The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore

[BernieTaupson]

NY Times

For my entire professional life, I have started nearly every weekday morning with an extremely important productivity ritual: I make a coffee, I sit down at my computer, and I mess around on the internet for an hour or so. And, for most of my career as a writer, this has been an effortless task. I’ve had accounts on dozens of social networks, message boards and online communities thronging with similarly bored and truant peers, vibrant with creativity and delight. Or, at least, with tolerably decent jokes.

But recently I find the task of wasting time online increasingly onerous. The websites I used to depend on have gotten worse, and it seems as if there’s nowhere else to look. Twitter has been transformed under new management into an increasingly untenable social experiment called X. Instagram is evolving into a somehow-even-lower-rent TikTok, while TikTok itself continues to baffle and alienate me. Even Reddit, a stalwart last resort of time-wasting, briefly went dark in June during a sitewide revolt over new policies.

Something is changing about the internet, and I am not the only person to have noticed. Everywhere I turned online this year, someone was mourning: Amazon is “making itself worse” New York magazine moaned); Google Search is a “bloated and overmonetised” tragedy (as The Atlantic lamented); “social media is doomed to die,” (as the tech news website The Verge proclaimed); even TikTok is becoming “enjunkified” (to bowdlerize an inventive coinage of the sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, republished in Wired). But the main complaint I have heard is was put best, and most bluntly, in The New Yorker: “The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore.”

It’s indisputable that we are living through a transitional period in the short history of the internet. The end of the low interest-rate era has shaken up the economics of startups, ending rapid-growth practices like “blitzscaling” and reducing the number of new internet businesses vying for our attention; companies like Alphabet and Facebook are now mature and dominant businesses instead of disruptive upstarts. But I suspect there is another factor driving the alienation and discomfort felt by many of the people who feel as though the internet is dying before our eyes: We’re getting old.

For more than a decade now, millennials like myself have effectively (and, in the case of our cohort’s richest member, Mark Zuckerberg, quite literally) run the internet. We were the earliest adopters of smartphones and we once consistently (not that I’d brag about it) led the generational pack in screen time. Over that period we’ve grown used to an internet whose form and culture was significantly shaped by and moulded to our preferences. The American internet of the 2010s was an often stupid and almost always embarrassing internet — but it was a millennial internet. There were no social networks on which we felt uncomfortable; no culture developments we didn’t engender; no image macros we didn’t understand.

This now seems to be changing. There was a time in my life when it was trivial to sign up to a new social network and pick up its patterns and mores on the fly. Now, I feel exhausted by the prospect.

Google Search and Amazon may have gotten worse in an absolute sense, but so too has my patience for finding stuff. Millennials are increasingly joined online and off by people who have never heard the sound of a modem handshake in their lives and never asked “a/s/l” in an AOL chat room. We’ve been used to wielding an innate understanding of the web’s capabilities and culture to our advantage; our knowledge of “how to search Google” and “how to use emoji” and “how to deploy the ‘Sarcastic Wonka’ meme,” which may once have given us an edge in multigenerational workplaces and social settings, is simply irrelevant to people younger than us.

According to the consumer research firm GWI, millennials’ screen time has been on a steady decline for years. Only 42 per cent of 30- to 49-year-olds say they’re online “almost constantly,” compared to 49 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds. We’re no longer the earliest adopters, even: 18- to 29-year-olds are more likely to have used ChatGPT than 30- to 49-year-olds — though maybe only because we’re no longer being assigned homework.

These stats confirm what a brief survey of popular posts on TikTok or Instagram or X will already tell you: The heaviest users and most engaged American audience on the internet are no longer millennials but our successors in Generation Z. If the internet is no longer “fun” for millennials, it may simply be because it’s not our internet anymore. It belongs to zoomers now.

Zoomer internet is, at least on the surface, quite different than ours. The celebrities are unrecognisable (Kai Cenat???); the slang is impenetrable (gyatt???); the formats are new (GRWM???). Austerely tasteful overhead shots of meticulously arranged food posted on Instagram have been replaced with garishly lit minute-long videos of elaborate restaurant meals posted on TikTok. Glibly chatty blog posts about the news have been replaced with videos of recording sessions for podcasts. No wonder millennials feel so alienated — the language and terrain of the internet are now entirely foreign.

And yet zoomers — and the adolescents in Generation Alpha nipping at their generational heels — still seem to be having plenty of fun online. Even if I find it all inscrutable and a bit irritating, the creative expression and exuberant sociality that made the internet so “fun” to me a decade ago are booming among 20- somethings on TikTok, Instagram, Discord, Twitch and even X. “Skibidi Toilet,” “Fanum tax,” “the rizzler”: I won’t debase myself by pretending to know what these memes are, or what their appeal is, but I know that zoomers seem to love them. Or, at any rate, I can verify that they love using them to confuse and alienate middle-aged millennials like myself.

True, the fun I’m talking about is co-opted and exploited by a small handful of powerful and wealthy platform businesses. But platforms have sought to mediate and commodify our online activity since the beginning of the commercial web. Millennial memorials to the “fun” internet tend to rely on a rosy vision of the web of the 2000s and 2010s as a space of unmediated play and experimentation that doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny. Engagement-driven platforms have always cultivated influencers, abuse and misinformation. When you drill down, what mostly seems to have changed about the web over the last few years isn’t the structural dynamics but the cultural signifiers.

In other words, “enjunkification” has always been happening on the commercial web, whose largely advertising-based business model seems to obligate an ever-shifting race to the bottom. Perhaps what frustrated, alienated and ageing internet users like me are experiencing here is not only the fruits of an enjunkified internet but also the loss of the cognitive elasticity, sense of humour and copious amounts of free time necessary to navigate all that confusing junk nimbly and cheerfully.

Frankly, that should be freeing. Being extremely online, on an internet geared to your interests (in the same way that heroin is geared to your brain), is not exactly a quality conducive to personal happiness. Young people themselves will tell you they have, at best, an ambivalent relationship to their internet. The more alienating the mass internet is to me, the more likely I will put to good use the hours I previously spent messing around. Or, at least, the more likely it is I will find corners — group chats, message boards and elsewhere — geared to my specific interests rather than the general engagement bait that otherwise dominates.

And even if you’re jealous of zoomers and their Discord chats and TikTok memes, consider that the combined inevitability of enjunkification and cognitive decline means that their internet will die, too, and Generation Alpha will have its own era of inscrutable memes and alienating influencers. And then the zoomers can join millennials in feeling what boomers have felt for decades: annoyed and uncomfortable at the computer.

Max Read
NY Times

[Fat_Elvis]

Everything sucks.

[LAglamrocker]

Writer? No chance anyone read 1/4 of that

Lesbian granny on Xhamster is alive
It’s mostly young chick 19 from foreign land
They can’t write or read- real career

[VinnieVincentsVag]

Everything sucks.

Give me something to break.

I’m actually embarrassed I know that lyric.

[whammybar]

He picked the right name for sure.

[Metal Heart]

NY Times

For my entire professional life, I have started nearly every weekday morning with an extremely important productivity ritual: I make a coffee, I sit down at my computer, and I mess around on the internet for an hour or so. And, for most of my career as a writer, this has been an effortless task. I’ve had accounts on dozens of social networks, message boards and online communities thronging with similarly bored and truant peers, vibrant with creativity and delight. Or, at least, with tolerably decent jokes.

But recently I find the task of wasting time online increasingly onerous. The websites I used to depend on have gotten worse, and it seems as if there’s nowhere else to look. Twitter has been transformed under new management into an increasingly untenable social experiment called X. Instagram is evolving into a somehow-even-lower-rent TikTok, while TikTok itself continues to baffle and alienate me. Even Reddit, a stalwart last resort of time-wasting, briefly went dark in June during a sitewide revolt over new policies.

Something is changing about the internet, and I am not the only person to have noticed. Everywhere I turned online this year, someone was mourning: Amazon is “making itself worse” New York magazine moaned); Google Search is a “bloated and overmonetised” tragedy (as The Atlantic lamented); “social media is doomed to die,” (as the tech news website The Verge proclaimed); even TikTok is becoming “enjunkified” (to bowdlerize an inventive coinage of the sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, republished in Wired). But the main complaint I have heard is was put best, and most bluntly, in The New Yorker: “The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore.”

It’s indisputable that we are living through a transitional period in the short history of the internet. The end of the low interest-rate era has shaken up the economics of startups, ending rapid-growth practices like “blitzscaling” and reducing the number of new internet businesses vying for our attention; companies like Alphabet and Facebook are now mature and dominant businesses instead of disruptive upstarts. But I suspect there is another factor driving the alienation and discomfort felt by many of the people who feel as though the internet is dying before our eyes: We’re getting old.

For more than a decade now, millennials like myself have effectively (and, in the case of our cohort’s richest member, Mark Zuckerberg, quite literally) run the internet. We were the earliest adopters of smartphones and we once consistently (not that I’d brag about it) led the generational pack in screen time. Over that period we’ve grown used to an internet whose form and culture was significantly shaped by and moulded to our preferences. The American internet of the 2010s was an often stupid and almost always embarrassing internet — but it was a millennial internet. There were no social networks on which we felt uncomfortable; no culture developments we didn’t engender; no image macros we didn’t understand.

This now seems to be changing. There was a time in my life when it was trivial to sign up to a new social network and pick up its patterns and mores on the fly. Now, I feel exhausted by the prospect.

Google Search and Amazon may have gotten worse in an absolute sense, but so too has my patience for finding stuff. Millennials are increasingly joined online and off by people who have never heard the sound of a modem handshake in their lives and never asked “a/s/l” in an AOL chat room. We’ve been used to wielding an innate understanding of the web’s capabilities and culture to our advantage; our knowledge of “how to search Google” and “how to use emoji” and “how to deploy the ‘Sarcastic Wonka’ meme,” which may once have given us an edge in multigenerational workplaces and social settings, is simply irrelevant to people younger than us.

According to the consumer research firm GWI, millennials’ screen time has been on a steady decline for years. Only 42 per cent of 30- to 49-year-olds say they’re online “almost constantly,” compared to 49 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds. We’re no longer the earliest adopters, even: 18- to 29-year-olds are more likely to have used ChatGPT than 30- to 49-year-olds — though maybe only because we’re no longer being assigned homework.

These stats confirm what a brief survey of popular posts on TikTok or Instagram or X will already tell you: The heaviest users and most engaged American audience on the internet are no longer millennials but our successors in Generation Z. If the internet is no longer “fun” for millennials, it may simply be because it’s not our internet anymore. It belongs to zoomers now.

Zoomer internet is, at least on the surface, quite different than ours. The celebrities are unrecognisable (Kai Cenat???); the slang is impenetrable (gyatt???); the formats are new (GRWM???). Austerely tasteful overhead shots of meticulously arranged food posted on Instagram have been replaced with garishly lit minute-long videos of elaborate restaurant meals posted on TikTok. Glibly chatty blog posts about the news have been replaced with videos of recording sessions for podcasts. No wonder millennials feel so alienated — the language and terrain of the internet are now entirely foreign.

And yet zoomers — and the adolescents in Generation Alpha nipping at their generational heels — still seem to be having plenty of fun online. Even if I find it all inscrutable and a bit irritating, the creative expression and exuberant sociality that made the internet so “fun” to me a decade ago are booming among 20- somethings on TikTok, Instagram, Discord, Twitch and even X. “Skibidi Toilet,” “Fanum tax,” “the rizzler”: I won’t debase myself by pretending to know what these memes are, or what their appeal is, but I know that zoomers seem to love them. Or, at any rate, I can verify that they love using them to confuse and alienate middle-aged millennials like myself.

True, the fun I’m talking about is co-opted and exploited by a small handful of powerful and wealthy platform businesses. But platforms have sought to mediate and commodify our online activity since the beginning of the commercial web. Millennial memorials to the “fun” internet tend to rely on a rosy vision of the web of the 2000s and 2010s as a space of unmediated play and experimentation that doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny. Engagement-driven platforms have always cultivated influencers, abuse and misinformation. When you drill down, what mostly seems to have changed about the web over the last few years isn’t the structural dynamics but the cultural signifiers.

In other words, “enjunkification” has always been happening on the commercial web, whose largely advertising-based business model seems to obligate an ever-shifting race to the bottom. Perhaps what frustrated, alienated and ageing internet users like me are experiencing here is not only the fruits of an enjunkified internet but also the loss of the cognitive elasticity, sense of humour and copious amounts of free time necessary to navigate all that confusing junk nimbly and cheerfully.

Frankly, that should be freeing. Being extremely online, on an internet geared to your interests (in the same way that heroin is geared to your brain), is not exactly a quality conducive to personal happiness. Young people themselves will tell you they have, at best, an ambivalent relationship to their internet. The more alienating the mass internet is to me, the more likely I will put to good use the hours I previously spent messing around. Or, at least, the more likely it is I will find corners — group chats, message boards and elsewhere — geared to my specific interests rather than the general engagement bait that otherwise dominates.

And even if you’re jealous of zoomers and their Discord chats and TikTok memes, consider that the combined inevitability of enjunkification and cognitive decline means that their internet will die, too, and Generation Alpha will have its own era of inscrutable memes and alienating influencers. And then the zoomers can join millennials in feeling what boomers have felt for decades: annoyed and uncomfortable at the computer.

Max Read
NY Times

Max is correct. I present Exhibit A. His above ramblings.

[GreatWhiteSnake]

Everything's Perfect Nobody's Happy...

[BernieTaupson]

Max is correct. I present Exhibit A. His above ramblings.

Have to quote six pages of text to add one sentence, fuckwit?

[MetalSludgeCEO]

NY Times

For my entire professional life, I have started nearly every weekday morning with an extremely important productivity ritual: I make a coffee, I sit down at my computer, and I mess around on the internet for an hour or so. And, for most of my career as a writer, this has been an effortless task. I’ve had accounts on dozens of social networks, message boards and online communities thronging with similarly bored and truant peers, vibrant with creativity and delight. Or, at least, with tolerably decent jokes.

But recently I find the task of wasting time online increasingly onerous. The websites I used to depend on have gotten worse, and it seems as if there’s nowhere else to look. Twitter has been transformed under new management into an increasingly untenable social experiment called X. Instagram is evolving into a somehow-even-lower-rent TikTok, while TikTok itself continues to baffle and alienate me. Even Reddit, a stalwart last resort of time-wasting, briefly went dark in June during a sitewide revolt over new policies.

Something is changing about the internet, and I am not the only person to have noticed. Everywhere I turned online this year, someone was mourning: Amazon is “making itself worse” New York magazine moaned); Google Search is a “bloated and overmonetised” tragedy (as The Atlantic lamented); “social media is doomed to die,” (as the tech news website The Verge proclaimed); even TikTok is becoming “enjunkified” (to bowdlerize an inventive coinage of the sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, republished in Wired). But the main complaint I have heard is was put best, and most bluntly, in The New Yorker: “The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore.”

It’s indisputable that we are living through a transitional period in the short history of the internet. The end of the low interest-rate era has shaken up the economics of startups, ending rapid-growth practices like “blitzscaling” and reducing the number of new internet businesses vying for our attention; companies like Alphabet and Facebook are now mature and dominant businesses instead of disruptive upstarts. But I suspect there is another factor driving the alienation and discomfort felt by many of the people who feel as though the internet is dying before our eyes: We’re getting old.

For more than a decade now, millennials like myself have effectively (and, in the case of our cohort’s richest member, Mark Zuckerberg, quite literally) run the internet. We were the earliest adopters of smartphones and we once consistently (not that I’d brag about it) led the generational pack in screen time. Over that period we’ve grown used to an internet whose form and culture was significantly shaped by and moulded to our preferences. The American internet of the 2010s was an often stupid and almost always embarrassing internet — but it was a millennial internet. There were no social networks on which we felt uncomfortable; no culture developments we didn’t engender; no image macros we didn’t understand.

This now seems to be changing. There was a time in my life when it was trivial to sign up to a new social network and pick up its patterns and mores on the fly. Now, I feel exhausted by the prospect.

Google Search and Amazon may have gotten worse in an absolute sense, but so too has my patience for finding stuff. Millennials are increasingly joined online and off by people who have never heard the sound of a modem handshake in their lives and never asked “a/s/l” in an AOL chat room. We’ve been used to wielding an innate understanding of the web’s capabilities and culture to our advantage; our knowledge of “how to search Google” and “how to use emoji” and “how to deploy the ‘Sarcastic Wonka’ meme,” which may once have given us an edge in multigenerational workplaces and social settings, is simply irrelevant to people younger than us.

According to the consumer research firm GWI, millennials’ screen time has been on a steady decline for years. Only 42 per cent of 30- to 49-year-olds say they’re online “almost constantly,” compared to 49 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds. We’re no longer the earliest adopters, even: 18- to 29-year-olds are more likely to have used ChatGPT than 30- to 49-year-olds — though maybe only because we’re no longer being assigned homework.

These stats confirm what a brief survey of popular posts on TikTok or Instagram or X will already tell you: The heaviest users and most engaged American audience on the internet are no longer millennials but our successors in Generation Z. If the internet is no longer “fun” for millennials, it may simply be because it’s not our internet anymore. It belongs to zoomers now.

Zoomer internet is, at least on the surface, quite different than ours. The celebrities are unrecognisable (Kai Cenat???); the slang is impenetrable (gyatt???); the formats are new (GRWM???). Austerely tasteful overhead shots of meticulously arranged food posted on Instagram have been replaced with garishly lit minute-long videos of elaborate restaurant meals posted on TikTok. Glibly chatty blog posts about the news have been replaced with videos of recording sessions for podcasts. No wonder millennials feel so alienated — the language and terrain of the internet are now entirely foreign.

And yet zoomers — and the adolescents in Generation Alpha nipping at their generational heels — still seem to be having plenty of fun online. Even if I find it all inscrutable and a bit irritating, the creative expression and exuberant sociality that made the internet so “fun” to me a decade ago are booming among 20- somethings on TikTok, Instagram, Discord, Twitch and even X. “Skibidi Toilet,” “Fanum tax,” “the rizzler”: I won’t debase myself by pretending to know what these memes are, or what their appeal is, but I know that zoomers seem to love them. Or, at any rate, I can verify that they love using them to confuse and alienate middle-aged millennials like myself.

True, the fun I’m talking about is co-opted and exploited by a small handful of powerful and wealthy platform businesses. But platforms have sought to mediate and commodify our online activity since the beginning of the commercial web. Millennial memorials to the “fun” internet tend to rely on a rosy vision of the web of the 2000s and 2010s as a space of unmediated play and experimentation that doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny. Engagement-driven platforms have always cultivated influencers, abuse and misinformation. When you drill down, what mostly seems to have changed about the web over the last few years isn’t the structural dynamics but the cultural signifiers.

In other words, “enjunkification” has always been happening on the commercial web, whose largely advertising-based business model seems to obligate an ever-shifting race to the bottom. Perhaps what frustrated, alienated and ageing internet users like me are experiencing here is not only the fruits of an enjunkified internet but also the loss of the cognitive elasticity, sense of humour and copious amounts of free time necessary to navigate all that confusing junk nimbly and cheerfully.

Frankly, that should be freeing. Being extremely online, on an internet geared to your interests (in the same way that heroin is geared to your brain), is not exactly a quality conducive to personal happiness. Young people themselves will tell you they have, at best, an ambivalent relationship to their internet. The more alienating the mass internet is to me, the more likely I will put to good use the hours I previously spent messing around. Or, at least, the more likely it is I will find corners — group chats, message boards and elsewhere — geared to my specific interests rather than the general engagement bait that otherwise dominates.

And even if you’re jealous of zoomers and their Discord chats and TikTok memes, consider that the combined inevitability of enjunkification and cognitive decline means that their internet will die, too, and Generation Alpha will have its own era of inscrutable memes and alienating influencers. And then the zoomers can join millennials in feeling what boomers have felt for decades: annoyed and uncomfortable at the computer.

Max Read
NY Times

""""""""""We’re getting old."""""""""""""

This is it... and sums it all up... plain and simple!

And it's relative to ALL things in life.

Not only are we getting older, but a percentage of our peers have lost respect, or have no respect for anyone younger, especially much younger.

But when they need help to de-bug their PC or figure out Blue Tooth and their iPhone, they immediately call their teenage kid into the room, "Honey... can you figure this out?"

And 30 seconds later the kid sorts the issue, and leaves to go back to his room to play Fort Nite.

Most adults over 40... (especially being north of 50) think teens and 20-somethings and what they're doing are generally dumb, and stupid.

Don't freak out... I said "most" not all... deal.. and which are you?

More of what I (we) see and hear endlessly is...

Their music all sucks (why isn't Ozzy playing the Super Bowl half-time for the 25th year in a row complaints...), the trends are lame, complaining about Starbucks lines, or self-checkouts and someone having more than 15 items. Really?

It's going to be 2024 folks... and our group is into the 4th quarter of life... it's almost over... enjoy what is left... as time it ticking!

The reality that is reality TV and reality Internet, is all beneath them.... or is it? Without the internet... you'd all be looking at a Rand McMally map and writing checks at Piggly Wiggly...

The internet is awesome and essential to our entire world moving forward! #facts

Time to move forward... and smile while you still can.

"When I was a kid..." blah, blah, blah.

Shut the F#@k up... (mostly) nobody cares about 35 years ago... the same way we didn't in the 1980's care about what happened in the 1940's or 1950's.

All facts... and it's all day and all nite too!

Thank you drive thru!



$tEvil

[BernieTaupson]

Way to miss the point. Debugging PCs and hating young people? I don’t even know what you’re talking about but it’s got nothing to do with the article you’re replying to.

When the internet first switched from something that just university nerds used to mainstream in the mid 90s it was a totally different landscape.

People would set up their own websites, sure 90% of them were garbage (same as everything) but at least people did it. Metal Sludge was one of those sites. You know exactly what it used to be like. We all would have had a bunch of homemade sites we used to frequent daily. KISS Asylum, Black Sabbath Online, there was an X Files site and forum I used to go to, a Planet of the Apes one, dozens and dozens of great sites for whatever weird niche thing you happened to be into.

Now EVERYTHING is commercialised and homegrown sites like that don’t exist anymore, unless it’s the pathetic remnants of something created 25 years ago which is barely hanging on for dear life.

Everything is on one of the half dozen social media sites. People don’t make websites just because. Forums are dead. The internet is a completely different soulless thing. If it ain’t on Facebook or X or TikTok, it might as well not exist.

This video summed it up a bit better than the article did,

The Golden Age of the Internet Is Over :

https://youtu.be/OU6CuSMzNus?si=3Yht9MSZWkZoMnc2

[VinceVanLane]

"When I was a kid..." blah, blah, blah.

Shut the F#@k up... (mostly) nobody cares about 35 years ago... the same way we didn't in the 1980's care about what happened in the 1940's or 1950's.

All facts... and it's all day and all nite too!

Sounds like you are talking about your own views than what's really going on. None of this was the topic that was being discussed, but since it was brought up:

Saying nobody cares about 35 years ago like we didn't care in the 80s about the 40s and 50s isn't accurate at all. In the 80s we didn't have the internet, thus it was a lot harder to be exposed to what happened in the 40s and 50s. I didn't know anybody growing up who listened to bands from the 40s or 50s because how would you? But I know teenagers in 2023 that listen to Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo as well as Metallica, Huey Lewis, Run DMC. Kids today have more access to what happened in the past, and music from the 80s sonically sounds current today. But in the 80s, if you heard music from the 40s and 50s, it didn't sound current and sounded old. But if you play Master Of Puppets to a kid today, they won't know if that was recorded in 1986 or this year, which is why it blew up this year on Stranger Things (which is a show based in the 80s). Kids today are still streaming Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Guns N Roses, etc. Those acts still have huge streaming numbers and it ain't from people 40 and over. Tom Petty's song "Love Is A Long Road" just blew up a few weeks ago because it was in the video game GTA trailer on YouTube.

"The song is taking off due to its use in the recently released trailer for the highly anticipated upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI, which set viewership records in its first 24 hours of release on YouTube. Though “Long Road” was only drawing between 4,000-5,000 daily official on-demand U.S. streams before over the weekend, that number was up to 78,000 on Monday (Dec. 4) – when the trailer first leaked on social media – and rocketed to 376,000 on Tuesday after the trailer’s proper release, according to preliminary numbers from Luminate: a gain of 8,421% from the prior Sunday. (The song also sold nearly 1,000 digital copies over those two days, after a negligible number the days before.) "

That's from young kids hearing the song for the first time and loving it. The song came out in 1989. Young people still love good music if they are exposed to it.

There was a Barbie movie and Super Mario Brothers movie this year. If you go to a toy store, you'll see Pac-Man, Mario Brothers, Sonic The Hedgehog, Zelda (from Nintendo), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, etc. If you look in the games section, you'll still see Candyland, Mouse Trap, Operation, Battleship, and all sorts of vintage games that kids today think are new.

Anyway, the topic was how the internet sucks today compared to the past. And it does, for all the reasons that are listed above.

[MetalSludgeCEO]

Way to miss the point. Debugging PCs and hating young people? I don’t even know what you’re talking about but it’s got nothing to do with the article you’re replying to.

When the internet first switched from something that just university nerds used to mainstream in the mid 90s it was a totally different landscape.

People would set up their own websites, sure 90% of them were garbage (same as everything) but at least people did it. Metal Sludge was one of those sites. You know exactly what it used to be like. We all would have had a bunch of homemade sites we used to frequent daily. KISS Asylum, Black Sabbath Online, there was an X Files site and forum I used to go to, a Planet of the Apes one, dozens and dozens of great sites for whatever weird niche thing you happened to be into.

Now EVERYTHING is commercialised and homegrown sites like that don’t exist anymore, unless it’s the pathetic remnants of something created 25 years ago which is barely hanging on for dear life.

Everything is on one of the half dozen social media sites. People don’t make websites just because. Forums are dead. The internet is a completely different soulless thing. If it ain’t on Facebook or X or TikTok, it might as well not exist.

This video summed it up a bit better than the article did,

The Golden Age of the Internet Is Over :

https://youtu.be/OU6CuSMzNus?si=3Yht9MSZWkZoMnc2

My reply was referring to...

"The internet isn't fun anymore" and "We're getting old" which I highlighted both in my reply.

$tEvil

[ijwthstd]

Sure it is

[BernieTaupson]

My reply was referring to...

"The internet isn't fun anymore" and "We're getting old" which I highlighted both in my reply.

$tEvil

What fuckin songs are you playing in Thailand in two weeks?

[GoodJudge]

That article took a long time to say "get off my lawn".

Older guy complaining about young people's slang = not groovy, daddio. And also a cliché that was probably doing the rounds in ancient Rome.
People who grow up with something on tap don't treat it in the same way as the original early adopters? Who'd have thunk it?! Another dull cliché.

And despite that headline, he admits "And yet zoomers — and the adolescents in Generation Alpha nipping at their generational heels — still seem to be having plenty of fun online. Even if I find it all inscrutable and a bit irritating, the creative expression and exuberant sociality that made the internet so “fun” to me a decade ago are booming among 20- somethings". In other words: things have changed, I don't understand it so I don't like it, I want the internet the way it used to be.

The cry of boring conservatives everywhere.

[Metal Heart]

Max is correct. I present Exhibit A. His above ramblings.

Have to quote six pages of text to add one sentence, fuckwit?

Yes. It was part of the point I was making. You were the dipshit that posted it.

[BernieTaupson]

Yes. It was part of the point I was making. You were the dipshit that posted it.

Learn what an ellipsis is, motherfucka!

[jens]

Max Read but I didn't, gtfo with your ramblings.

[MetalSludgeCEO]

My reply was referring to...

"The internet isn't fun anymore" and "We're getting old" which I highlighted both in my reply.

$tEvil

What fuckin songs are you playing in Thailand in two weeks?

Are you going?

I can't wait.... likely a few (3-4-5) TUFF songs, and a handful of covers.

$tEvil

[Love_Industry]

Now EVERYTHING is commercialised and homegrown sites like that don’t exist anymore, unless it’s the pathetic remnants of something created 25 years ago which is barely hanging on for dear life.

Everything is on one of the half dozen social media sites. People don’t make websites just because. Forums are dead. The internet is a completely different soulless thing.

Exactly, but it's not really expected to stay DIY and fun forever. Nothing is. It's almost three decades since Netscape was launched so the web is well into the maturity stage. It's where mail order and print newspapers were in 1990. Stable, mature, a bit boring, used by old people like us and dominated by a few giants who survived the early days with their boom and bust cycles.

[Jason Jennifer Leigh]

Everything does suck doesn’t it.

I don’t think we’ll have to worry about it after 2024 ..the end is very near.

[BernieTaupson]

Yes, for you!

[El Vampiro Blanco]

My reply was referring to...

"The internet isn't fun anymore" and "We're getting old" which I highlighted both in my reply.

$tEvil

What fuckin songs are you playing in Thailand in two weeks?

Are you going?

I can't wait.... likely a few (3-4-5) TUFF songs, and a handful of covers.

$tEvil

Wish I could.
Whilst when I was young, money was an issue in travelling to far locations, now it is more like how to get time off from work, who can watch the cats, look after the parents, take care of the fish tanks etc etc.
Haven't left the country in over a year now.
Have fun in Thailand....

[BernieTaupson]

He was asking me, dipshit!

[Ziggy Sawdust]

Well the days of Ebaums World and MSN chat rooms are long gone, and killed off by the age of waving smart phones at concerts.