This didn’t just start now. It’s been fading for over a decade. I remember when every forum had its own look, strange layouts, unique colors, and a vibe you couldn’t really describe but you felt it.

Now everything feels the same. Same layout, same font, same clean boxy design. Sites copy each other. AI just made it more obvious, but the soul started slipping away long before that

I remember usenet where every forum was exactly the same and it was still better than today, so I’m not convinced this is a fundamental symptom of our current problems. To me it’s more that the internet has lost any sort of physical, spatial, kinetic quality. There’s no time or place, no nooks and crannies to disappear into with friends. Just an unyielding cacophony. I agree it’s all undifferentiated but it’s not the aesthetics that are the problem for me.

I think the issue is optimization. As these sites have grown more efficient at gaining and exploiting (like a natural resource) users for money, they’ve optimized away mechanisms people used to form community and such. Moving to a feed of recommendations instead of a feed of people you follow is an easy example, but there must be a thousand little examples like that.

Fundamentally, if the goal is to make money, then that’s what will be optimized for, and in this case that goal appears to be in conflict with the formation and maintenance of community. It was just a matter of time.

I was thinking about this the other night - everything is more fun until it becomes professionalised too much. In this case, professionalisation is synonymous with optimisation for engagement.

Motorsports, video games, chatting online, working in a warehouse - all things that are loads more fun to do when someone isn't seeking to eke out more and more marginal gains.

Yeah, I see this all over. Every hobby becomes a question of how to get better at it, not of how to enjoy it more. Even if you enjoy your craft and growing your skills, the internet presents you with infinitely many well-trodden paths, completely robbing you of any sense of ownership. Instead of being here and now, possessing agency in a particular moment, you're just a dot in the bottom-left quadrant of some enormous scatter graph. It's the total perspective vortex.

Yeah, maybe you’re right. Could be nostalgia playing tricks on me. I just remember how exciting it felt to join a new forum, or discover something like eMule, Sababa DC, or random p2p tools.

Everything felt raw and full of possibility. Even if a lot of it looked the same, it didn’t feel the same. There was this sense of exploring something alive.

It's possible that various Discord servers, or obscure streamer chatrooms still feel like this, and we're just old. But it definitely feels like the default has become very top-down and public instead of bottom-up and intimate.

I think the difference there is streamers are just there to get money from their audiences. Doing something they like sure, but a vast majority are trying to make a living. That has a different context entirely.

I think there's an extremely long tail of streamers and associated chat communities that are untroubled by any form of financial rewards. When I speak to people in those communities it sounds to me like the closest thing to IRC in the 90s - tight-knit groups with regular comings together at specific times and places, being their whole selves with each other.

"Context collapse"? The phenomenon that, no matter where you go and what the nominal topic of discussion is, it always comes back to US politics.

It's more a thing of the masses now when in the earlier days on average more smart people used it.

It's funny, I generally agree with you, but this reminds me of old people complaining about rock music. Maybe the cacophony is the point, it's not to our taste, and we don't get it. But maybe it's also less and less our world anymore.

I imagine it's less about "rock music" and more about the disappearance of "bands" from the mainstream. Almost every charting artist now is solo and makes pop music, which greatly limits the variety available to listeners, and encourages labels to push copycat acts because they feel those are the only ones worth taking a risk on. The Oasis reunion is an example of this: they are a band selling out arenas and pocketing millions performing songs from the previous century, and facing little in the way of competition because bands like them are largely extinct.

You don't think it's because wealthy older folks are nostalgic for their youth and have money to spend?

Seems like there is plenty of variety, just nobody telling everyone what specifically to listen to.

> I remember usenet where every forum was exactly the same

alt.confident.assertion.question.doubt.disagree

;)

This was in reply to a post about visual design of different forums.

My memory of this was Facebook overtaking MySpace

I remember being 13-years-old and completely baffled people preferred the platform where I had no say over the HTML on my page.

I didn’t understand how people could prefer a boilerplate with profile picture and name over an actual artefact made by the person.

I loved Myspace. You could talk directly to bands members (At least the unknown punk bands I was following back then)

Once they lost all the pre-2016 content, I think that was it. Hard to make a comeback after something like this

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/18/myspace-l...

It's a long shot, but you might find some resources here:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Myspace

You can still do that on Instagram

I guess you didn't have a lot of friends that would make their text white, on a yellow background, with autoplaying music. Then sprinkle in some blinking and/or moving text to make it even harder to read.

I think there could have been a nice middle ground with more "tasteful" customization that would have still left plenty of room for individuality, but nobody built it before Facebook totally took over.

Yeah, too many MySpace pages would drag your browser to a crawl or outright crash it. Facebook's uncluttered interface was a breath of fresh air at the time.

It has turned from a library into a shopping mall. Anything that is not totally bland and mainstream would only pose a risk to sales.

I think it's more that they built a shopping mall around the library. Web hosting is cheaper and more accessible than ever, so the small quirky websites that existed in the 90s can, and probably do, exist today as well.

Accessible web hosting was when your internet plan gave you access to a web bucket by default, and when the average internet user needed a computer to go online. The default Internet-connected device now is a locked down phone that barely lets you write to your own storage in an exportable text file format.

As a counterpoint, have you seen Stack Overflows proposed new brandings and redesigns? Pretty wild colour choices.

With CSS and JS Libraries I can create a 'good' looking and usable web interface in minutes.

You still have Straight Dope for realtalk and RPGCodex for shitposting.

Besides that, there’s Reddit. They’re all vastly different and are essentially discussion boards.

What faded were the obscure or niche ones where discussions simply didn’t invite enough people.

Lowering the voting age to 16 makes sense on paper. Many people at that age work, pay taxes, and take on real responsibilities. But let’s be honest, parties don’t push changes like this unless they believe it gives them an electoral edge

They are not legally adults.

* They are restricted in what jobs they do, and are supposed to be either in education or doing apprenticeships or similar

* They cannot drive until they are 17

* They cannot purchase alcohol, knives and many other things

* They cannot get married

* They cannot get tattoos

Its very much that they think it will favour them. I think it might very well not do so - while they will net vote for Labour its not by a huge margin and its changing. I wonder whether the government are overly influenced by the huge margin they enjoy with privileged people in that age group - i.e. the ones they meet.

To me at least, the argument that young people face great restrictions (even if many of those restrictions might be intended for their benefit) doesn't justify not giving them a voice, or a seat at the table.

"So if democracy is so great, and voting rights are so important, why don't you let us vote on anything that matters to us?"

"So taxation without representation... that's like me, right?"

"So if universal suffrage is important, are people like me included in the universe?"

"So we can (in the UK) potentially join the army or navy at 16, and possibly die in dangerous training or even fighting in a war, but we don't get to vote?"

> Let's see... 16 year olds in the UK can potentially join the army or navy (and perhaps die fighting in a war)

No combat until 18.

s/fighting in a war/in an attack by militants/

Under-18s in the UK military, while able to enlist with parental consent from age 16, are not legally permitted to be deployed to combat operations outside the UK or where there is a risk of exposure to hostilities.

pensioners are legally adults but , they don't work thus don't pay taxes, they dont drive some of them, and getting tattoos is kinda weird for them. why do they get to vote

UK pensions are subject to income tax, if you're receiving more than the annual tax free allowance.

That's half the story - there was tax relief paying in, and many view paying tax on your pension as deferred tax

In most jurisdictions (especially at a national level) the changes that elected officials enact usually don't affect the population for at least another 12-16 months after voters cast their ballots.

If they have jobs, they pay taxes, right?

Depends on how much income they get.

Under 16s also pay income taxes in they have income. They also pay various other taxes such as VAT. Non-citizens pay taxes but do not get to vote.

The general expectation is that they should be in full time education or training until they are 18.

All that makes "a minority of people in this age group pay taxes" a very weak argument for giving all of them the vote.

There's no rule that says that, in fact the rules in the UK are that you can pay people below minimum wage if they're under a certain age.

I think there are also some tax incentives that are designed to make employers more friendly to the idea of hiring a young workforce - all to offset the "cost" of training people, but of course this is just used by mega-corps to have a perpetual stream of extremely cheap labour for frontline staff. (Argos, McDonalds).

So it's possible that not only do they not pay tax, that also their employment is partially subsidised by tax.

Even if below the income tax threshold, they might still be above the Class 1 NICs threshold (which is £250 or thereabouts).

But no matter how low their earnings, all employees must be registered for PAYE from age 16 onwards and will receive an annual P60, as well as a P45 when they leave.

That is irrelevant. If a 5-year old wins some competition, they will pay taxes on that money. That doesn't mean we should give 5-year olds the vote, does it? Also, plenty of non-tax related laws apply to children - why should they not get to vote on Education or Healthcare, for example?

Also, while some 16-year olds work and pay taxes, the majority do not. So a blanket right to vote is not justified even by this strange criterion.

- Are the merits of the change not more important?

- Couldn't you argue parties don't promote changes like this to protect their interests too?

> Many people at that age work, pay taxes

Not in the UK, particularly England. With the requirement to remain in education/do an apprenticeship/perform a mixture of work and part time education (in England), combined with our the personal allowance, very very few 16-18 year olds pay any tax or national insurance.

According to ChatGPT, data from the ONS in 2021 shows the average weekly earnings for 16-17 year olds was about £160, well below the personal allowance and NI thresholds

>No. But engineers who learn to work with LLMs will most probably outpace those who don’t.

I think that in a few years, programmers who wrote code before this 'AI era' (or whatever we will name it) will have an edge over those who were “born” into it. It’s a bit like learning to drive a manual before switching to automatic. You build a deeper connection with the machine. You feel how things work under the hood, Which makes you a better driver, even when the car starts doing most of the work for you

Not sure why you are banned but you can always try to appeal:

https://www.reddit.com/appeals

Each subreddit has its own rules listed in the sidebar, so make sure you check those. What’s allowed in one community might be completely off-limits in another, even if it follows Reddit’s general guidelines

This doesn't work though. I was banned there without as much as a single-line explanation after 10+ years of being a normal rule-abiding user which didn't change even up to that point. Maximum stuff they might not like I did is visiting through a proxy due to my country's circumstances. Right after that I tried appeals daily nearly for a week with no reaction whatsoever. So I just deleted my acc, less value for them is better.

Thank you for that. Yes I did fill out that form. I only realised the shadow ban several months after it was implemented. The clues were not being able to update user handle, server error thrown when accessing profile, content suppression. So it's serverwide. I've decided to move on. I closed my account.

Interesting read. I don’t have kids yet, but the author’s experience seems to come from a time when kids spent more time playing and interacting with each other, not glued to screens. These days a lot of young kids are on devices from a really early age, and from what I hear from friends who do have kids, many parents don’t pay much attention to that. So I’m not sure the idea that kids will just naturally learn to read still holds the same way. The environment has changed a lot

Nice idea. But honestly, what I'd really want is a script that tracks how many times it said "absolutely right" when it was actually just hallucinating

and how do you detect hallucinations?

I’ve got a friend who sends me happy birthday wishes using Suno. I hate it. I love the friend though.

It feels a bit like watching an old movie where the scene drags for no reason and the background’s kinda off, but you still enjoy it. Then you go watch Netflix and everything is smooth, predictable, perfect, and somehow super boring.

I honestly like your version more, with all its imperfections. Feels more alive.

> I hate it. I love the friend though.

Have you mentioned it to them? Presumably you can be honest about it with such a friend. I’m curious as to how the conversation went and what you both learned.

Yeah, he knows. We just laughed about how cringe we are. For his last birthday I downloaded our entire chat history, ran it through Claude, and sent him a visual of our most used words. I also added a few of the funniest lines we’ve had (It wasn’t actually that funny by normal standards, just to be clear)

Honestly, I have no idea how that’s birthday-related but we both enjoy it