Why do people leave ILX for good?

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.

I can't figure out, after all these years, where people congregate on twitter, like, how you find "the conversation" and not just people typing how they feel about something. all I use it for is keeping up with the politics of my neighborhood, where it's pretty informative. but not people chatting with buds or whatever.

it seems really alienating

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

― Trϵϵship

"independent" will lose to "organized" any day of the week

My poorly researchd theory is that sociability, in the form of friends and family nattering on about their lives, seems to be much harder to monetize than viral memes, so that each successive internet vehicle for socializing is colonized first by teenagers (who are at the most intensely sociable age) who use it exclusively for exchanges with friends, then they rapidly grow to the point of economic viability and issue an IPO, after which they slowly morph into overheated engines for distributing corporate content, viral memes and bot-driven politics.

When ILX issues an IPO, I'm outta here.

maybe you just can't find them?

There must be more individual web pages than people on earth, multiple times over. Finding an interesting blog among the 493,766 hits on your casual web search is rather difficult.

Quick bit of a search reveals: "Google says that the web now has 30 trillion unique individual pages."

that's disgusting

And that's not counting the 77 borad

tabula rasa!

wikipedia is bad and indicative of what made online community’s early days so frustrating but that’s a separate thread

once the "pros" got involved, for whom it was a job, it quickly became unfun.

this is obviously the right answer to 'how has the internet got worse'

wikipedia is one of the best websites

Wikipedia's shortcomings are similar to any other encyclopedia's shortcomings, but not exactly the same. Its great weakness is dilettantism. Its greatest strength is the obvious one; the breadth of subject matter it addresses extends far beyond any previous encyclopedia ever published by orders of magnitude, while it remains easy to search.

I quite like Momus's latest 'Open University episode on 'Computers':
https://youtu.be/eqhW-8NJd44

where he identifies the introduction of the iPhone as the moment when the internet became 'finger food'/fast food, and the quality of content became degraded (from around 16:00 onwards).

Momus you say

it also has psychotic admins who want to separate out “women _______” while not being as obsessively fastidious about filtering their male counterparts from the all-gender listings. (i know from personal experience.) also its lack of information on cultural phenomena that fall outside nerd “culture”’s straight white guy purview is galling.

xp

Momus otm.

I think it has a lot to do with what the technology people are using makes possible and encourages. When we were all using desktop PCs, it was natural to both read longform and do a lot of typing.

On phones, where everyone is, many of them for hours a day, both of those are just a bit harder to do than they were before. Conversely, it’s easier than it ever was to take and make photos and videos. So naturally that’s the stuff that gets made and consumed. All the action now is in Instagram and TikTok and Snap, not in forums or blogs. What typing is left is as short as possible, hence the Twitter hellmouth.

(This also combines with the always-with-you-ness of phones. People used to (sometimes) turn their PCs off and return to their physical spaces. Now it’s very easy to spend your whole existence with a foot in both worlds. No wonder it’s unpleasant: we are closer than ever before to all of everything of everybody. It’s like moving into the world’s shittest commune and not even having a bedroom door. Who wants to add to the chorus when they’re already enveloped in millions of voices?)

Curating your internet content is the newish curating your music before the internet. Time consuming to be selective and not just consume what is thrown your way.

I say this also because I know a lot of record collectors who got into wine because there are a lot of transferable skills: attention to production, pressings, labels, allotments and cruising of stores to find gems.

It’s like moving into the world’s shittest commune and not even having a bedroom door.

upvoted this

No wonder it’s unpleasant: we are closer than ever before to all of everything of everybody.
this is suuuuuper otm
looking at/reading what other people complain about is one of the most depressing ways to spend one's time

xp stet, I always feel frustrated that the smartphone era ended up being about information consumption, not about communication. It frustrates me that I cannot buy a handheld device that I can use for convenient >160 chars communication. And yeah I post more on ilx since I bought a laptop. For the last decade I felt confident that the tide would turn. And, in fact, the collapse of tablets in the marketplace are a glimmer of that possibility. But clearly we're not there yet...

xp when my brother in law was getting his PhD one committee prof was a huge audiophile and another was a huge oenophile; they kind of hated each other and would often end up in fighting about why their esoteric and expensive hobby was great while the other’s esoteric and expensive hobby was a scam and pointless waste of time.

maura otm abt wikipedia, its shortcomings go way beyond dilettanteism (though it remains massively useful if you are conscious abt what you are consuming). there's a great ilx post abt this, maybe a whole thread... gimme a sec.

ugh can't find it, maybe googleproofed thread or something..... it was an ilxor (maybe you, maura!) doing this sentence by sentence takedown of an entry on slavery in the united states, how the milktoast compromise language was effectively adding up to an apologia for slavery. really revealing, even more than e.g. how every single star trek episode gets an entry while no mary tyler moore ones do (or whatever).

found it, rushomancy itt: The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

i can write the mary tyler moore pages if it will improve things

So this is now the “why is the internet bad” thread?

Old Lunch OTM on that thread.

Using Wikipedia as anything other than a starting point for further research/inquiry has always been problematic at the very least.

― Transformed From The Norm By The Nuclear Goop (Old Lunch), Monday, February 6, 2017 1:01 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Didn't know about this, though:

it also has psychotic admins who want to separate out “women _______” while not being as obsessively fastidious about filtering their male counterparts from the all-gender listings. (i know from personal experience.)

found it, rushomancy itt: The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

― |Restore| |Restart| |Quit| (Doctor Casino)

hahahaha i don't even remember writing that, cool :)

"Didn't know about this, though:

it also has psychotic admins who want to separate out “women _______” while not being as obsessively fastidious about filtering their male counterparts from the all-gender listings. (i know from personal experience.)

― Locked in silent monologue, in silent scream (Sund4r)"

yeah wikipedia has serious governance issues when you start looking at how the sausage is made, it's to their credit that even with all the bullshit going on behind the scenes wikipedia is still probably the best site on the internet

i know el sandifer had strong criticisms of wikipedia that seem reasonably well-founded particularly re: transphobia

re: mtm:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuckles_Bites_the_Dust

having said that there are literally two mary tyler moore show episodes with their own pages, as opposed to, say, the first forty-two episodes of M*A*S*H and many thereafter, so i think the argument does still hold water

isn't this more to do with which fan base is interested in making episode pages? mary tyler moore fans probably are more at peace with the passage of time and don't feel a need to fetishistically document everything

i'm sure there is tons of gender bias in wikipedia just don't know about that data point

editing wikipedia articles is pretty fun imo

treesh, that's my point - wiki's coverage is inevitably lopsided towards things that have not just people interested in them, but people who are tech-savvy, internet-battle-inclined, and obsessive. that's going to produce comparatively benign distortions, like suggesting star trek was a more popular or significant show than mtm, but obviously bigger ones as well. doesn't mean the whole project is worthless but def means that wiki-literacy includes having to take these grains of salt with one's browsing.

ah, gotcha

sentence by sentence takedown of an entry on slavery in the united states, how the milktoast compromise language was effectively adding up to an apologia for slavery.

I have not done the necessary research, but I would be surprised if any printed encyclopedia in English ever included an article on the US history of slavery that amounted to a scathing rebuke aimed at everyone who participated in or apologized for that cruel and morally criminal institution.

history textbooks have some issues, especially in conservative states

http://www.keranews.org/post/american-slavery-isnt-taught-well-schools-texas-or-across-us-report-says