Why do people leave ILX for good?

we can make ilx good again by adding avatars, post signatures and an upvote/downvote system

I mean what an I supposed to do....work?

― The Poppy Bush AutoZone (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

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For many shows, the Status Quo Is God. No matter what happens in a given episode or arc, somehow, things go back to the way things used to be by the end. However, there are series that have the guts to break this pattern — to seriously change their premise, or at least to shake up major parts of their story, and really mean it. No Reset Buttons, no Snap Backs, no way to restore the comfortable status quo. Nothing Is The Same Anymore is Exactly What It Says on the Tin — the setting, or the characters' situation, has changed significantly and irrevocably, for better or for worse, and now the characters have to deal with it.

The trick is to do it without Jumping the Shark, which can be a difficult task.

As there isn't an easy out if it all goes wrong, the writers tend to have to resort to desperate measures like All Just a Dream to attempt to undo the damage should things go pear-shaped and are rejected by audiences. This rarely goes well, and can even result in a Franchise Killer. Pretty much the only hope is a well-executed Continuity Reboot.
See also Game Changer, Wham Episode, Freak Out!, Post-Script Season, Breaking the Fellowship, Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome, and Ascended Fridge Horror.

we can make ilx good again by adding avatars, post signatures and an upvote/downvote system

no.

i forgot Facebook integration and the chance to give ilx gold to particularly accomplished posts

you've earned a trophy!

one month without a flagged post

I kind of wish you could upload small temporary pics directly to ilx. But that's probably because I wanted to post a pic of my dog.

I never thought cutty was mean.

bg oozing for a bruising

kind of wish you could upload small temporary pics directly to ilx

you can upload small temporary pics to the internet and then post them on an ILX thread, which is exactly the same procedure as uploading a picture to ILX and then posting it on a thread would be

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/arts/the-end-of-endings.html

The mutually assured feedback loop between Twitter and cable news has suspended us in a kind of informational purgatory. As the BuzzFeed news reporter Joe Bernstein put it recently: “One amazing thing about being alive today is the constant electric sensation of bad things coming to a head that never resolves but still maintains its tension over time.” The algorithmic “timeline” — which does not show tweets in chronological order but instead boosts the most attention-sucking posts — has corroded the sense of even the passage of time. Tweets from hours and days before mysteriously resurface to haunt the present. Facebook creates a similar sensation in one’s personal life: Recently I found that every time I logged in, the first post I’d see was a tribute video to an acquaintance’s dead dog, over and over again.

a tribute video to an acquaintance’s dead dog, over and over again

If you want a picture of the future...

Today I learned that calzino should stop biting the postman.

(Sorry about your dog, man)

I used to be a thread starter, but I doubt I've started as many threads this year as I did in Nov 2013..

At this point, the internet for me is basically ILX and baseballcardvandals.com. Don't really know what else anyone would want/need.

I get a lot more actual reading of actual books done these days, so three cheers for the internet's senescence on that front.

I don't know if this is really the right thread ask, but could someone expound on how the internet has gotten worse? I mean, aside from the ascendance of Twitter/FB/Instagram?

Was there something of the good internet that simply no longer exists? I mean, there are still good websites. Is it something to do with actual good blogs being replaced (and, I guess, eventually decimated or even destroyed) by microblogging?

Is it that Google search simply doesn't lead you to the good stuff anymore (which, in itself, would have a severely delitirious on the existence and creation of good stuff)?

we're all old now and trump won

Xp

People just like to complain

We’re also the same troll cru but ilx’s collective soul got old and furry

IT'S NOT THE PROCESS IT'S THE PEOPLE

I would also like to deprecate the following things I enjoyed 10 years ago but am currently disillusioned with :

there are some thoughts here, i think:

Internet nostalgia
remember the 90s and internet nostalgia

i think that there are two things going on that mutually reinforce each other and ultimately result in less of an incentive for everyday normal people (as opposed to internet companies) to post good original "content". or in other words, my sense is that the earlier days of the internet fostered more production of content, while we have long since shifted to consuming content that others create. and in a related development, there is less original content and more rearrangement and aggregation of previously published work.

the first factor is that now there's already SO much out there. there's so much out there that a necessary first step to making something is to take a look at what everyone else has done. posting new content often devolves into an aggregation exercise, or digging up info on something that has been "lost" (which of course means that it was made by someone in the first place). these are all old complaints, beyond the internet, i know. it's part of getting older, also, and becoming familiar with certain ideas and hobbies - you learn that so much of what you think is your own idea has actually been exhaustively explored in the past. but there really was a golden age of the internet when you could literally be the first person to make a website about a certain topic, or to blog about a certain thing, or to convert a basic IRL idea or project into an internet version. that era ended relatively quickly but something about it reverberated for long afterward, imo. i still think of the internet as that kind of magical place, even though it's no longer like that.

the second has to do with how new internet content is typically discovered and shared these days. google, facebook, twitter. reddit. aggregators. search engine optimization. the algorithms, all that shit. when norms (like me) make "content" and post it, it disappears. you need to have the mindset of a public relations firm in order to emerge above the internet bedlam for even a moment. or have a connection at a gatekeeper publication or internet influencer. the early internet was exciting because the power of the gatekeepers was diminished. now their power is back, and in some cases even more consolidated (the gatekeeper for the gatekeepers is facebook, for example). this creates an incentive to produce things that will do "well" on social media. i'm not sure what exactly i mean by that, but it seems right (anyone agree with any of this? am i losing it?).

these two things seem to be at odds at each other. if there's so much stuff out there that it's hard to breathe, and there are presumably people out there creating the content, then why does the internet suck? because it's harder to make something is truly new because so much of it has been done before, and it's almost impossible to find an audience without working within the channels of the internet gatekeepers. all of this favors aggregation and recycling of existing content. further, the people that work within the system of gatekeepers now have very useful analytics on what their customers (you and i) like to read and click on the most, so they naturally tend to produce more of what has been successful for them in the past. this all leads to a circling of the drain, the feeling that you're visiting the same 4 or 5 tabs over and over again, reading about the same thing you read about a few years ago to see what has changed.

(and even as i write that really disorganized, self-contradicting post, i know that there's probably an article on WIRED or somewhere else that tackles the same exact issue much more effectively. so why did i take the time to write it when i could have just linked to it? etc)

as if i didn't shit all over this thread enough already, there's also the idea that the good internet still exists and is out there for those that know how to find it - it's barely perceptible through the constant noise of the corporate internet. i imagine the old internet being overlaid by robert moses superhighways, right on top, or like the cities in sci-fi novels where the megacities are built directly on top of the slums in the shadows beneath .

living in Austin in the late 90s toward the end of its halcyon days, it seemed one out of every ten cars had a "Don't Move Here" bumper sticker. seemed a little smug to me at the time, but in retrospect there was probably more legitimate fear behind that sentiment than I recongnized. And that fear was warranted -- the overall feel of the Austin has been lost. you can still find good bars, bands, people, but you have to weed through all the chaff which will be shoved in your face first

i feel like the idea that fb controls whether or not ppl get to access good internet content is a defeatist and tbh incorrect view

the first factor is that now there's already SO much out there

i actually feel like the opposite is true now. i mean it’s trivially true that there is more now than ever before, but i feel like lots of obvious good content just isn’t being made anymore. maybe it’s behind a paywall somewhere

well, of course i didn't say that facebook has TOTAL control over the internet, or that there is zero good content out there (if it came off that way, i really didn't mean to).

but it's silly to pretend like they don't have a huge influence over what is published on their platform. for example, remember the experience of the last two years, when, famously, news organizations large and small across the world fired their writers so they could "pivot to video", all based upon video analytics from facebook that ended up being completely false? oops!

"it was always already bad, as were the places we all arrived from"

my first foray onto the internet was on a HTAFC yahoo groups email list moderated by an unfortunately passed now and beautiful person called Jeannie who was old disabled lady who charmed everyone she met (serious rip she was lovely and I met her irl a few times). My brother posted on it as Goatboy, just to show what an edgy Bill Hicks fan he was. My bette noir poster on there was this uber middle class type who had his own consultancy business address on all his emails as if to say: "I'm the massive me, who the fuck are you, pleb" and he was the resident supercilious prick. This person was arrested and charged with the top tier of worst online paedos during Operation Ore. Anyway I got kicked off the list for calling him a "fucking repugnant nonce". Not good really, Jeannie pointed out that it was personalised abuse and seeing as I'd always argued with him - so it was also quite opportunistically cynical abuse as well!

My lesson learned was: despite how bad I was back then, everyone else was equally bad and still are, but I'm still even worse now, and so is the internet and everyone!

i actually feel like the opposite is true now. i mean it’s trivially true that there is more now than ever before, but i feel like lots of obvious good content just isn’t being made anymore.

i'm not talking about more and more stuff being made every day than ever before (although i'm sure that's true). i'm talking about the summation of what has already been published on virtually any topic that isn't today's breaking news.

i mean, like do a google search for, say "the origin of macaroni and cheese". and forget about the wikipedia entry. there are dozens of things that people have written, from every angle, that immediately pop up. that wasn't always true. it doesn't mean that no one can ever write about the origins of macaroni and cheese again, but it does make doing so more and more pointless as time goes on. easier to just link to an older article or quote from it.

the amount of things ever done has been weakly increasing forever, don’t see how that constant long term accrual can explain a sudden shift in quality of the web

thinking more about young ppl here, the internet as a medium for longform expression also seems to have vanished and that sucks

https://youtu.be/afam2nIae4o

Weird thing is the thing i was scared of the most clicking on that link was being rick rolled

xps - Screens aren't very well-adapted to the long form reading experience and largest percentage of the population, at least from what I see in the USA, resist reading much of anything regardless of the medium, let alone 'long form' written material. An audience of users on full-color graphics-oriented screens automatically promotes visual/audio content over purely written content.

https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ

sunnuva

It was over for me when Usenet died, really.

There's a way in which Usenet was a sort of analogue of capitalism, in that the whole thing was driven along by this explosive sense of growth which gave the illusion that it could go on forever. When the growth slowed, there was no point to it anymore. Because it was a race, a race against an exponentially growing tide of crap. We lost that race on Usenet, and I guess we're going to lose it on the rest of the Internet too. There are places that are good as information resources, but as a means of communication? Forget it! There's just not a lot of joy for me in spending time around other people online, no matter how smart, funny, charismatic they are, there's this looming background sense of No Good Can Come Of This.

(n.b. that is the first time i've seen that Who video and I watched it 6 times in a row and 2:11 tbh)

would you describe that as research tho :p

karl malone is pretty otm. the fact that facebook has become a de facto aol - only you’re paying with your personal data instead of $19.95 or whatever a month - has been ruinous. buzzfeed’s “more content at all times” imperative has been copied by lesser sites who know how to underpay writers just enough and game platforms’ systems (whenever i search something and get bustle or pinterest results first i sigh) so they can monopolize the first through nth page of search results. at the same time that buzzfeed imperative has made it much easier for “weird internet” stuff to become “a thing” for just long enough to persuade those things’ creators to get and stay in a niche with ever diminishing returns.

i also feel like animated gifs and their limited language can be traced to these market conditions. search any term on giphy and it’ll inevitably turn into a matrix of kardashian and anime images. the winner take all model of the economy is definitely mirrored by the way platforms work now.

the way that editors’ fear of metrics has made users (or bots or whatever)) de facto assignment editors has only gotten worse over the last decade. let me tell you about the time i had to quit a job because i, an arts reporter, refused to write an explainer of the “vaccination debate” because jenny mccarthy shot off her mouth... even though the employer was a newspaper with not only a science section but a whole consumer-facing sure ABOUT THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY*. garbage begets garbage, for garbage traffic.

* which has its own problems sure but at least its writers are informed on the topic.

let me tell you about the time i had to quit a job because i, an arts reporter, refused to write an explainer of the “vaccination debate” because jenny mccarthy shot off her mouth..

Good god that's fucked up

yeah well if you read any site out there you’ll see people with less leverage than me writing crap because it’s all they are told to write

*consumer-facing site

i wonder why all of the garbage content online hasn't led to a backlash in terms of independent blogs?

Because most ppl love garbage

Same as ever

yeah I mean the internet was fun (& is still fun) when it's not "monetized content" but once the "pros" got involved, for whom it was a job, it quickly became unfun. obv I don't begrudge the writers who just want to make a buck, but the amateurs in the golden age were just so much more interesting. but expecting "content" for free is lame, I know. it would be great if people made good money with jobs where they developed some particular expertise & had enough leisure time outside of work to create websites using that expertise. this is what at least academics should be doing.

& really, Wikipedia is an amazing amazing amazing thing that represents the best of the old web, even though we all kinda put it down a lot of the time.

this isn't about why people leave ILX, though, which I suspect comes down to losing touch with the community here, such as it is. I've never been here for the community, but rather to have a place to talk about music, so I don't see myself leaving. ILX plays both functions, a place to chat with buds & a place to talk about particular subjects without whoever. the former purpose I guess gets served by twitter or whatever, but ILX remains good for the latter, and since I don't care much about the former function, I'm happy enough still posting here.

twitter is straight vicious compared to here

people communicate there, it seems, by means of scathing takedowns. i would drown over there.