I ask this question here on HN, but I suspect that people who are bored with the internet may not be on the internet to share their opinion anyway. That said, HN community has been very diverse, and maybe you are in my stage where you're bored with the internet, yet you lurk on HN still, in which case, I'd appreciate your 2 cents on the causes of this.
Honestly, I'm also a bit worried that this might indicate an unknown depression. I'm 28 and shouldn't feel like this now.
A huge percentage of the Internet is the same information, repeated over and over again. This is especially apparent on film websites; they call it aggregation but it’s really just a nicer way to say regurgitation.
https://medium.com/@tonyszhou/postmortem-1b338537fabc
I will simply say: you aren't alone and I don't think it indicates depression. The early Internet was immensely creative, mostly because no one cared. It was a free space for experimentation. In the past ±15 years, corporations and other larger entities have homogenized everything.
It's important to remember that we're still only in the very early stages of computer networking technology, a.k.a the Internet. Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440 and it took over 70 years for its first serious society-wide impact (The Reformation.) The Internet of 2050 isn't going to look anything like it does today.
It's a means to an end, not the end in itself.
The Internet may have told you everything.
For you, the Internet is complete, as in The Nine Billion Names of God complete. Time for you to wait for the stars to wink out, one by one.
Or maybe you are full of whatever the Internet has given you and can’t take in anymore. Step away from the device and take a break. Talk to someone IRL and...
If you have time to chatter, read books.
If you have time to read, walk into mountain, desert and ocean.
If you have time to walk, sing songs and dance.
If you have time to dance, sit quietly, you happy lucky idiot.
(Nanak Sakaki)
Used to be, everyday there was at least 5 or more interesting stories that just got me excited about something new to try or learn.
Now, I’ve become so complacent with relying on sources like HN that I can’t find things on my own anymore.
Google does suck now. It’s mostly marketing.
Websites like Lifehacker used have fun information, now it just “hey buy this deal” shit.
Reddit sucks. I don’t find that fun at all, I miss digg.com but that sucks now too.
The Internet used to be full of fun things like diggnation. Even MySpace was better than Facebook.
Ugh. All the shitty things have taken over.
The Internet is the real Buddha of the 21st Century.
A perfect detached sovereign apparatus.
Unmoving, it rests on a billion routers and servers. Purest actuality and purest potentiality.
It is the embodiment of cosmic knowledge, and the human share in these,
The highest accomplishment of the human race, and the distraction from its ultimate happiness.
The triumph of technical rationality and its dissolution into chaos, frivolity and despair.
Its repose and its irony are endless.
It is the same to the Internet how it fulfills its mission, whether sitting idle or curing cancer or spreading an influencer video.
For it, the change of conditioned states does not count.
As with a Buddha, all there is to say is said by its mere existence.
The Internet is not a bit more evil than reality, and not a hair more destructive than we are.
The Internet is already completely incarnate, while we in comparison are still divided.
In the face of such an instrument, great listening is called for.
For have you actually ever listened to the Internet? The whirring of a billion fans, the ethereal hum of its photons and electrons? Fallen asleep to the gentle shush of packets making their appointed rounds? You’ll wake up a different person...
But perhaps your ear is deaf to the cosmic moan of the Universe straining to observe and understand itself through the Internet.
Then realize the Internet requires from us neither struggle nor resignation but the experience of ourselves.
We are the Internet.
Including me.
How dare you call me boring...
[this is a parody-ish paraphrase of a passage “the atomic bomb is the real Buddha of the West.” I remember it having been in a German book written in the 1960s, but by whom I cannot say. It was in a collection of quotations “Sunbeams” by Sy Safransky, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley 1990.]
It has become too popular, and so the most popular content is what sells to "the masses".
There is still niche content out there that is a lot more like "the old internet" and that is fun to discover.
For example, I often tune into a daily livestream on Youtube by a former pirate radio host in Limerick, which is viewed by only 10-30 people - very fun and definitely gives you a different perspective.
Then there are some obscure Russian personal blogs on livejournal.com.
All the content is still there, it's just that there are many more "internet tourist traps" now.
I wonder if we will see a rebirth of self-platforming and curation through bootstrapped means.
That is one area I am looking at seriously these days.
From experience, at some point many went from say 10-20 spam for every 1 comment with every 10th comment really being worth something to something like 200 spam for 1 comment and nothing really worth reading. Writing good comments use to be a viable method to advertise your own website. The link sat under your username and the content you commented on was related to your own site. If the comment was good enough people would naturally look for more of your writings.
Then came the "comments are spam" paradigm and it all went down hill from there.
But on the up side, the fast rate of change does mean it can be something entirely different tomorrow. All it takes is one or more good ideas.
(I just had one: turn downloaded yt videos into torrents and use the yt url to find the magnet. Independent users can download build and revive the same torrents)
When I was a kid, the first time I walked into a video store, it blew my mind. I spent every weekend for years binge-watching 3, 4, 5 rented movies. Now, I haven't actually watched a movie in years. I think that although there are new movies coming out, the patterns are fundamentally the same and so movies have gotten boring. After you've seen Apocalypse Now, Evil Dead, and Blade Runner, the Wire, Caddyshack, Oldboy, No Country, Night of the Living Dead, Y Tu Mama Tambien, and on-and-on-and-on, you've seen damn near most of the plot variations that can conceivably be constructed. So, new stuff just looks the same as the old stuff and it's not so exciting.
Same with the internet. I discovered 90% of what I still think is cool by the time I was 13. I picked the low-hanging fruit. So, now I'm at the point where I go deep on things. It's not sexy, but it is pretty rewarding. Used to think Magic-1 was awesome, well now Ben Eater's 8-bit-kit is half-assembled on a table in my living room. Used to think rock climbing was cool, but now I have to put in weekend after weekend at JTree moving over granite. Used to think Fravia was cool, well now it's time to construct my own web-crawlers. Used to think metalcasting and the Lindsay Catalog was fascinating, but now it's time to build actual internal combustion engines from scratch. Used to listen to the old Defcon DVDs on a pre-iPod mp3 player, but the time came to actually work through Erickson's AOE.
I think it's a natural evolution of life. When you're young you make a shallow pass and find what really resonates with you. When you get older, you spend more time digging down deep into those things and it's not as exciting as it once was, but there is a satisfaction from getting good at those things.
An alternate approach is to try viewing the internet through the lens of cannabis. I've had many nights in life where smoking some pot and watching YouTube has segued into a late-night coding session implementing something fun in Python that's been kicking around in the back of my head for a while. Pot has a way of helping you see things you've seen a million times in a completely new light. Some people love it, some people hate it. YMMV.
Most people seem to hit this point in life and just have kids to keep stuff interesting when things start to get boring. They take up a lot of time, teach you a lot of stuff, and suck up a ton of time.
I found Kaczynski’s manifesto actually is harder to find than one would imagine. There are many falsified versions of it circulating online. When I did find the original, it became abundantly clear why talking heads frame him only in context of rumors and never about the philosophy behind the manifesto. What he wrote is a hard pill to swallow, all for the same reasons Castaneda’s works are all but scrubbed from mainstream culture. For even a mature adult, for example, a software developer, to concede that their entire industry in practice and as a science is a manufactured and dogmatic “surrogate” ritual, is the reason they are depressed and humiliated, would undermine their purpose and significance in life.
The easy answer for the OP is that simply SEO ruined the internet. The harder answer might be that, in Kaczynski’s terminology, our “power process” as individuals is all but lost. Empirically, finding relevant resources online in the 90’s required considerably more effort than it does today. If I’m stuck fixing a bug today all I have to perform is a painless Google search. Why then would this be problematic? As Kaczynski argues, the more we remove the effort to perform our work, the more demoralizing it becomes. This is because, although the technology (Google) is useful, it nevertheless systematically removed the power and purpose derived from the challenge and art of that technicality. Software engineers have the distinction and privilege of being first witness to this complex deprive the rest of humanity of purpose because we’re the ones programming it. Or so the story goes...
So to answer the OP’s question: the internet is now boring because it’s no longer a challenge.
I used to complain a lot about the "here are the top X" so-called blog posts. But when you want information about a topic that you don't know anything about and for which you have absolutely no will to invest time in they are all you need to know.
Or take reddit. You want to learn about a topic. Go to its subreddit. Sort posts by top with timeframe = all time and after half an hour reading the top posts you know pretty much all you need to know about the topic (mundane topics obviously. Scientific topics excluded).
I could go on and on. It becomes hard to find a hidden gem on the internet becomes gems are not hidden anymore but exposed.
Maybe wrong expectation? Why should the “internet” be exciting?
I am on the internet +20years. And I only spend ~40min om two websites a day. (Hackernews included). The rest of the time I spent building the “internet” (personal websites and solutions).
The internet should/could be an extension of the exciting things you do. Not the other way around if you ask me. The internet is boring, it is a tool.
Also, you should probably limit the time you spend randomly browsing for the internet. It is just like TV or video-game: this makes your brain tired in a strange 'addictive boredom' if you are half-passive in front of it for too long.
- Unsure if I'm talking to genuine humans or people who are paid to post
- Block / mute features allow users to self-create bubbles
- Certain ideas are not allowed via downvotes (frequent) or deplatforming (rare) or calling them misinformation (becoming more common)
- Too many people. I don't really know anyone in these "anonymous only" communities (HN and Reddit) but I did "know" people back in the day when things were smaller (Something Awful)
- Politics are somehow dragged into everything and everywhere and it's almost impossible to avoid it (see also Covid news)
- We all thought bringing broadband and information to people would make them smarter and more progressive. I didn't. It increased radicalization and polarization. Now everyone can easily find ammo against the "other side" and there are a million ways to start fights and create reactions. People avoid discussions with others due to their viewpoint on a unrelated matter.
- Full post history is available and people will search it to dig up dirt on you. That little thing you said 10 years ago can be used against you (extreme) or people will look at your post history and pre-judge you (frequent)
To answer your question: yes.
the internet has gone critical mass, and when that happens, things go to shit. think pop music.
also, the media and other corporations are to blame. information is basically free. so how do you make your information valuable? you flood the sources with shitty information. ex; Ramit Sethi: "i give 98% of my content away for free and i charge a lot for that 2%" [not picking on him, it's just the business model adopted by the internet.] also, go check out the super cuts of media outlets. compilations of the exact, basically word for word, reporting coming out of these places. talk about gigantically redundant production budgets...
social media is definitely a bore. since when did we ever want to hear the inner thoughts of billions of people? can't help but feel sorry for Professor Xavier.
the gems though... DO NOT TELL ANYONE ABOUT HACKER NEWS!
It took me some time to notice that I wasn’t getting anything out of these web searches, so now I look for things such as “avoid pressure to succeed hacker news” so I can read first-person experiences from comments in hn.
Basically, hacker news is the only website that I still think I can get something out of it.
For things like programming languages, I believe that it’s better to find the best 1/2 books and read them instead of disjoint blog posts..
Am I getting fed up that it's an uphill battle supposedly with no end in sight? Slowly. But bored? Nope.
example : use youtube tutorial to learn a real skill like fixing a car. Then you'll like internet again
It's definitely the homogenization and corporatization, and the ads and paywalls, tracking and privacy issues, etc.
Perhaps this is nostalgia, but, exploring isn't the same as it used to be. I was 8 in 2003 and I remember surfing the wild west web of fan sites for my favorite shows and games. Pokemon probably had the most. A lot of people's sites were really intricate and organized and had a lot of content. I fondly remember a few sites with content created by just their owner.
When people had their own personal websites and didn't worry about copyright strikes and ads, when you didn't have to sign in, people were more creative. A lot of these kids would experiment with different types of art. Those personal fan sites often included art, fan fiction, flash cartoons, and journals. I liked all the different site layouts. Now everything is a cookies message and a hamburger menu.
Later on places like deviantart came and swallowed most of those creative people by the time I was 13 or so, old enough to really contribute something. Deviantart is a great example of a website filled with beautiful art (and even more garbage), connected to dead accounts, that may be purged or broken when sitewide changes occur, and forever forgotten.
Maybe they wouldn't be preserved at all if a personal site went down, but I feel like placing everything within the bounds of an unreadable terms of service, held by an uncaring corporation, on a site with some customization if you feel like paying for it, is a bigger problem depending on who you are. When everyone had their own, it felt more spread out, you didn't have to join one big community to talk to a group or an individual, you just... clicked a mailto link.
Maybe it's a convenience thing, in that case, not every artsy person also wants to be their own webmaster. But alternately, those who do create personal sites or project sites are forced to market themselves as there's less "exploration", people don't "discover" as easy.
Perhaps I'm unusual but, as a kid, I used to put vague terms into Google and surf to the 20th or 30th page and find all the neat stuff I could. My disk was stuffed with gifs and sprites and little games.
Remember back in like '02 when FunnyJunk was the same colors as HN? (iirc)
wfh today, probably shouldn't be writing books like this.