Hexbear is the last fun place on the internet
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i haven’t finished reading every last HTML page on marxists.org yet
Relevant relevant meme
I hate how gameification and memification has seaped into our everyday language too. Getting new skills is not “respecing”, graduation isn’t “leveling up”, life isn’t a videogame. It’s like we can’t even say coffee - cofefe isn’t funny anymore people.
oldmanyellingatcloud.jpg
MY LIFE IS LIKE A BIDEO BAME TRYING TO BEAT THE STAGE WHILE COLLECTING COOOOOINS
It is a conspiracy theory, but the way everything feels like copypasted crap really makes the Dead Internet Theory feel plausible.
the internet does feel a lot more corporate than it did 10 years ago and especially 20 years ago. That sucks a lot of the fun out of it. Making money off of the internet was barely even a thing 15 years ago.
The peak of the internet was Friendster, Geocities, MySpace, and the chat with a random stranger button on ICQ
Hexbear is the last fun place on the internet
I dunno what we are in now but the old web was better. 1.0 sucked. 2.0 was good though. You had all these nich communities bubbling with energy and ideas. Now it is just reddit and psyops and comodification.
Hexbears should help expand our creativity on the web, by taking inspiration from NeoCities (successor to GeoCities). Not everything has to be sterile and bland and boring. I’d even like to be able to customize our profile pages more than just things like the banner and profile picture. I mean, just look at how much life can be breathed into a site with so much flexibility. Look at all the colors and non-standard layouts. What the web as lost is personality, which we should be taking back. We’re on FOSS sites here in the Fediverse. We can do better, and we shouldn’t be too afraid to take risks by deviating from what’s accepted as “normal” these days.
We had way better tools for self-expression on older formats like early YouTube, MySpace, etc etc. We don’t have to stay the course of sterile, standardized, corporatized web formats.
The original point of using the web was making things beautiful and tinkering around with different designs. It was to tell a story with the layout. That was part of the content itself, not just what we say and do online.
Edit: https://yesterweb.org/ (on NeoCities) has plenty of good and interesting information on this general topic of a worse present web (a manifesto, if you will)
Check Hexbear
Pay bills
Order stuff
Watch a few youtube videos from select channels
Check email
Stream some show I don’t even watch off a russian piracy site, I just want the noise.
Check twitter for silly shit
That’s the entire internet.
I thought I just had depression but no, the internet really does suck now
It’s been this way since like 2008 IMO. Internet is just an addiction that we’re not allowed to break or else we get cut off from social and employment opportunities.
Internet is just an addiction that we’re not allowed to break or else we get cut off from social and employment opportunities.
Same with having a smart phone too. I miss my old flip phone :(
Cell phones peaked when they had the full slide out keyboard.
The web has been monopolized into a handful of big tech sites that trap everyone inside. The enshittification runs deep.
The chilling thing is that it doesn’t have to be this way. There are still plenty of niche communities online. You can find web comics and blogs and hobby forums. But these all require some means of funneling people into them.
Where are the AlbinoBlackSheeps and ICanHazCheeseburgers and YDMNDs of yesteryear? They’re on TikTok and YouTube, rather than their own boutique platforms, because there’s no really good way to get people from Main Public Forum into your niche community.
One of the silver linings of Lemmy has been a nascent renaissance of this kind of community. Even then its predicated on creative folks contributing and participating and feeding on one another, like the goons over at Something Awful did. I kinda see that sort of thing with podcasts like E1 and Hello From The Magic Tavern. It feels harder to find but not impossible.
it was real hit or miss, but it kinda makes me miss stumbleupon
To be fair the method that existed before tiktok youtube and the like was either word of mouth via discussion boards or google itself.
I think the bigger problem here is actually that everyone is chasing money in some form, which means people aren’t creating content for fun. They’re chasing mass market. The problem with chasing mass market is that it reduces the quality of niche content that is designed solely and specifically to only appeal to fans of that niche. This content is only created by people doing it for fun, and it achieves the highest level of quality within its respective niche (but not for mass audience).
If you like a bunch of niche things while finding mass stuff terminally boring, this becomes a problem when all the niche things no longer have creators.
The other side of this is that people do still want to do it for fun, but don’t want to do it for fun on a platform for someone else to profit from. The platforms being for-profit deters people from using or contributing work to them, because why contribute your labour to someone else’s profit? Fuck them. (Fandom being an obvious example of this).
Everyone was happier on the internet when everyone was just kinda doing stuff.
I think the bigger problem here is actually that everyone is chasing money in some form, which means people aren’t creating content for fun. They’re chasing mass market. The problem with chasing mass market is that it reduces the quality of niche content that is designed solely and specifically to only appeal to fans of that niche.
I mean, idk. I don’t think the E1 guys are exactly targeted to the heart of consumerism. And I periodically do see things in the hobby space pop up that I marvel weren’t introduced earlier. Virtual Table Tops, for instance, are a thing that really hit their stride in the last five years. Maybe its just my corner, but I never fail to marvel at all the stuff that gets churned out that you’ll simply never see spoken of mainstream. Discord has been really good about keeping me in the loop on these hobbies. Reddit has too, to a lesser extent.
I agree you do really need to be in the loop to find the heart of the hobby, but that’s not exactly new. Its always a challenge in a niche community.
Everyone was happier on the internet when everyone was just kinda doing stuff.
I think they still are. The mainstream stuff is just a lot louder now, so finding the “cool kids doing their thing” signal in the “BUY ME! BUY ME! BUY ME!” noise is harder. But once you cut past it, you can tune all that other stuff out and just have fun with your friends.
Hard agree. Shit’s just boring now. Even hexbear, while the best place on the internet, still gets boring when the posts aren’t there
a front page of threads all with 0-1 comments
Tbh I feel that this site has been more focused on culture war bullshit than before. And like, cutesy terminally online shitposts about power users or peepeepoopoo posting.
I know it’s fun, but I do enjoy the more effortposty and analysis based content.
Or maybe I’m way off and reminiscing over something that never really was.
ripping off the twitter and reddit bandaids, in addition to not using ig or tiktok, means i can spend about 15 minutes online before i’ve seen all the current content. we probably aren’t supposed to spend hour after hour surfing the web.
What else am I supposed to be doing while I avoid work then? Because I’m sure as shit not gonna be doing work
i read books on the clock, and then when i read about something interesting in the book, i hop on wikipedia and read a bunch more on the topic. yesterday i was reading
Breakfast of Champions and he mentioned “roller towels”, so i spent the better part of a half hour learning all about roller towels. shit like that.
