I dunno, it seems like there's some truth to it.
It isn't all new and exciting anymore. Everybody is on the web so being on-line is nothing to impress your classmates with.
Writing a program that did something interesting or typing in some HTML that actually worked used to be impressive. A show off to your friends. Now those friends make some better code doing some clicks here or there and walk away yawning.
Worst of all, you post a nice pic of your cat and the day later you find 5687 replies with cuter cat pics . . . sigh
this line is spot on: "Where once we’d had a rich ecosystem of extremely stupid and funny sites on which we might procrastinate, we now had only Twitter and Facebook."
still on Flickr, where he was friends with
sjonsvenson and
DBlume and
pastilla... and Nari and Zannah and lots of other people who are not active there anymore.
commenting on this very topic on LiveJournal today... where he was friends with
sjonsvenson (who is still there, posting every day) and
DBlume and
pastilla and Nari and Zannah and lot of other people who are not active there anymore.
manages to waste plenty of time online, and has fun doing so, but it's more of a challenge these days. Most of the forums of which I was a member are gone. But there are still a few specialty forums, which, on a good day, have up to half a dozen new posts!
Yeah, half a dozen. Remember when specialty forums got HUNDREDS of posts a day?
does not work with computers, so maybe it's easier for me to have fun online. Or maybe I'm stuck in a paleozoic version of the online universe.
mega-, rather than micro-, blogging at this point with these comments, isn't he? Anyway, that line about the guy becoming his dad when he found himself typing news sites into his search bar was funny, too. Except, dude, your dad would probably pick up a newspaper, not type in a web search.
anyway... hi! How're ya doin'? What's your online hangout of choice these days? (I was trying to remember the other day where you said you post your militant humanist diatribes... or something like that. I'm sure they are both insightful and amusing.)
and, of course, PHONES! Phones are the "fun" online time-waster of today. Nobody types searches into desktop browers anymore, do they? At least, none of the cool people. Time-wasting fun is now in the palm of your hand.
old school BBS forums would be a pain to read and to navigate on a phone-sized screen. (See comment on other Plurk about eyeglasses....
)
phones are not good for web-ing . . . Well, my Nokia 6020 isn't
I do not own a cell phone anymore. Imagine that.
I still have my cell phone, but I intentionally deleted Facebook and Plurk from it.
Our dads were fortunate to experience the serendipity of unexpectedly interesting articles in the newspaper.
websites are hellbent on surfacing posts that they think you'll engage with, so it's always the same bait. Not something completely out of your domain.
necro-ing this old Plurk, the same way he sometimes necros old posts on forums. Update a year later: I'm still active on a few toy photo forums where there are still, as noted above, a half-dozen or more unique new posts per day!
still having fun on these forums, and, as the article writer reminisced about, I still find them an escape from reality.
found a few people... again, that magic half-dozen number... who are alive and well and still posting on Flickr on a regular basis, even as Flickr's price has gone up and quality of service has gone down.