | clipboard managers that give you more visual access to the
         | things in the clipboard.
         | 
         | But you hit a steep uphill conceptual climb for the average
         | user pretty quickly: the better solutions for moving data
         | between applications end up resembling type-agnostic virtual
         | 'registers' or Unix-style pipes for more than just text, but
         | these abstractions seem to be too complicated in practice for
         | anyone who isn't a power user.
         | 
         | PowerShell actually implements the latter solution, a kind of
         | pipes-with-objects IIRC. And of all things the late Terry
         | Davis' TempleOS has an ability to treat all kinds of things as
         | text, render them, and pass them around.
        
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       (page generated 2024-01-13 23:00 UTC)