I think higher education may have played a role. Kids have to spend more time studying for longer into their life. Less time for careless days of youth when every job requires 10 years of experience. Young people have been obsessing over how to fluff their CV with credentials rather thing just living life.

I watched RocketBoom until suddenly they ran out of money. I don’t know what happened but it seemed like they were on the up and up. They even did videos with Sesame Street. If that isn’t a solid endorsement…

Then one day it was announced it was over.

It was nothing more than an off the shelf ARM SBC inside. Some third party designed and made the board. Nobody had the bootloader keys to unlock the units. It was easily bricked. No keys to recover it. They had sold it as a device for “hackers” but nobody could really hack it. The whole concept was dead on arrival.

Several years later people discovered weaknesses in Nvidias bootloader code. The Ouya is vulnerable. So they’re finally wide open hackable. But nobody cares anymore.

We are facing a very real possibility of the end of the web browser as we know it. Google owns the chromium engine. Mozilla is on ever more precarious footing. It’s become logistically impossible to build competing products except for tech giant. Even then everybody else gave up and went with chromium.

It goes to show the socioeconomic differences. The more affluent kids at my school went all out. There was expensive outfits, limos, and after parties at other venues. For others it was just mom dropping them off at the vanilla school hosted event and that’s it.

Holes and dots.

The internet made a whole lot of things a big deal. Then convinced guys they were the victims. Then filled their heads with extremist ideologies. What a wild past 10-15 years.

Reddit is inside the walls of enshittification. Reddit kowtows to the techbro narrative. Dissenting voices do appear there as they aren’t a full blown censorship. By and large the reddit userbase has historically been in aligned with big tech.

A spooky thing I noticed at one point I could search a rather vague query and Google was returning results in the programming language I was working with when the query was general enough to have been any language.

What has reddit accomplished in over a decade? That place has been nothing more than an escalating demoralization psy-op. It’s given the right another central platform to push their ideologies. It’s had the left preoccupied with petty squabbles.

Maybe reddit closer to 15-20 years ago would have been able to use reddit to stage actual coordinated worker demonstrations in cities around America. Over the past decade or so they’ve been keyboard mashing.

A president in jail would be disastrous for the reputation of America as a country. That’s been my theory as to why he will never face any real consequence. It seems like an elephant in the room. One that probably doesn’t even split neatly down partisanship.

The average person makes under 100k even in reddits favorite high cost of living tech hubs where their six figures is pretty much makes them equivalent to the people on skidrow. It’s amusing how when they were struggling college students the bar for rich was millionaires. Those who’ve made it rich themselves the bar for rich person moved up to billionaires. So now they have to wax philosophic, “what exactly is ‘rich’?”. You got rich. There being richer people than you doesn’t change that.

Explain the same executive compensation minus tech and people will have their pitchforks out. But it’s tech so which has a different set of standards because it’s the internets darling.

I think I’ve comment this before but over the pandemic years I did a little experiment. Every day I bookmarked the obvious content reposting bot accounts on the first few pages of r/all. After a while I checked back on the accounts. The majority of them become cryptocurrency spam bots. A very small percentage spam random things. There was an extremely high success rate of picking out the bot accounts. Pretty much all them were except for maybe a handful.

spez is basically exit scamming with reddit. Whoever is buying the dataset is getting robbed blind. That’s if reddit inc isn’t being upfront behind closed doors. Maybe they are. After all reddit does have well over a decade of mostly organic activity. The recent data has to be absolute trash though.

I hadn’t learned enough about how to use it back then.

Lost among the “internet sucks now, it used to be better” discourse is that the old internet was heavily moderated. The laissez faire parts of the old internet were known as the seedy corners of the web. Social media and its modern derivatives like lemmy take on that latter philosophy.

It’s no wonder it’s chaos every where. The libertarian tech bros have really impressed their world view on everyone. So the prevailing philosophy is these “digital town squares” should be absolute free speech zones. Except town squares in real life do not work like this anywhere. At least not in most liberal democracies. In real life there is bureaucracy. There are police, fire, ambulances. There is the simple matter of neighborly social contract. You cannot go into a real life town square and do whatever you want. You cannot just up and fight strangers, engage in lewd acts, set up encampments or what have you without permits. In the same way internet requires structure. Counter intuitively it used to have a lot more of it on account of sites being run by a real human being. Not the mega conglomerate investor groups feeding off ad/engagement profits.

Those users unfamiliar with the old internet yet pine for the good old days would have hated it. Power hungry mods is a meme as old as the internet itself. It’s a necessity of the internet. Hardly anybody gets banned for being an asshole anymore. Sometimes (often more like) people need to be forced offline so they can go outside.

Battlefield Earth. I saw a schlocky sci-fi movie. The internet has since informed me it’s the modern Birth of a Nation or something.

There’s only so far to go technologically speaking. Making websites and message boards was a solved problem a long time ago. Search engines were pretty much perfected about a decade ago.

Tech companies stopped being tech companies too. I dunno what they are anymore. The dystopian cyberpunk evil corporations.

I used message boards well into the 2010s. Digg and reddit were a curiosity that I mostly lurked.

I remember I got downvoted on Digg for anecdote about how the climate had been changing over the years in my area. The comments in those types of posts were primarily deniers saying there wasn’t scientific evidence of climate change.

Did many other students commute too? I went to a commuter school. There wasn’t much student life. People mostly went to class and went home.

Nobody really indexes those types of sites anymore. I suppose a lot of those site operators are more than happy to remain separate from the big tech net.