Lately I've been thinking a lot about how the best days of Internet use are probably behind me. I had some fun and learned a bunch of terminally online gags that I can't share IRL. I think I've steered clear from getting brainwormed for the past 10+ years (I had a brush with libertarian brainwormed) but on a long enough timeline it's probably inevitable that some AI-spawned hyper-memetic-weapon will fuck me up. Besides, I just spent my flight reading Heidegger and flirting with the black MILF flight attendant and I've never felt this good from refreshing a feed or imageboard.
I can sympathise. Welcome to the forum without notifications, without inboxes, without (You)s, in fact without any feedback regarding the contributions that you have made. Every page is statically rendered and shown identically to everyone. You might just as well get addicted to a newspaper.
>18 Fuck me
Flight MILFs are an underrated phenomenon. Talk a lot though
do that boss
Being and Time?
But here we are
sneed
Being and slime
>>39 I both loved and despised the book. Was lucky enough to read it during a college class devoted entirely to it, I think it that really helped as I probably would have given up otherwise. Definitely dense, almost poetic. It's one of those books that I catch myself thinking about almost every day
im gay
You might look at eg Dreyfus’ book on BT; I’m told orthodox Heidegger fans hate his guts but fuck em
>>131 Yeah, the thing that really makes me want to quit is "how we spend our days is how we spend our lives." I had a friend who died unexpectedly of an embolism and candidly I am horrified how much of his life he wasted on SomethingAwful and stupid YouTube shit rather than spending time with the people who will mourn him.
I dunno. I think it's a matter of time before big platforms become unusable. I do like getting pilled on various topics, disillusioning though it is.
It's pretty over. Way too much is just for attention, and so little creation. Any take on twitter or reddit has devolved into non-information non-humor non-personality nothingness. I dunno if I'd even call it language, it's weird. I think it's a good thing though and I like discord / chats coming back. Talking about bus shitters is healthier than anything upvoted, liked, ranked, algorithm'd to you now
fellow minnesota retard i salute you
>> 231 Honestly, I'm sort of glad for the enshitification of a lot of the bigger places on the internet. Especially as the last few interesting subreddits get banned/die, it's driving me to offsites like this. It's nice almost
>>304 The big platforms of the internet are like the roman empire after the marcus aurelius. they will never be good again, but they will take a long time to die. In the meantime the best chance of preserving what is interesting and valuable is to try and stake out independent places on the frontier beyond the aegis of billionaires and glowies.
I want to delete everything, but this is basically social suicide. I think maybe I should keep only instagram. I just wish there was a way to only see content from people I follow.
switched to a flip phone a couple months ago. It's been nice. I can feel my attention span increasing and it's starting to be a lot easier to be bored
every lunchbreak my coworker is blasting tiktoks from his phone for 30 minutes straigth. this mf won't smoke with us but still stand around, not participating in any discussion. it makes me want to bite my fingers of.
The social media giants are clunky, capricious behemoths. They shadow ban you for using a vpn, for trying to direct traffic anywhere off site. Meanwhile bots and scams run rampant. Somebody shows up in your inbox pretending to be a pretty girl to try to rope you into some crypto pump and dump schemes. Everybody who continues to use these things uncritically seemed to be getting dumber.
Honestly feels like we've already released Pandora's Box and there is no way to revert to pre-internet or even pre Web 3.0 times. I'm glad there's a new image board that hopefully won't be shitted up but it's unlikely we'll ever have a 'safespace' where we can go back to the old days just because the cat is out of the bag. I'm just gonna go with the flow and try and resist using brain rotting content as much as possible. Difficult when so much of my main form of internet communication (instagram) is just TikTok-lite. Anyways, $4 a pound.
I really enjoy this board, hope the people here stay active
Idk, I think that there’s still a lot of value in non-fully online forums. Group chats and discords for small communities can be amazing. My mum’s on a WhatsApp group with her book club and it’s very cute. The internet might be bad, but there are still some nuggets around.
I choose to believe that humanity will evolve to be able to handle the internet just as we evolved to handle booze.
Just wanna pirate white pony and visit dollmaker sites again :(
>421 humanity's going extinct in a matter of decades
I'd like to be mostly offline but I don't have the means or opportunity. It sucks to be WFH and glued to the computer all day. An old comment from Anna on the pod was how if you're rich you have the luxury of being offline and not looking at screens.
Am really grateful for this board too :) absent of the degeneracy of 4chan, existential malice of the lolcow farms while maintaining just the right amount of snark and authenticity that sets it apart from the homogeneity of the neurotic “decent fucking person” echo chambers we see in abundance. I relate to the other posts on here feeling like their minds have been rotted by unfunny memes, culture wars and ragebait. I really want this place to last. The closest thing to old internet I’ve experienced was “Spacehey” a MySpace clone - the layout is nostalgic enough but most people on there turned out to be low attention span self diagnosed zoomers who listened to 100gecs and ayesha erotica while insisting on being scene so it just wasn’t the same. Also no top 8 :(
>>395 I cannot access reddit anymore: no vpn allowed, no logged off browsing allowed. This is some sort of blessing (less scrolling), except reddit has become a source of information I'm having a hard time replacing. Oh well, I'll find a way. >>397 >and there is no way to revert to pre-internet or even pre Web 3.0 times. I'm not sure. So many people I know live 90% off grid. They connect for administrative stuff and piracy, but most of their lives are outside screens (and their kids too). Someone might say: have you seen this youtube vid? And we'll watch it, and that's all. But that would be in semi-rural Europe and these people cultivate contempt for smartphones. It probably is different in the US (?).
If you like this board please mention it on those rsp threads where people complain about the state of the sub and other internet places with good vibes / cultural discussion, it's really the only way to grow the readership as an independent forum.
Mention it on /r/RSBookclub, that's where the quality people are.
>>458 This place is really nice and I hope it stays that way for a long time. I tiny bit more activity would be cool. The rs subs have been shit for years at this point. Reddit (and other social media) as a whole is useless apart from some very niche hobby subreddits. Even more niche imageboards are infested with 4chan /pol/ brainrot losers or get spammed by CP bots. Its all hopeless. I recently had the idea of trying to set up some kind of messageboard or forum that is not indexed by any search engines and not advertised anywhere on the web. The only way of learning about it would be by finding stickers/posters/etc that I (and my cabal of international nerd friends) have put up in places that might attract interesting people (i.e. university departments, specific clubs, cafes, theatres, conferences, etc.) Its a very elitist approach and there is a very high chance that no one finds the site at all and it dies in obscurity. But I feel like it could be an interesting experiment and the only way of hosting an online community that does not get subsumed by internet mainstream brainrot is hiding in the periphery as much as one can.
>>596 admin here. Thank you for your nice words about the imageboard. I have some ideas for trying to bring more of the right sort of users to the board but I don't think it's something I can do alone. What I'm saying is that if you write petrarchan.com in the stalls of a really good dive bar or similar you will have my eternal thanks :)
>>596 >>597 AFAIK, robots crawl everywhere, no matter the amount of robots.txt. Current era forces us all into walled internet if we want anything else than slop and memes and advertisement (either paywall or any kind of loginwall). The old free access, wild west, edge of the world Internet is a thing of the past. Pt is exempt because it is small, but if it succeeds into harboring more users, it will face the same issue: a robot variation on eternal September. I don't have a solution.
>35 Question Concerning Technology
>I'm going to stop going online so much today's the day just stay away from the computer >But..I suppose maybe listening to some music couldn't hurt (or email or whatever excuse) >Proceed to waste 3 hours How to stop this?
>>741 My advice is to say something sincere but nasty on your fav time-waster site. What works for me is saying something heartfelt but disagreeable in public. That way I avoid the site where I said it so that I never have to deal with the response that other people will have to my disagreeable opinion. I get to preserve my ego AND enjoy the edgy pleasure of being a provocateur, but I just have to give up a website to achieve it. Guess my attachment style.
>>741 I've found my internet use naturally dropping since I started taking long walks. 10,000 steps a day seems to give me a lot of energy so it's easier to actually do something instead of just vegging in front of the computer. Honestly though my old internet haunts have also gotten boring so it's easier to pull myself away Also it's easier to stop doing something if you have something else to replace it, so try to cultivate some new hobbies
I came to the edgy podcast when I was feeling pretty low and lonely. The experience of listening to two cool girls sneer at things had gratified something about my loneliness. I really enjoyed the community that they had engendered because it seemed like it was organized around people who could at least recognize people were falsifying their preferences (read: people in the community could see the obvious trash being passed off as art, insight, or fairness). I found this addictive because I'm a strong people-pleaser. I grew up in a slightly abusive context and it's been a struggle for me to stand up for my own judgments. But the edgy podcast has been lost at sea for years and one of the girls, A, is obviously addicted to /pol/ fandom. I stopped listening after they had a famous racist on the pod. But I've stuck with the community for better or worse. Now that community is being overrun by more /pol/-tier racism and I think this is closing time. But before I go I want to share a read that I have on A that comes out of the low loneliness that felt relieved by this podcast: There's something about A that I recognize in myself. For her, the thrill is in being so self-effacing that she's permitted to say awful things about everyone else. She thinks that it's paradoxical that she's really nice even though she has a horrifying reputation online. This is not paradoxical at all: she loads up on the self-directed negativity because once she's under this load of shame she doesn't feel the additional shame that comes with behaving badly. I know this because it's also true in my life: I have a handful of shame-games that I play that give me this awful headachey guilt but once I have it then I'm insulated from the additional guilt that comes with being selfish. I don't really know what to do with this knowledge, but it really seems like closing time for the podcast and the community. This is basically the best last thing I could get from this: recognizing the venom that others are drinking at least so that I will put down the glass myself.
>> I think about it a lot, see a lot of people as "whizzing bullets" of myself. Anyone else do this? Is it empathy, or it it hatred?
>>911 >she loads up on the self-directed negativity because once she's under this load of shame she doesn't feel the additional shame that comes with behaving badly. You express the idea well (I recognize it). It's a bit like taking a shitbath so you can't complain about the smell of your farts (and neither can anyone else). It's debasing your self, because starting from a lower point is easier - so it's a low self-esteem issue, also some lack of courage. I understand the urge, but it condemns one to mediocrity.
>>913 I really like this post because I really relate to the whizzing bullets analogy. I see it everywhere now, I see people recoiling in horror at other people who are slightly more cringe, slightly more unaware, slightly more of a loser than themselves. In fact, I've realised that a large proportion of the time, if you see someone being unreasonably angry or mean to someone else, the reason is because they feel threatened by the insinuation that the two of them are more or less the same. There is nothing scarier than someone who is 15% more pathetic than yourself.
>>917 But Christ on the cross is all about being (and suffering) as a human, all about understanding those who have killed him and thus opening the route to forgiveness. It's not a raising up to a hallowed state, but rather a humble lowering down. Whatever sort of thing Anna'd be going for here isn't meant to gain an understanding of 'the haters', but rather to be un-understandable and raised above them.
maybe we shouldn't give up on internet culture as a whole but just astro-turfed, botted garbage full of AI content
I miss chatroom culture more than forum/early social media culture. Discord is the antichrist.
The internet used to be a better, less cynical place. I remember you could find a forum for lets say, music production fans and there'd be 500 people posting there with in jokes, lingo and culture unique to that board. And you had to lurk to understand it because if you didn't people would make fun of you. People can blame discord but the issue really is reddit and overall, the shrinking of the internet by huge corporations who want to control everything. You used to be able to find people in all different sites and places. Now, people use a handful of sites. Reddit, one or two social media sites, youtube & a news site. It's a far cry from people just scrolling the web looking for cool things. Oh well, nothing really lasts forever. The future is lame.
I just want to add one thing to anyone, anywhere who's reading this: One of the most poisonous things you can read about online is any sort of "how am I doing? is this a normal way for things to go?" board / forum / discord. That includes job hunting stuff, dating advice, grad school rumors, any of it. The only people who have a healthy relationship to those places take one look, grab a small number of hypotheses to test, and log off for good. The people who stay on those message boards are basically mired in self-hatred and self-blame. Stay long enough and you'll start thinking about totally normal, workable problems in terms of fundamental deficiencies, unsolvable problems, and ropefuel. But the truth is that for any deficiency you might think you have (bad CV, physical attribute, GPA), there are countless people who have had similar deficiencies in similar situations and most of them simply found a way to *work it.* The kinds of creativity and novelty that it takes to find a way to *work it* are completely contrary to the culture of advice boards.
^ Wish this board was over 30 so I didn't have to read this self-soothing drivel for high schoolers
>>1243 one of the things i find most unnerving about smartphone era culture is the seepage of online vocab into real life. not a priori because words have spread and meanings have broaded since forever, but somehow (the nature of algorithmic content?) everyone who is tapped in gets a firmware update at the same time and start saying some online phrase (many such cases). there's a clear separation between like a 4chan user or AA member who couldn't turn the jargon off and would say "normie" in polite company and someone who got it implanted into their brain when it suddenly became a fan favorite in like 2018. whenever the latter repeats some phrase to me that i've been marinating in for a decade i pretend like i don't know what they're talking about because it triggers the same reaction as a greasy child talking to me about rare pepes in 2016 unaware that no one thinks he's funny. it's obviously a different phenomenon though
Do you guys think we will ever go back to a time where forums will be popular again. Used to be a top poster on Overclockers UK until it started to die and the admins got all pissy about people getting annoyed about being banned
>> 1366 The interaction dopamine of modern social media is unironically too good. And children will grow up without knowing anything else. We're a bit fucked, though I perhaps those who'll be able to avoid the internet will have a blessed existence
Yeah we have no freedoms anymore. I'll give you another example, you can't even go to car meets without the police gaining access to FB groups and whatsapp chats in order to catch people